Artwork : Zombo.com
Author : Anonymous
Date : unknown

Profile :
Who : Research assistant
Where : Hypermedia research lab
With : Colleagues
When : At the end of a long work day
Doing : Documentation on hypermedia art
Laughing type : Burst out

I work in a research lab about hypermedia arts and literatures. We are just starting a database and so we document everything we find. We have lists of links to explore.  My retina told my brain that it had enough of screen reading. My brain answered that it didn’t have much more to do and to finish the work.

The artworks I went through today gave me a very rhyzomic experience and contained an infinity of links. They are the kind of hypermedia artworks that you don’t want to have to document. You have to find out yourself what they are about, because there is no introduction, nor documentation about them. Seems like artists have fun challenging the netsurfer’s patience. The truth is, if it weren’t my job, I wouldn’t take the time to try to understand some of these websites, as simple as that. But I have to document them all, meaning the good and the bad. Judgment is not allowed at this step of the process.

Z! The last on my alphabetical list for today is Zombo.com. I’m prepared for another laborious infinite text. I’m ready to put on my objectivity suit. I click on the zombo.com link. Is this a birthday party organization? It’s on my Net artwork lists so I have to figure it out. There is no links in the page, just some colorful circles flashing, a fun fair music playing and a creepy voice saying : “Welcome to zombocom, this is zombocom, Welcome, You can do anything in zombo com, anything at all, the only limit is yourself”. The voice becomes more and more insistent and repeats the same sentences. It’s a total opacity of communication. There is nothing you can do in zombocom, you can only leave it and do something else. Zombo.com is this crazy place where my brain finds itself at the end of a work day : a dead end in the complex information highways of the Web. A gap in the “too much informations”. A release for both my brain and my retina. I showed it to my colleagues and we laughed for half an hour.