Digital art theme parks:
The code of architecture,
and the art of code

By Douglas McDaniel

Just when you thought there were already enough possibilities for baffling amusements on Web, Internet art sites are popping up everywhere to provoke, amuse and even anger you.

Which is exactly what art is for, right?

Indeed, cyber art is emerging as a medium to be taken seriously enough to be included at the online offerings of major museums.

For example, the Museum of Modern Art has a number of interactive artists to experience. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial 2000 exhibition includes nine Web sites by either artists or more collaborative efforts.

The sites range from the ongoing multimedia project at Fakeshop to more generally fun site such as Ouija 2000 where users can operate a Ouija board with their mouse. The later has familiar theme of sites that equate occult mysticism with the Web. For example, Mark Amerika’s “Grammatron” is “non-linear narrative” about an “info-shaman.”

One of the best places to run a search on all online offerings available at the museum level is The Museum Network , which includes information and links to 33,000 sites. There’s also the Museum of Web Art , an entry in the field that given the chance, is capable of considerable growth.

Another Internet art site worth visiting is The Global Collage, a collection of artists from around the world that if you click on the collage at will rotate a new image every 30 seconds.

Other adventures in such efforts in digital culture can be found in Art Byte magazine, a for-print publication that also has a Web site with plenty of links.

Just remember: When exploring this cutting-edge form of non-linear entertainment, it’s probably a good idea to close out and save any work you have done on your computer. Indeed, some of these sites will not only destabilize you, they will rattle your machine pretty good, too.

One such practical joke can be found at the Whitney’s “Every Icon” by John F. Simon Jr. The Java aplet program automatically downloads and according to the Whitney site “would take several hundred trillion years for the process to conclude.” When one clicks on Ghost City , hundreds of small boxes will start appearing on your screen, and short of completely turning your computer off, you will be hard-pressed to figure out how to put the ghost back into the machine.