Devil inside

by Michelle Chihara

SITE SEEING

Some of the finest, most progressive design on the Web is in hell. That is, it lurks somewhere behind http://hell.com, the forbidding public face of a four-year-old artists' collective called Hell. The group's list of a few dozen names represents a healthy cross-section of today's cutting-edge digital-art scene; its lush, textured works, or "events," explore the medium's possibilities.

Only you can't see that list. Or the events.

Hell.com, the group's front door, is intentionally hard to crack. It's an all-black page that flashes through a slightly opaque, off-putting script. ("Why is this called hell? Use your imagination.") With a few devilish screenfuls of white-on-black text, Hell.com ingeniously taunts, infuriates, and makes you want in -- kind of like a good bouncer. If you play with it, you can get your name on the mailing list to be invited to events. But it's not designed to be easy. Says Kenneth Andorson, the site's founder: "It's about provoking people to think, to discover."

It's provoked a lot of people so far. Without a single link in a single search engine, and absolutely no advertisements, Hell.com now gets in excess of 90,000 visitors a month, according to Andorson. Hackers have long taken the site's user-unfriendliness as a challenge, but Andorson says that everyone from frustrated users to upset religious fanatics now sends him e-mail messages -- hundreds upon hundreds of them. Some corporations have showed up on his server logs, trying to get a look behind the curtain.

It's hard to manage that without actually being a member, or a nosy journalist. But in January, Hell did send e-mails to 27,000 people who had registered for the list at Hell.com, inviting them to see a fluid digital collage called Surface (an immersive Shockwave applet). Another event, called Skin on Skin, is a voyage through an interactive love affair and will be on display soon.

Between public events, Hell's goal is to continue to develop what Andorson calls a "private parallel Web," which seems to mean part digerati in-club, part creative rebellion against the increasingly corporate definition of new media. Like Andorson himself, it seems prickly at first. Then again, prickles can be exciting.