Last week I posted an involved review of Santiago Ortiz's 6pli project. I was really capitvated by the manner in which this application allowed for the navigation of a link database through the social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Santiago and I exchanged a few emails and I decided he would be an ideal first participant in a new series of interviews which will be published here on Serial Consign over the coming months. A member of the Barcelona based Bestiario collective, Santiago currently lives in Lisbon. Over the last several years Santiago has developed an impressive portfolio of imaginative and dynamic software art which explores a number of contemporary paradigms. I first found out about his work through the Sound and Energy suite of "interface instruments" which includes the delightful Sound Sticky Elastical Structure pictured above. Santiago has been kind enough to talk about his work, so without further ado...

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Greg J. Smith: In looking at your body of work, I notice several themes: narrative, networks, and genetics are all dealt with in several projects. Furthermore, there is a sense of play in almost all of your endeavours. Could you talk a little about your software art in general and how it helps you to explore these themes?

Santiago Ortiz: ...or how those themes helps me to explore the software art. In some way I use rich structural knowledge (as can be found in genetics, linguistics, mathematics...) to play with. The common things about those fields that I like are: structure and dynamics, which fits very well with code creation. In fact genetics is code creation, linguistic and narrative are code creation; that´s why I feel literature, genetics and code art are so related. Those three fields ask the same awesome question: what are the limits? Theorists and science fiction writers asks that in genetics; Philosophers (Wittgenstein, Borges, etc.) in language; Mathematicians (Turing, Gödel, etc.) and programmers asks the same questions through coding.

Your projects boast a wide range of experience in terms of usability; some feel like games and others feel like instruments. How do you approach interface design?

I have a few strategies:

• try to avoid metaphors (that´s impossible, off course) except if the interface is a metaphor itself
• if you have to use metaphors, at least choose familiar ones
• avoid technological metaphors (i.e. operating systems)
• no explanations, everything should be discovered by the user
• make things and behaviours intuitive
• all graphics elements communicate meaning (nothing is decorative)
• things are related (so, understanding one action can help to understand the others)
• repetition of interactive behaviours in different projects (I hope people will know more than one of my projects)
• repetition of concepts
• don´t cry if the interface or narrative of one project is not understood; it will happen from time to time
• people tends to click colored circles: capitalize on that (that´s a tactic, not a strategy)
• people like to understand things, go beyond visual or sound stimulus
• people like stories: capitalize on that (I might use this strategy more in the future)
• people likes to create things and tell stories: capitalize on that (this one is a key strategy for me right now)
• whenever you can, go see people interact with your work and other interactive projects (first you have to hide yourself, like a naturalist, then go talk and share impressions)

My most visited page is visualcomplexity.com and three nice books I always recommend to people who are looking for inspiration for code creation are The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and Escrituras Nómadas by Belén Gache.

Hipercontrol^3 (pictured above), NeuroZapping and now 6pli have all dealt with exploring social bookmarking through the del.icio.us service. What is it about social bookmarking that keeps bringing you back to this topic? What are your thoughts on del.icio.us specifically?

After some years playing and representing my ideas, or ideas coming from theories and knowledges, now I want to produce spaces for people to express themselves. In the spectrum of social web tools and services del.icio.us is the most neutral, because a post could be anything: your web, your friend´s web, an image, a video, a post on a blog, a file to be downloaded, and, actually, any digital "being" you want. Other nice thing about del.icio.us is the tag and bundle system (on services like flickr tags are less important), and we love tags!

Del.icio.us pages could be much more than favorite lists. See for example the TAGallery, a complex net-art curatorial system by CONT3XT.NET (discussed in a Serial Consign post a few weeks back). In fact a de.lici.ous page could be used as a backend for a wide range of visualization projects. It could also be maintained by a collective. Nevertheless I´m not only on del.icio.us. At Bestiario we are working on several projects related with social nets and collaborative creation, some of the uses of de.licio.us or flickr and others are self-contained.

One thing I've noticed in thinking about 6pli, is that it actually feels like exploring del.icio.us. The graphics are sleek and unembellished compared to the more aestheticized Hipercontrol^3 and NeuroZapping projects. Was there a specific "less is more" mandate for this project?

That´s exactly the case. Hipercontrol^3 and NeuroZapping are aesthetic constructions. Metaphors in fact (see the first strategy discussed above). The first one is a metaphor of the alienation of our society, the second one is a metaphor of the neurosis of our society. But, beware, there are not pessimistic criticism; is just the opposite: they try to express how alienation and neurosis can be creative.

6pli is a structural construction and it has some kind of universal pretensions. Because is a project made to be appropriated by anyone. The idea is that everyone who uses 6pli feels that it is their informational space, their own project. I’m not sure we are achieving this yet, but maybe with some improvements and time. Our goal is for 6pli to help people enjoy the organization of information and let people forget colors and shapes and even movement and achieve some kind of structural-navigational understanding, much like listening to music, but based on a framework of the users construction (because posting and tagging is like play with an informational lego). Those are our challenges, and 6pli has a long journey ahead of it.