Between Broadcast and Community: The Design of Virtual Spaces

As interactive design went online, these people who I really identified with—these artist-engineers—were the ones who were asking how they could put their stuff online. And they started making art specifically for what was possible—the basic things that you could do in the rudimentary browsers at the time, like Shockwave and animated GIFs and trying to figure out how you can scroll more than the height of a browser to show more content.

I think that group of people, who first came to the Internet as artist-engineers, completely set the tone for what the web is now. For example, browser standards are totally based on what was being pushed back then, in terms of multimedia content.

Nicola Twilley: Are you implying that the Internet could be quite different today, if different kinds of people had been experimenting with it at the start?

Gorter: Right. That’s what I think. Take, for example, blogging. I think blogging probably became popular simply because it became possible to scroll vertically in web pages.

Before blogging—before vertical scrolling—there was a 640-by-480 screen, and everything that didn’t fit had to go below the fold. That was a disaster, because people couldn’t scroll, which meant you had to make all sorts of new interface artifacts—“previous” and “next” buttons, page folding, and God knows what else—until people finally said, “Screw it. We need scroll bars.”

That’s why I call them artist-engineers, because they were making a medium that was able to carry what they wanted to express.

Of course, scroll bars already existed. They were carried over from all the other OS technologies like Windows, which is why they also get really high system priority—the mouse and scroll never lag because they’re driven directly by the operating system. It wasn’t that the concept of scrolling was new, but it was definitely one of the innovations that was necessary at the beginning of the web in order to push the amount of content that you could show on sites.

The scroll bar is a great device—I have always been most excited about it as my main user interface device. Way back, I started experimenting, along with a whole bunch of other people, with making scrolling interfaces. I would put up a ton of content, but you couldn’t see all of it. It was as if the browser was the viewfinder of a camera, and, instead of moving the viewfinder, you could just scroll the page.

Manaugh: Based on some of the images and quotations that you put on but does it float and Space Collective, from people like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, as well some of the things you’ve said in the past about wanting to see how human culture could move online, there seems to be an overlap between your interest in information technology and an almost psychedelic interest in things like the “Singularity.” I’m curious as to how those two strands weave together for you—if one led to the other.

Gorter: I’m really glad that you picked those things out. Those are the peaks of the landscape that I try to hang out in, pretty much. The web is a space of infinite potential, especially when I first met it, and it has not been charted. We can only go as far as our current interfaces and technologies let us go—in the same way that human language gives us a territory in which we can dwell—and it’s almost impossible to get outside of that.

I’m really excited about trying to make that space bigger—to create more land, as it were, the way the Dutch use ever more sophisticated technologies to pump out water and now we can live on the sea floor.

To bring that back to the psychedelia thing: for me, that feeling when you dive below or beyond or above language—when you’re in that zone—that is very much akin to being on the Internet. You can be somebody else. You don’t even have to be a human. You can speak using media.

Do you know the book Starmaker, by Olaf Stapledon? At one point, the narrator has evolved so far that he’s using the brains of different organisms as hosts. He’s sharing the minds of a flock of birds sitting on some mountainside, describing the amazing sensation of feeling an entire mountainside through a collective, distributed mind. He says—and I’m paraphrasing—that it was almost as though a blind race, through technology, could have invented organs of sight.

Manaugh: He was using the birds as a browser.

Gorter: Right. The Internet is a sensorium in the same way. Thinking about it as a biological, technological extension makes a lot of sense to me. What’s mainly interesting to me, at least right now, is that you don’t carry the limitations of the body with you in the virtual domain.

Twilley: So the limitations of this virtual world come from our interfaces—both the hardware and the software. Can you give some examples of things you’d like to do but can’t because of these kinds of technological limitations?

Jon-Kyle Mohr: Some of the stuff that we’re starting to explore right now is only possible because today’s browsers are capable of enabling it. Before, there were technological obstacles like latency. Latency is the bane of my existence. If you do something, you want to feel as though you’re affecting it, and not that there is a 15-millisecond lag—that there is latency. That’s what’s so great about your phone: you flick it and it responds immediately. It feels like you are actually manipulating it.

To give another example: right now, everything uses the metaphor of a page. We’ve been playing around with Z-space—that is, breaking out of the metaphor of a page and moving into three dimensions, the X, Y, and Z axes, but still within a browser. People have been playing around with how to represent three dimensions forever, but figuring out how to do that within the interaction history of the browser is particularly interesting.

Gorter: Virtual reality has been the frontier forever, and people have thought about it as if you were walking into a big sphere or you were wearing goggles and all of that. But, to me, thinking about virtualizing ourselves is much more interesting if you think about expanding what is possible online.

True Names, by Vernor Vinge, is a really great book to read on this subject. He lays down a lot of amazing metaphors for inhabiting cyberspace.

I mention that because what we’re trying to do with a Z-space interface is reintroduce the whole notion of the peripheral. Part of it is to do with the Tumblr and Pinterest thing: all these people posting millions of images and the way that styles seem to emerge from that stream.

If we compare vertical scrolling in blogs to driving in your car in a landscape, what we want to do now is lift off and be able to see all these image feeds, for example, as geological strata. If you’re flying above the landscape at 30,000 feet, there’s stuff to see—stuff you can’t see from your car window. That’s how we want to enlarge or expand the interface.

What we’re talking about now is really more of an actual environment, in which everything you see informs how you see the things around it. That’s one thing we want to accomplish with this interface, so that when you’re looking at one visual, you can also see it as part of a pattern—you can see all of its connections.

Back in the early days of the Internet, these artist-engineers I was talking about pushed for browsers to be able to handle what they wanted to do. We still have that power. Whatever the W3C sets as its standards is just based on what people want. With the whole web 2.0 fiasco—let’s be honest—it’s as if people stopped really pushing new things, because everyone was just happy together, using Facebook and Twitter and pushing their shiny social buttons.

But we need to keep pushing new stuff. It’s a really delicate process, because if you push too far, then it’s going to be clunky and no one’s going to be able to use it; but, if you don’t push far enough, there’s not going to be any change and it will never catch on.

Mohr: It’s an accessibility thing. You have to make sure that you’re still innovating, but that you’re not excluding everybody from that innovation.

Gorter: Because if you’re excluding everybody, then there’s no critical mass.

Mohr: Degradation in digital design is also really interesting—it’s almost like time-travel, in a way. If you try to look at the Wired website on a browser that was last updated four years ago, it’s going to look like hieroglyphics.

Manaugh: Jon-Kyle, you’ve done a lot of sound-related work. How does that relate to your online design?

Mohr: There’s a lot of overlap. A lot of sound design is just designing space, and directing the ear’s attention to certain things—how you use one rhythm to offset something else, for example. Then, all the looping and cloning translates to pagination and scrolling really well. It’s all math.

Gorter: I remember you saying that you credit being able to program to being a drummer.

Mohr: Totally. They’re both additive and subtractive processes. They use the same metaphors. They loop and repeat in similar ways. It’s actually kind of funny, because, ever since I started to do a lot of the programming with Cargo, it’s influenced how I perceive music now, as being much more programmatic.

Twilley: I love this idea of useful metaphors. If the browser is to be more than just a “window” and the web is to be made of more than just “pages,” where else might you go to find new metaphors that could expand what we can do online?

Mohr: Those are great questions. Skeumorphism was such a hot topic last year, and it was that exact same question, asking about the extent to which you need to be literal with your references versus the extent to which you can be more free and abstract.

Gorter: I think the way we get around this is that we try to not make a specific interface. Instead, we always use the content as the interface. This is how we always design. In Cargo, there’s no design, there’s just content. You click on a thumbnail, but the thumbnail is just a smaller representation of the project.

Essentially the browser is the canvas—it is the design—whereas, with a lot of web design, you see people making designs inside the browser, like a box inside a box, and then shading here, adding a bar there.

But we don’t do that. We try to disappear.

Twilley: You’ve described Cargo as not social but rather collaborative. That difference between closed and open, complete and unfinished, is really interesting. There are actually not a lot of middle spaces on the Internet that manage to straddle that division, whereas Cargo is populated by user content but still feels aesthetically coherent.

Gorter: I think, again, that’s because the design is the way the interface works, rather than being some kind of overlay.

Even if you completely disassociate your personal site from the platform, the brand is the interface. We care so much about the feel and the behavior of the interface—when you click something, something happens to bridge the waiting time between the click and the response, and the typography is always properly in proportion—that it still feels like Cargo, at the end of the day, no matter what it looks like.

You’re in a structure, but the only things you see are content.

Twilley: Most of the time, when you enter a social network on the Internet, the structure is very visible. If you’re on Facebook, for example—

Gorter: Everything is a dull blue. [laughter]

Twilley: It seems to me that you could maybe split the Internet between broadcast and community. Those two different kinds of platforms have very different design aesthetics.

Gorter: I think that’s true. We are always trying to find out where we are, between those two poles.

We’re now working on something called trace-marking. It essentially started as favoriting images across the Cargo platform. It’s one of a few attempts we’ve made to go a bit more into the community direction. The thing about Cargo is that, although our community is definitely there, it’s built on people digging how we do stuff, then trusting us with their material.

We have implemented a few community things, though: you can follow people, and there’s internal commenting. We built that functionality for student networks that we’re now running with UCLA and Art Center College of Design, and a few other places.

This new trace-marking thing is a way to visually connect. If you see an image you really like, you can save it in your own space and you can create categories for how you want to save it—whether it’s for reference or simply to tell somebody that you love their image. It becomes a visual collection tool mixed with a book-marking functionality.

But this is really early days. We always let the process determine the outcome. Today, Jon-Kyle made the first steps: you drag an image, a little shelf opens up, you put it there… So now we have to figure out: what’s next?

Twilley: It seems as though images are the quickest thing to get detached from their source online.

Gorter: Exactly. That’s always bothered me! Tumblr does a great job of showing the thread of reblogs, but then no one gives a fuck about who made the original image. Creating that kind of trace for images is important.

Manaugh: Our final question, just to bring it full circle, is about the process of working on the Venue website, and whether that allowed you to explore any new territory. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t.

Mohr: The integration with Google Maps for Venue was really fun. I had never used their API. We’re actually starting to work on an API for Cargo, and working with Google Maps’ API for Venue really influenced how I’m approaching that.

It was also really fun to play with spatiality. Google Maps is already interesting in terms of its Z-space functionality—the way that you can zoom in and out in satellite view—and we spent a long time playing around to find a comfortable zoom level for Venue, and so on.

Gorter: It was a great project for us, I think, because we’re always looking for excuses to extend Cargo’s functionality. The only reason we make new stuff for Cargo is in response to a specific request. We never say, “Hypothetically, people would love such-and-such new feature—let’s make it!”

And, because we don’t design websites—we don’t make layouts, we just put content in—the Google Maps integration is not simply decoration. It’s actually integral to how the site works. What I really love about what we accomplished was that we put the Google Maps in there, but we imposed the Venue aesthetic over top of it.

We’ve done projects with Flash before where we work the same way. The problem with Flash is that it’s like an aquarium—all the content sits behind a thick layer of glass. You can’t touch it; you can only look at it. It’s imprisoned. What we've done is use Flash in a new kind of way, as a background environment, and then put a flat HTML layer over top of it so that you can interact with as if you were interacting with any website.

Now, if you guys do another iteration of Venue, we can imagine even more integration. Come back in 2014, and we’ll talk!

This post was originally published at V-e-n-u-e.com, an Atlantic partner site.