It's the story of a match made in hell -- that is, on Hell.com.
To begin at the beginning, Hell.com is an interactive online project that is part Dante, part Jackson Pollock.
A private, parallel Web accessible only to its 80 or so invited members (which include avant-garde Web design forces such as absurd.org and jodi), Hell.com has been presenting abstract public "events" since January.
"This is not the Web as you know it," says Kenneth Aronson, founder of the diabolical project. "Although what you see is not dissimilar to art, 'experience' is really the only term that can quantify what Hell.com really is."
Hell.com's second so-called experience, skinonskinonskin, a poetic multimedia documentary of a real-life love affair between two members of Hell.com, launched 13 May for private guest preview only. Notable Web developers Michael Samyn of Zuper and Auriea Harvey of Entropy 8, designed it.
Aronson is trying something new with skinonskinonskin: He plans to make it a pay-per-view event, charging US$7.50 for 48 hours of access. Aronson says funds raised will simply support the maintenance of Hell.com and help pay the creative costs for both sites. Aronson said Hell.com and its events have put him "profoundly" in debt.
"Advertising is hardly an option," he says, because Hell.com's goal is to explore the creative potential of the Web, to take it beyond its identity as a sales and self-promotion tool by providing a noncommercial online community.
The viewer who reads "raunchy sex scenes" into the provocative title will be sorely disappointed. Nothing here is explicit. A series of multimedia love letters are hidden behind black links set against a black background.
In one environment, the cursor splits in two as it's dragged across an image of a torso; a heartbeat provides the soundtrack. In another environment, text depicting a lovemaking session ("deeper," "we sweat") dances across the screen, superimposed on an anatomical diagram of a heart. In another, two tastefully rendered nude bodies soar toward one another in what looks like a digital artist's concept of cyberspace itself.
Aronson said the average initial visitor to skinonskinonskin spends about 90 minutes, viewing over 200 pages. And reactions posted on the site have been generally favorable. "Stimulating brain food, awesome effects, interactive art show," writes one visitor, who said he viewed the piece three times within the first week of its preview run. Another viewer describes the work as "an inner piece, like a slice of hell."
Many reactions are simply questions, such as "What does it mean?" and "Is this just a Web art forum?"
Aronson hints that a major contemporary art museum will host the upcoming public pay-per-view skinonskinonskin event, he strongly emphasizes it isn't necessarily art.
"What you see isn't dissimilar to art, because it's visual in nature, but it also involves raw code, music, etcetera," said Aronson. "We militantly avoid using the 'A' word. We want to avoid the thousands of years of baggage associated with the concept of art. We don't want people to accept what they find at Hell.com at face value just because someone labels it as 'art.' Our goal is to enable people. We want them to discover the unknown."
Nonmembers of Hell.com can join the skinonskinonskin email list of 50,000 "guests," if they can find their way through a series of ominous black screens at the Hell.com home page. It isn't supposed to be easy: a pop-up window proclaiming "No entry" greets you, only to be followed with a black screen bearing the word "no."
"The attitude is huge when you first try to get onto Hell.com. You feel like you're waiting outside a Manhattan club waiting to be picked for entry," says Jon Winet, a new media artist who teaches at the Center for Digital Media at the San Francisco Art Institute.
"Once inside, you discover an elegant aesthetic, and the designers whose work is presented are obviously very respectful of bandwidth and are thus not elitist." Winet thinks that Hell.com and skinonskinonskin have arrived at just the right time.
"It's a brilliant example of an important kind of work: deconstructing Web design and Web browsing," said Winet. "Hell.com introduces us to an abstraction of the user experience and signals a maturing of the medium. More than enough has been built on the Web that we can now tear it apart."
