20 Questions with Curt Cloninger (Dec. 5, 2002)
"Curt Cloninger is a writer, web designer, and net artist. His commercial design portfolio includes sites like the award-winning (and revenue-generating) integritymusic.com. He is also a popular speaker at industry-wide internet conferences, and a regular contributor to design zines like A List Apart. His net art has been archived at rhizome.org and featured in publications like On/Off and Neural. Curt lives at lab404.com, plays at playdamage.org, and continues to hold the heretical belief that beauty enhances usability."
    - bio from New Riders
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webraw: How do you keep the Web raw?

Curt Cloninger: I make what I like instead of what I think people will like.

PERSONAL
wb.rw: Who are you, what have you done, what are you doing and what are you going to do?

CC: I'm Curt Cloninger. I have opened for the Flaming Lips, carried an 8-foot high banner around the entire island of St. Croix in 4 days, read the Bible 5 times in 9 months transcribing most of it in the process, compromised the security of a NASA VAX/VMS server, taught middle school English for 4 years, and written 4 books. I am currently answering these questions and listening to Cat Power. I am going to get some more egg nog and finish putting together my daughter's new swing set. Also, I will soon implement my newly acquired Director skills and hijack the online hive mind subconscious.

wb.rw: How has your faith influenced your work, your perceptions of the Web culture and how you interact with the Web community?

CC: My faith determines my world view, which influences everything I think and do at a root level. So in that sense my faith drastically influences my relationship with the web, but hopefully not in a contrived way. It's not like I try to say, "how can I present God in my work?" or "how will this message that I'm posting to this bulletin board influence people to pursue Jesus?" I love punk rock music, and it rears its ugly head in my writing style and my online art, but I'm not overtly trying to be punk. It's just part of who I am. Hopefully my faith is the same way.

wb.rw: When was the last time you read a book, heard a song, saw a movie or visited a Web site that caused you to say "Wow, things are going to be different after that?"

CC: It happens pretty regularly. Last night I heard a new Cat Power song produced by the Pearl Jam producer, and it changed the way I will approach the production of the CD I'm working on now. I just got this Recycle software that lets you speed up audio loops without changing their pitch, so that opens new doors in terms of arrangement possibilities. Learning Director has changed my approach to interactivity. Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" changed the way I approach multimedia narrative. Sigur Ros, The Olivia Tremor Control, Mum, My Bloody Valentine, even T.Rex -- my life was different after hearing all these bands. The list just goes on and on. Maybe I will hit a point where I've seen a bunch of stuff and nothing rocks me any more, but I'm not there yet.

wb.rw: What is your favorite type of sushi (or sashimi) and where is your favorite place to eat it?

CC: My favorite on a consistent basis is probably a dynamite roll, which is tuna and yellowtail and a bunch of other stuff that makes it spicy. So far, my favorite restaurant is Banzai in Mobile, Alabama, but I've only eaten Sushi in 4 other cities.

wb.rw: Elvis or the Beatles?

CC: the Beatles, from Revolver on.

COPYRIGHT
wb.rw: Recently you had an interesting exchange with Getty Images where, as part of an online, artistic experiment, you linked to what ended up being a pirated image. Getty Images asked you to remove the link or else… You finally did remove the link but, from my understanding, it was removed to avoid a legal hassle and not because you felt you'd done anything wrong. (Jason Kottke had a similar experience http://web.0sil8.com/episodes/99/03/29/index.html). How does that type of action affect independent Web designers and the Web community as a whole?

CC: Do you mean my action, or Getty's action? I realize that had we gone to court I would have probably lost, but that doesn't make the law any more "right." My problem with the way Getty handled the situation is that they are shooting all minnows with the same shotgun. Their argument is that if they don't enforce their copyright in every single instance of which they become aware, then their copyright power could somehow erode or weaken. Again, I'm not assailing all copyright law. As an author, I make money because of certain aspects of copyright law. My problem was the extent to which their copyright allowed them to harass me. Again, the details are here: http://playdamage.org/getty/ The image in question could have been removed from my project by contacting the artist who created it and was hosting it. I need never have been involved.

wb.rw: The Eldred v. Ashcroft case was argued before the Supreme Court this past October. While the ruling is still yet to be determined there is continuing speculation and debate about how this ruling, and copyright laws in general, affect the progress of the Web. What are your personal feelings about this case and how do you see current copyright law affecting the Web and Web designers?

CC: I think if web designers are going to use copyrighted images in commercial work, they should have to pay for them. It's the non-profit experimental art sites that I think should be cut more slack. So much conceptual and digital art these days is asking the questions, "what is an image?" "what is an original?" "what can be owned?" Copyright law shouldn't inhibit the creative exploration of these intellectual and cultural issues.

The original intent of copyright law was never to stifle dialogue about the validity of copyright law itself. So for the designer who rips off somebody's corporate logo and sells it to another company as their new corporate logo, that designer should pay. But for the artist who repurposes the McDonalds logo in some critical art site as a means of questioning the power of McDonalds as an icon or whatever, that artist should be exempt.

wb.rw: Have you ever downloaded copyrighted music, software or movies that you didn't own?

CC: Music and software. If it's new music and I like it, I'll always buy the CD to have it in that medium, just because I like the physicality of the cover art, and I'm a collector of sorts. I'm worse about older, one-hit pop songs. Like I will download an mp3 of the Brother's Johnson version of "Strawberry Letter 23," but I won't buy the album because I'm not going to like anything else on that album but that one song. I own all of the software that I use commercially, but I don't own all of the software that I use for my experimental art.

BLOGS
wb.rw: You don't currently have an official BLOG although lab404 is a blog of sorts. What is your opinion of blogging, the "blogging community" and what impact does blogging have on the Web?

CC: I'm not too big on the blogging community, I must confess. I always said if I started blogging, that would deflate all my creative momentum (because it would fool me into thinking that I was actually making something), and I'd never make anything cool. Blogging gives you the illusion that you are creating, when really all most people are doing is ranting or musing or thinking out loud. Good creative writing is a much more refined process. So if I have to choose between http://www.kottke.org or http://www.zefrank.com , I'll choose the latter every time. If you can force your blog energies/tendencies into actual multimedia projects, I think that's much more valuable. A good example of this is http://www.lfs.nl Maybe http://www.playdamage.org is my blog, it's just irregularly updated and not exclusively textual. I do see the point of journaling, which I do daily. Just not in public.
- (a follow up exchange on this particular topic can be read here)

wb.rw: Do you regularly read any particular blogs?

CC: http://www.zeldman.com I took a break from it, but now I'm back to reading it. Jeffrey is a friend, so it's more like a voyeuristic, cult-of-personality type of thing. I constructed a page of news feeds from design boards that I check regularly: http://www.lab404.com/news.html To me it's much more interesting to surf people's work than to read about somebody's night out or their personal opinion of G.W.

Blogging has changed the web in that it's created a bunch of independent content producers who might not have ever gotten involved in the web otherwise. So to me, that's a good thing. I'm not down on blogging per se. I think it's an intrinsic part of net culture.

It's just not appealing to me personally as a surfer or a content producer.

WEB STANDARDS
wb.rw: One of the multitude of trends on the Web is to create W3C standards compliant Web sites that validate (with those little validation stickers). A recent article on A List Apart even detailed how to implement some sophisticated hacks to render an embedded Flash file as standards compliant. To my knowledge you've not spoken out much about Web standards so I'm wondering how you view this current trend and what your thoughts are about creating sites that validate?

CC: I think it's important as far as it goes. If you're building a client site that will last for years, it makes sense from a scalability standpoint to try and code to standards. If you're building a personal site and you want to use some non-standard code that still works in all the browsers your visitors are currently using (according to your careful and regular inspection of your own weblogs), I don't see a problem with that.

At playdamage, for instance, I build it to where it doesn't crash older browsers, but Netscape 4.x visitors are going to have a totally different experience. A lot of those pages look radically different in Netscape and IE, which is all part of the fun of the art to me.

As long as they look acceptably cool, I just let them render differently. Like distorting a guitar amplifier, I'm trying to override the browser, to see how I can make it glitch. But again, that's not client work.

wb.rw: How are Web standards affecting Web design?

CC: Web standards are making web design more minimalistic and more content-focused. This is probably a good thing.

DESIGN
wb.rw: Designing for the Web is different than any other type of design for any other medium. Why is Web design so dynamically different and has that difference begun to influence other forms of design?

CC: The web is different because your final product is going to be rendered all sorts of different ways. With TV or Radio, maybe somebody's TV is black & white, or maybe their radio is mono, but this doesn't radically change the composition of the TV shots or the production of the audio recordings. But with the web, there are tons more variables -- screen sizes, screen colors, gamma correction or lack thereof, system font-smoothing or lack thereof, connection speeds, processor speeds, different browsers, different operating systems, plug-in availability, system font availability, etc. So you can't be anal-retentive about the ultimate look of your design. To me, this challenge is exciting, but then I'm not a print designer used to having a bunch of control. (cf: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/dao/ )

Web design is influencing other forms of design because the design solutions that work on the web (pixel fonts, flash vectors, 3ds Max abstract shapes, etc.) become part of our cultural design vocabulary, so they then get ported back to print and TV ads, because these design solutions seem hip or culturally current since the web is perceived as hip or culturally current.

Web design is effecting the rest of the design industry economically in that it's lowering the barrier of entry to the "design world," letting in a lot of lame "designers" and causing the "professional designers" to have to offer more value. (cf: http://www.commarts.com/ca/coldesign/rogW_150.html )

wb.rw: How does where you live affect the way you design and approach Web projects? Does not living in New York, LA, Chicago, London, etc. provide you with a unique perspective?

CC: I think so. I've never lived in a big city, though, so it's just a guess. As you know, I live in the mountains of western North Carolina. I can look out of my home office window right now and see my neighbor's sheep grazing. I think living here does give me a broader perspective on things. In a city, everything is made by people, so you are surrounded by human design and you can start to think that the way things are is the way we made them. But out here, you're surrounded by a bunch of stuff that no human could ever make.

So it puts design in perspective.

Also, I run in internet art circles, and there is so much micro-scene conceptual crap coming out of New York, it's sad. But the people who are involved in these scenes get so caught up in them that they start believing their own press, and if their friends think it's good they think it's good. But from this distance, the pretentious crap is not too hard to spot as pretentious crap.

wb.rw: Why do so many Web designers/programmers struggle to reach the balance between an aesthetically pleasing site and a functional, usable site?

CC: Because web design is like a strange hybrid between graphic (print) design and software interface design. You use photoshop to mock-up your interfaces, but then they have to be interactive and actually work. Designers that are solely into the look of things but neglect the functionality are always going to struggle, because people don't just look at sites, they use them. And designers who just fall back on ugly beveled buttons and outlined table-cells are going to struggle, because the most functional experience will also be one that is aesthetically pleasing. This was R. Buckminster Fuller's realization after examining nature up-close. It not only functions, it also looks good.

wb.rw: For the first time in about a decade there is a new type of computing platform for accessing the Web -- PDAs and Net enabled cell phones. The main sentiment is to design a normal Web page that will degrade onto these smaller devices. When do you think designers should start creating full-featured Web sites specifically targeted at these smaller devices and how will this affect the rest of the Web?

CC: Designers should start creating pda-specific alter-sites when their client's demand them. As usual, the question is, "who are your visitors and what do they need?" Usually, having a site's text viewable and navigable via a PDA is enough, and this is theoretically possible simply by coding to standards. People coming on a PDA aren't expecting some sort of gameboy experience. So the more people rely on PDAs to surf the web, the more important standards will become.

In the net art realm, experimental artists are already making some interesting projects solely for PDAs.

wb.rw: In what ways are independent Web designers, programmers and content producers shaping the Web and is their impact any more substantial than their independent counterparts in the offline world?

CC: Independent content producers for the web definitely have a more substantial impact on their medium than their counterparts do in other respective media, because the web is a many-to-many network. The very nature of the web as a communications medium encourages self-publishing. Not so TV, radio, print, which are all one-to-many media. I can't produce and distribute a TV show via my TV set. But I can produce and distribute a web site via my computer. It's two way -- the same tool I use to access content from the web is also the tool I use to produce content for the web. To me, after all is said and done, this many-to-many aspect is THE single sexiest thing about the web.

FUTURIST
wb.rw: What Web design trends do you see developing and impacting the Web during the next year? Which trends do you see fading into oblivion?

CC: Lots of people are going for this sort of bounded box thing on a tiling background. http://www.surfstation.lu is an example. It solves the variable screen size problem without resorting to a pop-up window, which has its own set of problems. More designers are incorporating hand-drawn illustrations in their designs, because when anybody can use 3d software, then you've got to distinguish yourself some other way. One of my favorites is http://www.hamada-takeshi.com. All the flash whiz bang stuff is sort of becoming cliche. Flash interfaces are becoming more subtle and functional, which is a good thing.

wb.rw: DMCA. CBDPTA. CTEA. Those acronyms send shivers down the spines of many Web activists. New laws give government and corporations increasing power over the Web. Do you have any concerns about the direction the Web is headed with regards to legislation and court rulings?

CC: I'm not very political, probably to my discredit, nor am I much of a student of law. To me, it seems laws that are impractical to enforce, if they are not too idealistically disagreeable, don't pose much of a threat. I'm not supposed to make a compilation tape for my friend, but I can and do and the record companies know I can and do and it's not worth their time or money to worry about it.

The internet was set up decentralized for reasons of military robustness. So its very architecture thwarts centralization. Add an international community to that, and lots of stuff is going to happen under the radar and beyond the reach of the policing community, just because of the actual nature of the medium. Which is not to say I'm for big brother. I probably should care more or lobby more, but there you are.

BONUS QUESTION
wb.rw: What is your current computer set up? Windows, Mac, Linux, other? Any preferences?

CC: My main machine is a Mac G4 running OS 9.2. I have Pro Tools 001 recording hardware hooked up to it. I work at 1280X1024 resolution on a 19 inch monitor.

I have a PC running Windows XP. I use it to check my sites cross-platform and my daughter uses it to play her 3-year-old games. I also have a G3 laptop.

I teach in a lab that has 6 macs running OSX, 4 PCs, and 2 Silicon Graphics machines. I'm not much of a hardware fetishist or an OS religious warrior. I prefer Macs because I'm used to them, but I'm guessing that if I was raised on PCs, I would prefer them. I used to crack into unix machines via telnet back in the day, but that was abuse, not use.

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