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>> In thinking about the World Wide Web and interactivity,
again, we're faced with the, the same thing.
When you look at text on a web page, it's not always possible
to tell the author's intent.
And, in fact, the, the work on the left is a work of art
by Jodi dot org, and the work on the right is about,
is a piece that is to help you organize the things
that you want to do to create a social space
where people can talk about, well, what is it that they want
to accomplish and share their goals with other people,
and sort of report in as they're,
as they're accomplishing these things.
Now, the, I mean, that, that's interesting, but, but, again,
that doesn't become a work of art on itself.
So I do want to talk, first, about the Jodi dot org piece.
In the, in the, in the mid 90's, in the early 90's,
two artists came to this area, to the Silicon Valley
and did a residency out here at the Calder Laboratory
for New Media, and when they returned to, to Europe,
they created this website.
And I want you to look at this very closely because this is,
when you first see it, it is, it looks like a bunch
of blinking text on it, on the page, and there's not,
it's not immediately obvious what's going on.
In fact, it's, it's really never obvious what's going on,
but that's part of the nature of the World Wide Web,
and as we scroll through it here,
and you see that it just seems like it's, it's impossible
to make heads or tails out of it.
We see that when we look at the source code, though,
it reveals another set of images, and this is part
of the nature of the World Wide Web
in that every time something is presented to the viewer,
there's another layer of code that travels along with it, and,
frequently, a great deal
of information is embedded within the code.
Sometimes it's important, sometimes it's not,
but as we look through the code here, we see what looks
like the plans for a bomb, and as we, as we scroll on further
to it, we see that it's a specific kind of bomb.
It's the plans for a, a nuclear bomb.
Now, now what does that mean?
What, what is it about?
Is it interesting?
When you start to roll through these questions,
you start to see that there is definitely something more
to this website than immediately meets the eye.
There's really a lot of thought
and consideration that's embedded in it.
So my next example is by an artist by the name
of Oleo Lee Leon, and she created this website
in 1996, and it has.
I mean, so it, it suffers from a lot of the, the, the qualities
that these early websites took on, but it also has a real sort
of beautiful cinematic, cinematography to it.
A real beautiful sort of structure to it
that creates a framework for navigation.
As you move through the site, as you click on the different,
the different links and the story is revealed piece
by piece, you find out what's going on in the narrative.
Now, you can go through this story many times
in many different ways, but it sort of marshals you through it
in that it doesn't let you wander off to,
into a blind alley.
If you wander off into a blind alley with, following one set
of links, you always have the other set of links to follow,
and, thereby, it reveals the entire story to you.
Now, as cinematography, this is, is fairly weak but as the person
who is observing the story is actually driving it as well,
it takes on new meaning and new intent in the, in the sense
that if you don't like the way something is going,
you can sometimes steer back from it.
You can go in a different direction.
The point is that the whole story gets told
in the end as well.