Urban Desires, the New York-based webzine that hit the bitstreams in December 1994 with a characteristically broad mix of articles about politics, shellfish, masturbation, underground comics, Star Trek on CD-ROM, and the first public release of a little piece of software called Netscape, is about to come to life again.
In mid-April, the publication - which served as a cachet-booster for Silicon Alley Web design firm Agency.com and stalled after its November/December issue - will reinvent itself as a showcase for visual and interactive art, with indie films, animations and games taking the place of columns and features.
"We're getting the zine out of ezine," explains Aaron Sugarman, vice-president of Agency.com and creative director of the new Urban Desires.
Founding editor Gabrielle Shannon, who will retain her post as editor-in-chief, says a brief hiatus was necessary for her to reconnect with the sense of enthusiasm and creative vigor that led her to sculpt a new kind of publication for a medium that barely existed.
"I knew I wanted to move in a completely new direction. I had played out the metaphor and was rehashing the same thing over and over again," Shannon observes. The new format will highlight content that is "less linear" than magazine prose, Shannon says, serving up three or four pieces at a time, with new content added every couple of weeks, rather than the zine's old bimonthly format.
One of the first offerings on the site will be Sandye Wilson's 10-minute film So Many Things to Consider, a poetic reflection on the last three decades of sexual mores, which will be presented in streaming video. The film won a prize at Sundance last year.
Other pieces headed for the site are currently in production at Agency.com, including an original animation in the South Park vein. In a letter to the site's readers - who numbered 500,000 a month when it was publishing regularly - Shannon predicted that the new Urban Desires will be "a venue for the distribution of new-school new media: highly visual pieces, not so linear storytelling, interactive explorations, short films, animations, games, experiments, media hoaxes, and who knows what else."
Invoking 3DO founder Trip Hawkins' mantra that compelling content is "simple, hot, and deep," Creative Director Sugarman makes the observation that some of the most engaging visual art of the last few years has been made in the margins of core programming: the title sequences of Seven and The Island of Dr. Moreau and the ads on MTV.
"Why is Titanic the most successful movie of all time? It's a story that's been told before: Poor boy falls in love with rich girl, boat hits iceberg and sinks," Sugarman says. "But what they did was to find what was uniquely suited to the medium of film in this day and age. We're going to be exploring what the Web is uniquely good at doing."
The kinds of content Shannon, Sugarman, and Editor Gabrielle Mullem are rounding up for Urban Desires will also be featured at the Eyebeam Atelier's Digital Museum, an ambitious exhibition space now under construction in Manhattan's Chelsea district. Shannon sits on the museum's board and is coordinating projects for Eyebeam Atelier's education department, including a "Digital Day Camp" that will offer courses in computing and art to inner-city kids during the summer.
Urban Desires was not subject to the same commercial pressures as some other sites, because the owners - including Shannon and Agency.com principals Kyle Shannon and Chan Suh - supported the publication out of their own pockets, only intermittently courting advertisers, and reaping benefit for Agency.com from the positive press generated by the hip zine. Now that the parent company has long established itself as a major player by building award-winning sites for clients like Nike and British Airways, however, the firm has less of a need to earn Alley cred by sponsoring a cool webzine.
"Once upon a time, Urban Desires was a calling card for Agency.com," says Sugarman, "but now our sites do that. Urban Desires fills a deep emotional need for the people here."
Though Urban Desires was never a bottom-line-dependent venture for Agency.com, Sugarman reassures potential advertisers that the editors "wouldn't slap anybody in the face" who came forward to sponsor individual pieces on the site.
In addition to looking for forward-looking pieces for the site, the new Urban Desires may also republish art from the earliest days of the Web.
"It's never too early to be nostalgic," Sugarman says.
