I have just spent another perfectly good hour wandering around Jim Andrew’s vispo.com. Jim takes visuals, poetry, music, writing, gaming, criticism, coding and much more very seriously. No, on the contrary, he is very playful with all of the above.

Jim builds Web Art Instruments such as the splendid Nio and Jig Sound. These look good, sound good and are fun to play with.

I have been to Jim’s site a number of times. There’s a lot to read and interact with. For the moment I don’t have any great insight into Jim and his work - other than it’s great and very much a part of where I think the Art of the Net is heading towards and very much worth exploring. I hope to come back to the site and talk about individual works.

vispo.com

ample interactive design appears to be a “business card” web site for Alex Lampe. Perhaps “Lampe” is an anagram of “ample”. In any case this sites links top a number of clever and well-designed commercial web sites constructed in Adobe Flash. One link, however, (pointing to a folder on the the ample site itself) is a link to an on-line Web Art Instrument that, with your input, can create visual music.

First you load one or more instruments from the list at the top or bottom of the screen. Or click one of the presets on the right to load several instruments all at once. Then move your mouse around the screen. On screen symbols appear and musical instruments play.

The whole effect is more like an orchestra warming up more than a symphony in progress. There is obvious sophistication, care for detail and full technical sophistication here. Nevertheless, we await Rev 2.0.

Visual Acoustics

The DMF web pageallows you to create music by clicking on a board. Each click causes a peg to pop up and be played. It’s very similar to the mechanical mechanism of a music box. As the music is being played a visual presentation of the music is displated that swirls around the position of the mouse.

If you like the piece of music that you have composed, you can copy and paste the score into a text file and replay it again later.

The delight of this page is that is is a combination of visual, aural and interactive elements. You control the sound and the display and both are pleasing.

The DMF page is not a masterpiece of the art world or in any way a great work of art, but very much a nice work to bring up every once and a while for a few minutes of play and relaxation.