Digital Trippin’
by Ruth Arnell
Welcome to Germany, the country that brought you the Protestant Reformation, Hasselhoff fanaticism, and most recently: Zoomquilt.
Zoomquilt, an expansively innovative use of e-space, is the brainchild of 21-year-old German art student Nikolaus Baumgarten. It manipulates Macromedia Flash in a way that defies traditional ‘Search and Rescue’ image caching, while elevating Zoom User Interfacing (ZUI) to an art form. Utilizing his own artistic talents and those of sixteen other German art students, Baumgarten organized a series of fantasy-based images and connected them along a swirling orange rift in Internet Reality, all in a ZUI Flash based framework. The resulting website allows the viewer to navigate by ‘zooming’ through the center of the images, ultimately landing where they began. And because zooming in only one direction would be contrary to the intent of the interface design, users can zoom backward through the site’s images as well.
The Zoom User Interface works from the theory that just because computer filing operates on drop down menus marked with pluses, minuses, and other profanity symbols, doesn’t mean you do. For the more spatially-minded among us, that structure can make finding stored information a search nightmare. The ZUI call-to-arms insists that something new is needed to fill in that mapping gap. ZUIers have already developed several programs that allow users to ‘zoom’ in from the Big Picture of their hard drive down to track lengths of forgotten mp3s buried 28 folders deep, in a format reminiscent of Google Earth.
Zoomquilt is a visually delicious example of that theory. In traveling the image space you notice something new each
time you loop through the sequence. Surrounded by creatures both gruesome and delightful, there’s a feeling of trust in the site’s contributors that the as-yet-unseen segments won’t let you down in content, quality, or simple technical finesse. And with the
work of artists like Markus Neidel, Jann Kerntke and Lars Götze on loving display, return trips are almost guaranteed.
So go, loop, zoom. Switch on the ambient electronica and let both halves of your brain revel in the stuff dreams are made of – fairies, monsters, interfaces…
