Superbad (website)

Infobox Website
name = Superbad

url = http://www.superbad.com
commercial = No
type = Web art
language = Occasionally English
owner = Ben Benjamin
author = Ben Benjamin
launch date = 1997
current status = Active

Superbad is a noted web art installation created by Ben Benjamin in 1997.

It received a 1999 Webby in the "Weird" categorycite news
url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/05/08/BU45688.DTL
title=What Webbys Win: Internet awards' effect on bottom line difficult to measure
author=Verne Kopytoff
date=May 8 2000
publisher=San Francisco Chronicle
accessdate=2007-06-26] , and was one of nine websitescite news
url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996548,00.html
title=Clicking on the Canvas
author=Anita Hamilton
date=april 10 2000
publisher=TIME magazine
accessdate=2007-06-26] featured in the Whitney Museum Biennial in 2000. [cite news
url=http://archives.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/arts/04/18/whitney.biennial/index.html
title=Internet art on display at Whitney Biennial
author=Jamie Allen
publisher=CNN.com
date=April 18 2000
accessdate=2007-06-26] Superbad began as a test bed for Benjamin's web design for technology corporations ranging from E! Online to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. It heavily samples Japanese popular culture.

The website serves primarily as an artistic work that was produced using the tools and methods of web design. This genre of art is often referred to as web art.

The site consists of a veritable maze of inter-linked visual, conceptual "subprojects" ranging from two-tone and technical-looking to wacky, colorful, and even bizarre. Often a subproject will have clickable elements linked to other pages within that subproject, or to another, or that just provide visual richness (for example, [http://www.superbad.com/1/follow the "follow" subproject] has a grid of circles with arrows that follow the mouse cursor; each circle is a link to a different page within the site). Some of the pages contain narrative elements. There are 143 different pages (and still more coming).

TIME magazine cited "the very randomness of the electronic images" offered on the website that lures the viewer "deeper and deeper into its playful maze".

Benjamin sells nothing on Superbad, and received little extra traffic from the Webby award. Up to 10 percent of the 2000 Biennale consisted of various net art projects, marking the first time they were considered "so prominently among the traditional arts", according to Salon.cite news
url=http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/03/15/whitney/
title=The Net as canvas : Web art is being included in this year's Whitney Biennial, but will the museum's validation make it any easier to buy, sell or even define Internet art?
author=Janelle Brown
date=March 15, 2000
publisher=Salon.com
accessdate=2007-06-26] Benjamin "didn't really start thinking of Superbad as art until the art people started finding it", but insisted that the Whitney's selection of his and other web art projects "makes it look more valid to the art crowd. So all of a sudden because it's in a museum it's not crap anymore?"

References

External links

* [http://www.superbad.com Superbad]
* [http://artport.whitney.org/exhibitions/biennial2000/benjamin.shtml Ben Benjamin at the Whitney Museum Artport]
* [http://newlangtonarts.org/view_event.php?archive=1&category=Gallery&eventId=216 newlangtonarts.org:Review]