Splash art originated in the 1940s in comics, where the term referred to a full page of visuals at the front of a book. Pages were designed to engage the reader's imagination along the lines of the comic's broader concept, while standing independent from the narrative. In the late 1990s, when the widespread use of the application Flash opened up new possibilities for animation and interactive media, the idea of the splash page migrated to web design. Online splash art brought visual excitement to a webpage when low modem speeds made it impractical to post large or moving images amid a site's textual content.

Rhizome introduced splash pages to its web site in 1998 in order to display artwork with greater immediacy....

Launch Project

served by, 2001
About
"I am not..." prompts users to assert their identities through negation, and uses Perl script to aggregate their responses in a long string of text. served by is a variation on conceptual stabs at making long sentences through online collaborations. Below the conditional conclusion—"but I can take you to Rhizome.org"—follows a record of the visitors' origins, organized by domain extensions. Annie Abrahams, an artist born in the Netherlands and based in France, has been active online since 1996. served by expresses her concern with the potential and limitations of web-based communications that are central to her work.

http://bram.org