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

Fork does Rhizome., 1998
About
A stylized, stylish image of a baseball diamond, dominated by shades of red perches on four iterations of a partial view of a mitt catching a ball. A soundtrack of a sportscaster's announcement in Spanish confirms the ballpark setting. Fork does Rhizome. is an eye-catching intervention into the user's contact with Rhizome's home page. Founded by David Lindeman, an American living in Berlin, Fork Unstable Media is a design studio specializing in interactive technologies that markets its products with the vocabulary of experimental art.

http://fork.de/