A Simple Website for a Complicated World

This new website was a long time in the making—and will stay in progress.

It’s a return to roots—just as we’ve circled back to Brooklyn, where Eyebeam was founded in 1997, we’ve also strived to achieve the simplicity of the pre-oughties web. As Paul D. Miller puts it in his Postscript to <eyebeam><blast>, the list-serve that started it all:  “the network as ‘synthetic garden’ rather than cultural mausoleum. That is what Eyebeam taught me.”

The previous website’s backend was something of a Gothic cathedral: beautiful, complex, and sometimes a little scary. And it will still be available at archive.eyebeam.org, though to start not all that content will be available on this site because there’s just so much of it.

To build this site, Eyebeam worked closely with 4REAL, a design agency that was co-founded by Eyebeam alum Slava Balasanov with Analisa Teachworth. During Slava’s residency, he built the 3D communal collage platform Gif Pumper. And the platform was developed by another member of the family, Hellyn Teng, who helped create Computational Fashion exhibitions, together with Clara Santamaria Vargas. Once someone enters our Brooklyn studios, they often find reason to stay. In fact, every single one of our programs is imagined, developed, and scaled by an alum.

Here are some of the changes we’ve made to the website:

We’ve combined the education and research sections into one broader section, called Community This is where we’ll be hosting the work continued by the legendary research groups of Eyebeam.

We’ve added a section called Facts, to answer all your frequently answered though it’s not because we’ve got all the answers.

Our new story-telling platform is called the Stop Work!—named in honor of the monthly ritual of the Eyebeam critique. You’re here right now.

Bios were getting outdated quickly, so to keep the information up to date, we’re linking our resident information directly to their websites.

And because there are so many stories, here, we’re also adding a press room to deal with press interest more efficiently. If you’re one of the few and the proud, get on our list and learn what we’re rolling out before anyone else does.

If you’d still like to see the old website, just go to archive.eyebeam.org. We’re currently in the process of migrating data from the old website, focusing on alum information.

(Oh, and those are Betta fish, by the way.)

[iframe src=”http://eyebeam.org/fish-animation/fish.html” height=”830″]

Design Statement

By Analisa Teachworth and Jon Lucas of 4Real

There are so many aspects to what Eyebeam provides that we wanted to maximize the process of reduction, using minimal elements to display all that Eyebeam offers to its wide community. 4REAL views webspace as a very malleable and complex landscape for creating. That said, when envisioning an online presence for an institution, it’s often best to base the site’s design on clearly conveying the most important information We strive to build spaces on the net that stand up to time because they are designed around a fundamental framework that’s well organized and beautiful.

Installing the latest version of HTML, JQuery, Node, Express, and Angular, may be a good starting point to building a website, but no scripting framework can replace the immediacy of thoughtful organization. The use of indentation, as seen in Eyebeam’s new website, is fairly uncommon within the context of the web; its line-by-line nature tends to emphasize the vertical demarcation. Yet indentation, of a simple horizontal space, is amongst the earliest way of denoting hierarchical information. There is an immediacy of the indentation that notions order and tasking.

As web design grows to encompass endless possibilities, it has become increasingly difficult to filter excess from the necessity. That’s resulted in a lost a sense of immediacy behind load times and visual excess. Eyebeam’s new site embodies the contrast between the contemporary environment of web design and the concurrence of absorbing information. It’s in finding these unmapped zones that reveal their own proportions that 4REAL is most interested in exploring. Some fish get to swim in streams that have not yet been charted.

This site was designed by 4REAL and developed by Hellyn Teng and Clara Santamaria Vargas.