Some people would call what you do, "shitty, ignorant and irrelevant trash." What would you say to them?

Usually, I say, "Geez, Mom. I'm doing the best I can."

A lot of people might say that Superbad is really just a graphic design portfolio. In my opinion that's kind of missing the point that you are using graphic design as a language.... sort of the way JODI uses HTML and broken code. Do you think that's accurate?

It's not much of a portfolio—I rarely show it to clients; it scares them. So, yes, I think "using graphic design as a language" is an accurate description. I was an artist before I was a graphic designer, so now to do art, graphic design is mainly another tool that I can use.

And Superbad tries to draw attention to the language of design itself. I like how Godard does that in his films—draws attention to the film, or how Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker do that too; they did "Airplane." But I'm no Godard and Superbad is no "Airplane."

Kids seem to be a big part of the content on Superbad. Or the idealization of childhood. It's innocent; even things that are disturbing (the boy who gets attacked and killed by bees) are _innocently_ disturbing. Even Mao becomes a cartoon character..

Yeah, it's like Mao, cute-ified. Cartoon, but also he's a logo. The real Mao's face IS a logo, used to represent his brand of communism; in the same way a company uses a logo to represent itself. I just tried to show the connection in an entertaining way.

As for the innocently disturbing stuff, it's there because it's entertaining. And the childhood elements I like to use because everyone was a kid, so everyone can identify with them.

There's a lot of childhood nostalgia, like "Being Silly," or the vaguely recalled family stories. If you combine that with the idea that Superbad is a lot about logos and corporate design, you could say it's a statement about the homogenizing effect of the mainstream media. Again, the cartoon Mao.

In the beginning, Superbad started out doing a lot of parody, and what was on the web at that time were a lot of personal sites. Since then, the web has become more about commerce. So over time, both of those things have been parodied.

I'm not sure that it makes sense to try to understand how those two parts fit together. It's more like some of it is accessible by being childlike. And some of it is a little bit slick and commercial and is accessible in that way. But both aspects are just using that accessibility to communicate ideas other than what seems to belong there. It's sneaky.

I think the text on Superbad is one of my favorite aspects. The sort of trivial tragedy.

Trivial and lurid at the same time. Like someone in the office stealing your lunch from the fridge. It's a real drama, and it's really upsetting, but if you have a reasonable perspective, you understand that it's a very small personal drama. Still it's compelling. Same with the cigarette shoplifters and the guy who bought all the meat. I honestly don't know why I wrote the meat part. I thought web pages had to have words, so I just started writing.

And its drama! And entertainment. "But Is It Art?"

At first I didn't want to call it art because I thought it would be more fun for people to be surprised by it and I wanted to leave it open to different interpretations. I like it when people think of it as a site for kids or a site showcasing "experimental fiction" or whatever. However, "art" seems to be the word that does the best job of describing it.

It seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Superbad, within net.art theory, falls into giving it a reputation for being irreverent and trivial, whereas other work is praised for bridging a gap into pure entertainment.

Hmm. I'm not sure I understand that criticism. Who's saying art shouldn't be irreverent, and where were they during the twentieth century?

Anyway, the comment about it being "trivial" is probably valid. I think most websites are pretty trivial, and Superbad is, probably more than most. Making it entertaining is definitely more important to me than making it non-trivial.

Well, you don't seem to care about criticism anyway. Your site doesn't exactly work towards textbook sorts of discussions. But that seems intentional.

My site works best as a website. That's intentional. I'm better at making stuff than talking about it. Plus, talking about my site is usually about fifty times less interesting than actually visiting the site itself.

And people do visit it. The most popular site on the web, I think, as far as Internet art is concerned. Your site's hits, according to Netscape, are higher than JODI's and Hell.com's...

It's the most popular website in THE WHOLE WORLD. Because I'm the most popular person in the world.

(Serious answer now.) Actually, I don't understand how popularity is quantifiable. And I don't know that it's useful to compare numbers like that. It's not like Superbad is trying to compete with other websites. Popularity contests are kind of exclusive and annoying and are pretty far removed from what I want Superbad to be about.

I just mean to say your site has got Populist appeal, not that it's running for class president. I would think that is probably more valuable to an artist than a handful of academic criticism?

Superbad is like colorful, splashy Art-Lite (TM). E-Z Art for people on the go. So it plays by most of the same rules as a pop cultural product, which makes it somewhat Populist. Still, I don't devalue criticism. I dig well done art criticism, though none of Superbad was created with academic criticism in mind.

eryk salvaggio, 9 april 2000
rhizome.org