Norway chronicles, day 1.
I am now in Bergen, Norway and on the University of Bergen's network. Long live the efficiency of the local network admin! I will be staying here till the end of December, working with Espen Aarseth, Jill Walker, Carsten Jopp, Hilde Corneliussen and the other interesting people at this place.:). So far, Espen has gone to a conference in the US which is why I am currently sitting in his office, watching the Bergen rain and the mountains in the distance, behind the university buildings...

Opening mailbox, I found an interesting post to the AoIR list.
Web design is not about webdesign, it is about web-d 'media' design. We are talking about a medium of expression which will be expressed in many ways. Sometimes the best way to get across an idea is with the ambiguity and obfuscation common to art. A critique of the Bible and other holy documents could be that they might have been easier understood if they hadn't been written in parable form and just used bulleted action points not open to interpretation.

Indirectly this quote addresses exactly the kind of expression I am working with. Though I might not agree to the use of the word "obfuscation", making life a little bit harder, not easier for the users, is what the "arty" kind of work I am dealing with does. Interfaces can be mysterious, events unexplicable, the computer's power over you as user explicitly demonstrated - indeed, all these traits can be seen as "art-efacts" in works which aim at confronting your intellect or your curiousity. Making "the medium" transparent, meaning digestable and navigation easy, is not always a goal, despite what all the Jacob Nielseners of this world claim.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:49