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Soon you can stop reading and return to enjoying the work.

It is certainly arguable as to what makes a good web site. Each site serves a different purpose and is made for a different crowd. Jordan Stone's works are nowhere near the most commercially successful, most publicized, award winning, or most used or useful web sites. However, while maintaining the general guise of what we call a "web site," his work takes the medium to an entirely new level. Stone's edgy, humorous content and delivery, combined with a technical drive to infuse his creations with the motion and immediate experiential value present in our interaction in daily life, creates "internet web sites" unlike any other I’ve seen.

Sites like Billy Harvey's come together in form and content to create something that will prove lasting in such a quickly changing field. In five or ten years when Flash designers are achieving technical effects we can only dream about today, the "places" that Stone has created will still be just as enjoyable. Stone says, "I would like for some of the sites I have worked on to remain valid even after technology has moved way beyond the point at which they were made."

Stone achieves this goal by creating work that integrates the artist, the viewer, and the work of art, and goes beyond the Flash medium by integrating visual and audio narrative and humor, aspects that won't die even when the technology is obsolete. With a high level of user interaction needed to navigate and uncover the entirety of each of his works, the user has no choice but to enter into this world that Stone created. Each new viewing of his work re-enlivens the bit of Jordan Stone style and humor that was embedded during its creation. What emerge are laughs and smiles and the inspiration to break boundaries and enjoy even the simplest aspects of life and society.

Before my academic words make Stone out to be some heavenly figure with divine enlightening powers, I'd like to quote an interview question and answer that will bring us back to what I love most about Stone and his work:

Interviwer: "We are often instilled with an idea that the internet we see today is just in its incipient stage, partly due to all sorts of the cumbersome issues concerning business profits or inadequate infrastructure etc…Do you think so too? Why or why not? Do you often find your original ideas technology-challenging? What's with that?"

Stone: "I don’t believe in the Internet."

Sources

Quotations taken from email interviews conducted for XFUNS (a Chinese magazine), and "some Korean mag." Courtesy of Jordan Stone.

Links Sofake Amplifier Billy Harvey Music Matthew Mahon Wefail Martin Hughes Tony Oursler

See Also Jordan Stone Interview

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