Web Nexus

It’s called ‘interface,’ but that’s tech-talk for ‘visual.’ Already we have to clarify which vocabulary to use. That’s where Web Nexus began. My first website, www.donalddaedalus.org, which quickly changed to .com, assumed many of the nuanced conventions. Even the change from .org to .com was motivated by these nuances. An alternative would have been .net. You don’t have to be an organization to have .org, which is ostensibly used to signify to visitors your business’s status. But since there is no “.artist” many visual artists have chosen .com, which is either apt, in that they are business people, or ironic since they wish they sold work to warrant the suffix. Is it telling that .com is the largest gTLD (generic top-level domain) in use or is it a question of generic?1

Some of the other visual and conceptual conventions I sought for my artist website regarded color, font selection, layout (navigation, content, et al.). Again, I wanted something clean, meaning visually discernable, focused, in the photographic and academic sense. They all testified the luddite stoicism that is stereotypical of fine art creator.2

It’s a wicked combination, the visual artist, wrought with the generations of personalities and misconceptions, and the web designer whose maximums are re-iterated like swanky business jargon. It should be clean. It should easy to navigate. It should be memorable. It should be X. If you can’t think of a color scheme, go with white, black, and red because it looks good (does it?). Of course, it’s been these self-perpetuating maximums, each individual site testifying to its peers, “This is how a website should look,” that, largely, has made the internet look as it does today.

You put these two prescribed and prescribing groups, artists and web designers, together and you have your visual artist website. You have http://www.donalddaedalus.com/fine_art/2009/churchshitler1.html

It likens to an online portfolio with a business attached.

Again, that already assumes how the website is going to be used. We’re going to see their work, if we like it (or not), we can contact them. There are variations within this small realm. There is the flashy, dazzle-you-while-you-visit sites and there is the stark image-sur-le-blanc. Lately, I’ve noticed some visual artists have begun to appropriate blog space, as musicians appropriated MySpace.

But every medium has what could be considered its neutral or default; neutral not in the universal sense, but specific to each medium. In drawing it’s the blank drawing surface. In sculpture it’s the unsculpted form. In the internet it would a blank webpage…but that wouldn’t be much of a website!

I approached Web Nexus with the intention of unloading the visual conventions of various types of websites as well as creating something that operated not strictly as a website but a juncture of my presence on the internet. My presence included some examples of how I (and others) use the internet, and how my presence, whether personal data or art projects, look different in these different contexts. My intention is not to be thorough, utilizing or cataloging every type of web space, that would be a separate project altogether, but to survey some web space and examine the disparate visual conventions. At Web Nexus these conventions sit in a simulated neutral parent directory, allowing the viewer to select the format through which to experience my web presence.