Honey

I took a digital media class in college back in 1999. The class covered Photoshop, web design, and video. Our assignments interweaved together into a final project that formed a final, polished web site, presented to our fellow classmates.

It was summer time and I was struggling through a particularly difficult breakup. In this state of passion and despair, each one of my completed assignments turned out more and more intense, building up to the final presentation, which was an explosion of all my feelings, in the form of the final web site. [Side note rambling: Is it any wonder that I ended up in a career spent entirely on the web? Strange though, that my focus is so completely on the clean, anti-feelings of the back end to everything, creative in a mathematical design pattern way, rather than a visual art kind of way.]

Anyway, I was nervous the day of my presentation, but tried not to quiver through the images, interactions, and video that so clearly expressed all the raw feelings in my heart. At the end, I didn’t need to hear my teacher’s feedback to know what he was thinking. “That was a little too personal”, he said.

I’ve felt bad ever since for making my teacher and most likely the rest of the class feel weird about witnessing my self so intimately. But what is art except the opportunity to express these feelings as intimately as possible? I don’t think I should feel bad.

I believe my presentation was shocking to the teacher because the web is not a recognized medium for intense art or personal expression. If anything, the web gets more conventional and conservative all the time. We want it clean and functional. That’s not to say that the web doesn’t host and provide amazing artistic expression, but in general, the experience is not built to provide an intimate expression of personal feeling. I keep waiting for a break-through, a web site that feels as much as it informs. I’ll let you know if I find anything.