The Art of the Web : Wild Things Are Happening in the Internet’s Multimedia Zone

The experience is both fresh and familiar. A few clicks of the computer keys and you’re on the Internet. A few more and you’re in the World Wide Web, where the Net’s text-dominated world, usually silent, stark and still, becomes a minefield of sights and sounds.

Once largely the domain of scientists and engineers, the Web is becoming a showcase for a cadre of artists, intellectuals and Everymen who are creating a new kind of interactive multimedia art. Like CD-ROMs and other electronic media, these works fully exploit a computer’s aural and visual powers. Users with Web-browsing software can click their mouse on a symbol or a highlighted word in one of these works and it can respond: a sound clip plays, a photo resizes, a video clip runs.

But these pieces can even transport a Web explorer to related works located on another “host site” --a networked computer posting the kind of artwork you see on these pages. Click on a “linked” image or word on one of these documents, and it’s as though a trap door opens: You can go from a site in, say, Houston, to another in Moscow. Serendipity can lead you from a painting of strawberries on one Web location to a song about berry picking in France on another to a photo of the French countryside on still another. Every word, as Octavio Paz said in a much different context, is a door.

Artists spend about $50 a month to put a page on a Web site, says Paul Haeberli, a research scientist at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif. And with personal computers getting more common and more powerful (a necessity for the software that helps navigate the Web), the potential audience is vast. In January, 1993, there were 50 known Web hosts. There are now more than 16,000 machines that serve the Web, estimates Chris Wilson of Spry, Inc., a Seattle-based Internet and Web software maker.

“What’s best about this medium, though, is that it’s so plastic,” e-mails Jon Lebkowsky, creator of FringeWare, an online retail outlet, service and publisher. “If I design a page today and it doesn’t work for me next Wednesday, I can change it . . . a luxury you don’t have in print publishing.”