The Jerk-Stop Aesthetic: Using the Web's limitations to create art for the times

Turbulence artists end up taking full advantage of the limitations of the medium to create something that is of the Web, not merely on the Web. ... "You really can't have your druthers all the time," says Marianne Petit, co-creator of The Grimm Tale."[The Web's limitations] force you to make decisions, and sometimes the decisions are based on things you don't want to base them on ... but I think a lot of really good art comes out of having those restrictions."

The Grimm Tale profits from the restrictions. Based on perhaps the darkest of all the bleak fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm, "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," the story concerns the quest of an odd boy obsessed with his inability to shudder. He sleeps with dead men, uses skulls as bowling balls, commits dreadful violence left and right, all to no avail.

With a spooky MIDI soundtrack employed to great effect, GIF animations such as the animated cat-thumping scene flicker along the borders of the text with Web-powered resonance. Cartoonish, clumsy, and stark, the endless cycling picks up on the repetitive theme of brute horror and adds a ludicrous counterpoint to the underlying comedy of the shudder-free boy. A smooth slice of full-motion video would have been less successful, both in that instance as well as in the case of the recurring motif of disembodied heads who roll their eyes, leer hither and thither, and twitch in depraved tics throughout the narrative. Petit and co-author John Nielson end up taking full advantage of the limitations of the medium to create something that is of the Web, not merely on the Web.

By doing so, they fulfill the mandate set forth by Turbulence's online curator (as well as featured artist) Helen Thorington, "to find out what the medium is and what the medium will bear." So maybe we don't need more bandwidth. Perhaps more luxurious conditions are merely an invitation to laziness. Keep the conditions harsh - and watch the great art emerge.

Andrew Leonard
Wired.com
October 8, 1996

* The Grimm Tale is by M.R. Petit, with programming by John Neilson