If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~jh5231/NetArt/index.html. I recommend opening the project in Firefox as it sometimes acts strange in Chrome (haven’t tested it in Safari)
Our project was intended to be awesome. You can be the judge of whether it lived up to the hype, but either way it was super fun to envision and create.
What we did was largely inspired by theuselessweb.com – our website, like its inspiration, is a diverse collection of short activities, each fulfilling a distinct (although sometimes unclear) purpose. Even the index.html page, commonly used to introduce and explain the project, is nothing but a redirect – it sends you straight away to one of the other pages, chosen at random every time.
But while the Useless Button redirects you to one of a number of unrelated external websites, our project’s various pages are held together by a few underlying themes, the most obvious being that you can go back and forth between pages with ease thanks to the integrated menu, as well as some shared visual themes. Of course, all the pages are also quite different from each other – the payoffs for the bubble wrap and basketball pages (that is, the thing that happens after you’ve done the thing that you’re supposed to do) apparently were quite jarring for some viewers, who thought the payoffs to be out of line with the main interactive focuses of the pages, and the overall “vibe” of the project. Still, as most audience members on the day we presented it concurred, there’s a kind of beauty in the chaos – somehow, the weirdness works.
If there’s one regret Vincent and I have regarding this project (Vincent, by the way, was an excellent partner to work with – truly an unstoppable creative force), it’s that we couldn’t add more pages to our burgeoning collection – quality over quantity for sure, but sometimes you need that quality in bulk. Though we had great ideas, not all our ideas were great ones – some of them we decided not to use. Given more time, we could have bolstered our project with even more weird random pages, but for now you’ll have to be satisfied with four. Funny enough, our original idea was stress relief, but now I think the page that provides the most actual stress relief is our Credits page.