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Art Terrorist with the Right to Crash Browsers |
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Their main sites, at the moment, are Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a gonzo-site if there ever was one, and Alex Proyas', director of The Crow, Dark City. Both sites use Shockwave to its fullest extent without it being a empty graphic masturbation, but willful creations autonomous from the movies they advertise. But what is far more interesting than "eyecandified" and streamlined webpages, commercial or private - very few have got any originality, hardly even programming knowledge, but rip off someone else's code - is what is called "parallel networks". Never heard of it ? Well, you are not alone. But learn this: it is a big net and large parts are secret, private. It is not incorporated by the search engines web robots, not linked, perhaps even password protected. These are the grounds of true creativity. A far cry from the ugly pornsites and banner-infested pages we are force fed all too often, lies a very active web underground. One of the entrances to the parallel web is hell.com. Eclectic, provoking, obstinate and inhospitable, it towers like one of the last outposts against digital mediocricy. Do have a look, but I certainly don't guarantee you'll like what you see! Hell.com is yet unusually simple to gain insight into. Quite a lot of other parallel websites have sparse index pages, often with a text similar to "you came to this web uninvited, go away" or something less nice. After signing up as a visitor of hell.com, you are free to browse the creations of the featured artists. You'll almost certainly find something you'll like, if you are interested in anything but vanilla. ª p!ng!ng tzhe v-nervouz humAn zystem. antiorp, 1998 One of the artists having been visible on a lot of distributed sites, is the mysterious art terrorist antiorp, also known as "=cw4t7abs". He - because in an attack of sexism I assume it is a he, even though it hasn't been verified - was first sighted on the scene of mailinglists associated with digital music. His bizzarely formulated and deconstructivistic postings has gained him a group of fans eagerly awaiting the next posting, but there are also those who loathe him like the plague, among others big-shots in well-known audio-software companies. Entries such as: "lemaise.hagam the velt won.t be goires or machshiv what we speak out here. it.s zicher not shayach for them to forget what they tued uf here. we are mechuyav to be meshabed our selves to the melocha in which these soldiers made a haschala - that vibalt they were moiser nefesh for this eisek" is vintage antiorp. To antiorp there doesn't exist any artistic limitations, he plays with the media at hand: webpages, movies, music, software, pictures. The only thing his works has in common is the purpose of pushing the borders further and being confusing, to be up-in-the-face-annoying. Musically, antiorp has released a full-length CD, containing 97 tracks, entitled "krop3rom" under the name "a9ff". A reviewer wrote: "Imagine if The Prodigy had spent six months at IRCAM doing an intensive residency with Pierre Boulez. Imagine if Kraftwerk were using Kyma in 1972". Keyboard Magazine wrote "I thought I'd heard everything, but I've never heard anything like this." A lot of antiorp's work is displayed on the net. If you dare visit one of his webpages, be prepared for the unusual: browser windows are opened, closed and moved around, strange sounds emerge, the screen flashes, java-scripts shows up every now and then making it an annoying, to say the least, virtual quagmire where a misplaced click of a mouse button can get you stuck in infinite loops, things you never have seen before showing up on your HD. But that is part of the fascination of antiorp's webpages: none of the regular patterns one has aquired surfing the internet works, the "language" you have learned has been bypassed. It is ugly, it is broken and busted and to make it even more complex, antiorp has a vocabulary that is somewhat irritating and confusing. I sent a mail to antiorp [to me, actually (translator)] concerning this article, and this is the reply I recieved:
One say that antiorp's distributed page is what Hakim Bey called TAZ, a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a sort of private anarchistic miniature-country with its own language, opinions and structure. Antiorp has hidden his treasures well. If you manage to navigate through traps and bizzarre things, programatic terror etc, you can find quite a lot of neat stuff: self-constructed software, mp3 files, shockwave files, pictures, quicktime movies etc. "AM3R!KKA SUG3R. OKK. DET. ordentli!gt" it says on one of antiorp's pages. But he isn't swedish. Nor german. He has, however, got a talent for adapting linguistic patterns and incorporating them in his obscure techno-lingo. In his creations - he didn't approve of the attention his appearance on hell.com generated - antiorps's motto seems to be: "Take what has got inherent bugs, use the bugs to create something new, even if everything fucks up bad." His record makes your CD-player confused, his webpages makes you browser crash, his quicktime movies makes your monitor seem defective and his language makes your mind snowcrash! Go to http://194.19.130.194/=cw4t7abs/ or http://194.19.130.194/spCa/zweite and start searching. You won't regret it. Or mayhap a little...[m] ADRESSER |
ON
THE INTERNET THERE IS A LOT OF CRAP, a lot of copy-cats, a lot of
techies and a lot of rigid designers stuck in the oh-so-tiresome paperthinking.
Sure, there are some commercial webdesigners who has pushed the envelope
to some extent, such as The Big Gun Project. These punkish hot-heads
who has a lot of projects going on beside their ordinary jobs, amongst
others the rather well-known Crashsite, were spreading a rumour that
they were living on an abandoned oil-rig listening to punk (music),
playing computergames, talking politics and other interesting activities.