Dora
By Max Van Kleek
Although technically extremely simple, Dora is a piece that manages
to achieve something unusual and interesting in the sphere of web
art and experimentation. The piece consists of a black and white animation
of a woman's head looking forward, and turning back as if to look
behind her. This synchronized animation is repeated along a row at
the bottom of the screen, while a web script suddenly starts scrolling
back and forth in a violent shaking motion. The shaking motion creates
a feeling of shock or trauma, while also creating a visual illusion
that the images of the woman's head are splitting and merging with
its neighboring images.
Dora represents an art form that does two things both very successfully.
While maintaining a strong traditional-media aesthetic consciousness,
it ventures out to use DHTML/Javascript as a tool for the purpose
of furthering the aesthetic. By treating the web browser merely as
another form of canvas in the artist's palette, the artist was able
to break away from the loaded notions of web surfing or scrolling,
and use them to her advantage.
The main frustrating thing about this piece, as well as many of the
other pieces on entropy8zuper.org is the lack of commentary, background
information, or any other sort of metadata surrounding the pieces.
Furthermore, the pieces seem to lack any sort of recognizable context.
Thus, I was unable to garner any soft of information whatsoever about
the artist or the subject - I could only guess based upon my observations
of the piece itself.