“YOUR MEGADRIVE JUST DISCOVERED NARCOTICS!!” reads a press release from the website for the London based clothing label CASSETTE PLAYA. The press release reads like some sort of youth culture manifesto. “CASSETTE PLAYA IS ABOUT HACKING REALITY, A HALLUCINOGENIC INFECTION, KRAYOLA INJECTION-” Unlike the websites described in McPherson’s article “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web” the CASSETTE PLAYA website does not wish to create any sense of control or interactivity. Instead, the website seeks to create an immersive digital experience that is disorienting both visually and mentally. The site seeks to create the experience of taking hallucinogenic drugs without actually having to take them, to “MAKE YOUR THIRD EYE BLEED.” It breeds confusion and attempts to show the user that he is not the one in control.
“IT’S A BATTLE FOR CONTROL AND DEFINITION OF TECHNOLOGY,” reads the press release, “VIRUS OR SERENDIPITY.” The background of the press release makes it hard to read, even physically sickening. The site seeks to create a “digital breakdown.” Fragmented digital music plays on the home and front pages, links on the site are broken, leading to nowhere, icons are unlabelled and the visual environment gives the user a headache while simultaneously drawing him into its world. Options are limited. One can stop and start the music on the page and click on the icons provided. The digital complexity is minimal, while the visual complexity puts both brain and computer into overload. It even crashed my browser twice.
The CASSETTE PLAYA website seeks to point out the same things that McPherson’s article does. It points out that the user is constantly manipulated, that the user is never truly in control of his experience on the web, and that there can be no true liveness on the web. One of the best examples of this on the website is the brand’s promotional video for their fall winter 07/08 season. The video starts out normally enough showing a bunch of people dancing about wearing the brand’s clothing. Shirts change colors and neon flashes everywhere as the video cuts quickly from scene to scene. The sky is a visual cacophony of colorful imagery and electrical energy descends from above and is harnessed by the dancers. Then something truly interesting happens. The video itself becomes pixilated, as if buffering. The user cannot tell if something is wrong with their computer or if the video was merely designed to look this way. One can easily imagine a confused user pausing and replaying these parts of the video, wondering why it refuses to play properly. The video is a digital prank that points out how little control users have in the digital environment. It manipulates us more than we manipulate it. The same idea is shown in the plethora of broken links on the site. It is never clear whether these links are purposely left broken to confuse the user or if they are actually broken. Either way the message is the same. The Internet is not infallible. It can break and it can fall apart. Things can be lost on the Internet. The user can become lost on the Internet.
Perhaps one of the criticisms of the site is that it does not take it’s own philosophy far enough. In all reality, the site exists within the modern Internet world, and it must be structured accordingly. The interface, while it may be confusing, is relatively straightforward. It does not subvert the user’s sense of control quite so much as it claims. If the site truly wished to take the ideology behind it to the absolute maximum it would not only present visuals that are disorienting and an interface that is jumbled, but it would also remove the user’s control over this interface. The site could move randomly from page to page without the user’s consent. It could assault the user with pop up windows full of hallucinogenic digital imagery. It could force the user to view it in full screen. It could even give the user a virus that would cause their desktop to bleed pixilated color (though this is probably illegal). In reality the site is a marketing device and must operate as such. This is one of the things the site seeks to hide from the user. It wishes to become a true digital narcotic experience, but is limited by it’s function rather than being limited by the realities of the web like the news websites mentioned in McPherson’s article.
The site is a sensory experience. It is meant to be taken like a drug, ingested through the eyes and ears, and digested in the mind. It operates more like a piece of artwork than a traditional website. Much like a painting, the site is meant to be viewed and taken in passively, not manipulated. The interface of the site is like the railings in front of paintings in a museum. They allow you to get up close to the material, but not close enough to touch it. It turns the evolution of the Internet on its head, denying the usefulness of any of the illusions the Internet seeks to create through interactivity.
In fact, in this way the site is much like the JFK experience that McPherson references in her article. The CASSETTE PLAYA site looks like a website from the early days of the Internet. It makes absolutely no attempt to be modern. It looks poorly thrown together, when it is in fact carefully planned out to produce a specific viewing experience. Like the JFK experience in McPherson’s article the CASSETTE PLAYA site wishes to make the user believe that he has been transported to a different time, perhaps the internet boom of the 90s. At this time the Internet was still a mystery. Possibilities seemed unlimited. The site uses images from old video games, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, to conjure the ghost of Internet and technology past. A past that could have thought: maybe it is possible for a computer to take narcotics.
