The Doorway

mances; each performance was tai­ lored to an individual audience mem­ ber. Regardless of the experience we gained, the performances retained their personal nature. By the end of die installation we spoke to downtown executives, conventioneers, security guards, art students, delivery drivers and transients. There are few social contexts in which people agree to par­ ticipate—often these center around ritual, liminal, transactional or conver­ sational situations. In contrast to the more impersonal voice-mail system, the participants in the live perfor­ mances were far more willing to re­ spond to the issues in depth. We wanted a memorial that would con­ tinue to resonate with the audience af­ ter having experienced it, so for us the meaning of the piece lay in the depth of the exchange. The piece was most successful when awareness of the his­ tory of the site shifted into an exami­ nation of the current issues of housing and gentrification in San Francisco, and diis could happen at any time dur­ ing the experience of the piece. We continue to explore the poten­ tial of the phone for art (Fig. 3) and have found it to have a unique ability to connect with people because of its transparent and pervasive presence in the environment [6]. References and Notes 1. Frank Popper, Art of the Electronic Age (Thomas and Hudson, 1993) p. 126. 2. The project is administered by New Langton Arts, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Presenting and Commissioning Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the San Francisco Publicity and Advertising Fund's Hotel Tax/Grants for the Arts and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 3. Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr., Opening Ceremony for the Yerba Buena Garden and Center for the Arts, 8January 1995. 4. The languages used were English, Spanish, Man­ darin and Tagalog. 5. Performers were Tom Barratt, Jonathan Crosby, Judy DeMocker, Sarah Lewiston, Michael Peppe, Kevin Radley and Cesar Rubio. 6. We have just finished version 1 of the Garden of Eternal Time. We will be starting on version 2 soon. The Garden of Eternal Time is located at . THE DOORWAY Eric Dvmond, 299 Glenlake Ave., Apt. 301, Toronto, Ontario, M6P 4A6 Canada. E-mail: . Web site: , 1997. Words on Works 2 9 7 ideas are introduced that recur later in the work. Slavnics's image and my own are presented, repeated and then merged. The silo, a tall dilapidated structure beside the doorway, enters the work and the fear of its collapse ini­ tiates a flight by Slavnics and me. At this point the images and text become dissonant, with a sense of loss and aban­ donment prevailing. The last three documents are sequenced but return eventually to the opening page, where, again and again, the day is replayed. This is an interactive Web project that requires some time to complete. The word "doorway" refers both to the ac­ tual physical doorway seen in the open­ ing web page and to the virtual doorway of hypermedia images and text that allow the viewer to navigate the site. Through the use of repetition and table structure, even subtle changes to the document become significant. In navigating the site, the audience will find that the first page will take a minute or so to load. By following in se­ quence, from top left to bottom right, the viewer finds the images and subse­ quent documents come in quickly (a few seconds). The active link and vis­ ited links are colored differently so the viewer may choose to follow the site in a random manner. Tapping into the non-linear nature of the Internet, the layout of the work allows the visitor to go back and forth in the site's history to relive an event or experience it differently. Unconnected to art's historical distri­ bution systems and yet more widely dis­ tributed, Web works cannot be referenced by object-based criticism. What is a Web work? Where does it re­ side? What form will it take? On the Web the immaterial and indeterminate nature of the presentation create fugi­ tive forms, indefinite with no mass or weight. As...