!hobgoblin: An interactive internet art museum
!hobgoblin was, in short, a museum, containing various high quality modern and contemporary artworks, mostly from Scandinavia, that adjusts itself to reflect the decisions, and therefore character, of the user. The works themselves ranged from simple photos of modern designs to contemporary web-based pieces to more mundane service sites that nonetheless reflect quintessential Scandinavian design practices. The museum also included contemporary web-based artworks that may or may not have been produced in Scandinavia but that transcend national boundaries.
The site was also an early (2001) experiment with dynamic HTML (note the intro text — "ns" is Netscape!).
I built !hobgoblin while at the Denmark Design School. I implemented it in HTML, Javascript, PHP, and MySQL.
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When a user launched !hobgoblin, a new window appeared on which were three images and four parameter bars. When a user scrolls over an image, more information about that piece appears.
The four parameter-pairs reflect the system's approximation of the user's taste. Their meanings are as follows:
simplistic/expressive: Is the layout of the site itself simple and functional, or is it expressive, flashy and graphic heavy? This qualifier has more to do with the attributes of the site itself than its contents.
pragmatic/artistic: Do the contents of the site serve pragmatic ends? Or does the site exist as an independent artwork? Sites that themselves contain several artworks will tend towards the middle of the scale.
virtual/real: Does the site or page display representations of real objects, or is the content virtual? Sites that contain real objects or data but are not themselves real objects (e.g. museum Web sites) will tend to be rated around 50.
container/object: Is the site a container for other works or other projects? Or does the site stand on its own as a piece of art (or, is the 'site' a page describing a tangible artwork)?
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When a user clicked on one of the images several events were set in motion: the site referred to appears in another window (below left), and the !hobgoblin interface reloads, updates the parameter-pairs based on the user's input and displays three new images that link to sites some way related to the sites the user has thus far viewed. In addition to the three new images, smaller representations of the last five sites visited appear in the !hobgoblin window, but may be buried beneath the three new possible choices.
New choices always linked to sites different than the sites the user had most recently visited, but may start to repeat sites viewed in the not-so-distant past. However, a user could at any time reset !hobgoblin, effectively erasing the user's history, and begin again.
Also, the user could click on any one of the parameter names to increase that parameter's importance.
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