the doorway
An emotional and autobiographical account of a weekend trip. Looking back, who ever thought that an escape to the country could tell us so much about where online aesthetics were in 1996? I hope people realize this was a fictional account set in a real place.
The doorway in retrospect seems to still accomplish much of what it was intended to. Over the years however, the web, and web art in general took a more calculated path, one where anonymity and alias became common. Artists in general hid their identity or created new ones which were very aware of contemporary critical writing. One of the web's biggest advantages at first was the distance offered between gallery culture and internet culture. As the web became ubiquitous this distance narrowed. The Doorway was and is a personal journey.It has many emotional aspects which can be uncomfortable even to myself. We usually feel embarrassed when someone, esp. a stranger delves into their own psyche and tells us about it. That discomfort is still evident, and helps form the personal success of the work. Autobiographical work can fail on many levels, it's a tough venue.
-Eric Dymond, 2000
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The doorway
"The doorway is an interactive web project which requires some time to complete.The first page will take a minute or so to come in.If you follow in sequence from top left to bottom right the images will come in very quickly(a few seconds).The active link and visited links are of course colored differently so you may choose to follow the site in a random manner."
"The doorway is situated just west of Toronto.A friend (Chiyoko Szlavnics) and I had left the city on a weekend in March.The snow had fallen all day.As we drove towards the Forks of the Credit river she took a less traveled road.That's her way.The doorway recalls the day and some images which grew in my mind over the next few weeks."
"The work was made in html 3.0.The film was an inexpensive drugstore brand.The photo's were scanned on a Hewlitt-Packard Flatbed and reworked in Paintshop.Image reduction was done with Gifweb.This project is public property.I would imagine it could be even more effective if it was viewed using twenty monitors(one monitor for each table).If you want to execute the work this way simply strip the html and make each table a URL.This would yield 400 URL's and although that sounds like a lot,I imagine the programming would still be quite easy."
-Eric Dymond, 1996