Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: Etoy, eToys, TOYWAR

Abstract

In the summer of 1999, an America youngster surŽng the Internet for the site of eToys, a US online toy company, instead made his way to the site of etoy, a performance art group once based in Europe but now living on in the networks of cyberspace. The young American, instead of going to etoys.com, mistakenly went to etoy.com. There, rather than being greeted by bright white pages featuring smiling faces and the latest in games and action Žgures, he instead found stark black pages devoted to etoy.HISTORY, etoy.SHARES, and etoy.PRODUCTS. Instead of seeing text and graphics of baby blue and candy red, he saw neon orange and electric green. And rather than moving through the