Blvd. Magazine
Fresh blood from the spleen on the net
February 1997
"A quiet moment for rest and consideration before the day starts is a very rare thing in this hasty world.
Piotr Szyhalski thinks that the need for this has not disappeared. [...]
The spleen is the organ that refreshes our blood and that's an appropiate metaphore for the function of Piotr's site. 'The Spleen' is a good example
of the shift from the pure text orientated internet to the internet as a visual medium. The introduction of the visual WWW was the first step. Now are the technical possibilities bigger; for example the visual chat environments like The Palace and of the increase of the sound distribution quality. A very important development are the 'plug ins'. They add extra quality and depth to the internet. A good example is Shockwave' which is often used by Piotr. Thanks to shockwave image, sound and interactivity become one like on CD-roms.
The most websites are setup like printed magazines because most designers of sites are really graphic [read print] designers. But the voices predict that the net will more and more look like television and film instead of
looking like printed magazines. The truth will be neither one of the two. We do not know which formats will be succesfull. That's why the sitemakers use the already known proven formats out of the printed culture and now also the visual culture. The key is ofcourse 'interactivity'.
The Spleen shows search operations for
new conventions which are hard to label. "The Final Analysis" is such a captivating experiment. During the 'use' of "The Final Analysis" I felt like a painter and a dj at the same time and I had to search for a clearing goal. It was as if I was watching a television programm, that only wanted to be created if I constantly was zapping inside the programm itself. For these kind of multimedia formats the current terminology fails. The
creation of new terms is a task for the representitives of the printed culture."
Excerpts from the article translated from Dutch by Irma Brevink
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