Skip to contentKyle Macquarrie

Net Art Research, pt III: mrdoob.com

This last site kind of bridges the gap between the two I looked at previously: introducing Mr Doob. His speciality seems to be HTML5 madness and high end JavaScript, but there’s some phenomenal stuff here, some of which is really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible visually on the web while still maintaining something that people will actually want to use.

Harmony is a procedural drawing tool which provides some interesting drawing possibilities; Google Sphere and Google Gravity reconfigure the world’s most famous search engine (make sure you actually try a search in both!). Or So They Say is just a lovely ambient experience, but possibly the best known (although it’s not clear exactly what his role in it was) is The Wilderness Downtown which is a music video for the band Arcade Fire. Built in HTML5, it combines specially filmed footage with content from Google Earth to make something a bit mental. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing as HTML5 support gets better.

You may find a lot of these projects aren’t compatible with all browsers, especially the Google experiments. I recommend SRWare Iron, which is a version of Google’s Chrome browser with all the stuff that talks to Google secretly stripped out. Isn’t open source great?

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