{"id":1380,"date":"2012-05-29T09:38:31","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T07:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2012-05-29T09:38:31","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T07:38:31","slug":"interface-aesthetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/archives\/1380","title":{"rendered":"Interface Aesthetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below is an excerpt from Kei\u2019s senior thesis entitled \u201cInterface Aesthetics: Practice in the Expanded Field of Design.\u201d
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\n…
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\nOne may look to more recent work as an extension of the tradition. The Web site of Jim Punk, an anonymous artist, opens to a text-drawn computer frame, and hovering over the keys changes the computer\u2019s \u201cscreen,\u201d inviting users to navigate further to seemingly discrete examples of his portfolio.
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\nYet \u201cthere are no direct title links,\u201d as Louis Dulas writes in an editorial for Rhizome,
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\n or any kind of straightforward archive list of projects, instead it\u2019s these arranged letters and symbols that when painstakingly, individually clicked on, lead the viewer down into a further maze [\u2026] [The] non-linear, schizophrenic performance draws attention to the form language and communication take, all the while disrupting standardized information flow and producing an irregularity in the way we expect to approach and access content.12
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\nThe site leads to a frenzied and often alarming display of projects, such as the page below which constantly reads out text of \u201cbomb\u201d and \u201ckill\u201d commands.
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\nYet Punk tempers such works with the page below, the title bar reading \u201cjust one Untitled Document\u2022\u2014>,\u201d which seemingly benignly draws pink squares left in a trail by the visitor\u2019s mouse coordinates.
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\nThe \u201cschizophrenic\u201d and \u201cdisruptive\u201d nature of Punk\u2019s site compels the visitor to click with conscious intention, though surrendering to the artist\u2019s chosen system of interlinking. Thus Punk\u2019s work forces the visitor into an exploratory interaction, with her initially unaware of the content each mouse click will bring, whether it may be a torrent of pop-up windows or a calm set of links to another artist\u2019s site. Yet the perhaps compulsorily exploratory quality of Punk\u2019s site may not fulfill the last tenet of explorable systems Norman cites, that actions be without cost. In learning the rules and language of the interface, the visitor is faced with a certain awareness of risks, otherwise minimized on most popular and thereby authentic, rather than spam or virus, Web sites. For when one deletes the pound symbol from the end of the \u201chome\u201d page\u2019s url, www.jimpunk.com\/#, the screen becomes black for a moment, long enough to cause the concerned visitor panic, until the fullscreen menu for film editing software appears. Despite the humor of this example, the awareness of risks \u2013 real, imagined or invisible \u2013 to one\u2019s machine and data becomes a certain palpable anxiety in much net art, at least when one is unfamiliar with the work. Still, Punk\u2019s site does function as a wide structure that begs exploration, with the computer keys displayed on the homepage suggesting a various range of navigational options with only minimal visual cues as to the nature of their path. Once one trajectory is chosen, the visitor\u2019s input, such as mouse position, browser window, and, in fact, entire machine become malleable, generative tools. Whereas standardized Web design posits the goal of a site as the extraction of information, the goal of Punk\u2019s site \u2013 as a site that utilizes and exploits its format as an interface \u2013 becomes oriented toward its explorable, experiential character; for the opening text-computer navigational system can be easily, for the most part, returned to through the browser\u2019s back button. The site houses many projects, but in their amalgamation, becomes a multilayered project itself, rather than a lucid or explicit gallery of discrete pieces. The site self-consciously recognizes, as stated in the opening quotation by Drucker, an interface as the \u201ccritical zone that constitutes a user experience.\u201d
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\nWith institutional or Web sites, perhaps users have come to desire the traditional navigational menu, preferring a narrow or shallow structure in order to access information with speed. While Punk\u2019s site design may be easily explained by the fact that its artistic content is the interface and browser itself, it may be that it is merely this self-conscious intention that allows such design to be realized. Yet in several fields, most notably that of architecture, many firms are coming to experiment with the dynamic and experiential qualities of Internet interfaces. One such firm based in New York, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, presents on their Web site an array of images from their latest projects.
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\n…
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\nvia http:\/\/www.ourmachine.net\/?p=62<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below is an excerpt from Kei\u2019s senior thesis entitled \u201cInterface Aesthetics: Practice in the Expanded Field of Design.\u201d … One may look to more recent work as an extension of the tradition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[341,339],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-online","tag-texts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimpunk.com\/.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}