Shine on
Shine, a new website from Amnesty International, includes 12 interactive media projects to celebrate the organisation's 40 years of "creative activism" in the US. Highlights include previous Webwatch favourites Hexstatic, who has built an extraordinary "video harp" for the project - a kind of virtual instrument that allows you to manipulate video clips from television news. Elsewhere, the current darlings of the New York club scene, Fischerspooner, contribute an interactive display that features work from their new album. It's all rendered in Flash and the navigation can drive you to distraction, but the work itself is good enough to reward perseverance.
Read in circles
Readers of Lewis Caroll might think that the great author's work needs little altering to make it strange and surreal. But visitors to Textarc.org can read the work online in curiouser and curiouser ways. The new site includes more than 2,000 literary classics, such as Alice in Wonderland and works by Shakespeare and Balzac. Each complete text can be displayed, line by line, to form a wide circle on the screen.
It works like this. The site's software counts each word in the text and notes its location every time it is used. It then creates an interactive map in which the relationships between words and where they appear in the book can be seen at a glance. The frequency of individual words can also be mapped. The effect is to turn each work into the kind of concrete poetry that Caroll anticipated in his wonderful books. It takes some time to load and you need a Pentium III PC or better. Fascinating, but you couldn't read a whole book that way.
Donnie Darko
Hi-Res!, one of east London's most imaginative design studios, is back with another website to promote a new film. After its multi-award winning sites for Requiem for a Dream and Centre of the World, a new Hi-Res! site is a mini-event in itself. The new site is for Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko - a film about a young schoolboy plagued by visions of a giant evil rabbit who orders him to commit acts of violence, and which predicts the end of the world. But Hi-Res! won't tell you any of that. Instead, the site takes on a life of its own, inventing a complicated prequel and sequel to the film. As beautiful as it is beguiling, it is the current state of the art in web design.
Get back
Backmasking is the alleged insertion of messages - invariably demonic - backwards. It was supposed to be a serious problem in the 80s, and led to a high profile court case involving UK heavy rockers Judas Priest. The results - available here as a number of Real Audio files - aren't exactly convincing, but most are intriguing enough. Some, like Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, seem playfully intentional, but judge for yourself.
Slacker study
Has the internet made the world more efficient? Not according to researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Cyber-slacking and the Procrastination Super Highway is a study of how the rest of us avoid studying. It found that 47% of the time we spend online is spent avoiding work. Web watch intended to read the whole report but got distracted by too many instant messages...
Pizza action
Domino's Pizza has just relaunched its site and made it a lot easier to order pizza from your home or office. Now you can design as well as order pizza, and even design "half and half" pizzas. The site also has an "order recall" service, so you can save your favourites. Results are delivered to your door in about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, Ihavemoved.com - the site that tells people you've moved - is offering a free pizza for those who sign up to its service.
Crash
You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was JG Ballard's pornography of the car crash made real: smashed, catalogued and displayed on the web.
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