Listed here are the top ten interactive websites that are bound to suck you in with their addictive content. They are unique examples of contemporary internet art based on user interaction, and distinct from games in that there is no goal or win conditioning. One could contextually refer to them as “time-wasters”, but that would be an insult to digital art. I don’t know… Time-wasters or art, you be the judge.

1. Medijate

   Organic green spirit digital work by Larry Carlson, an American multimedia artist. Whichever way you click, you’ll be taken on a mesmerizing, psychedelic ride through the universe of Virtual Om. Enjoy it.

   
   Medijate

2. Feed the Head

   Feed the Head, created by Vector Park, has been around for some time, and it stands for a piece of interactive entertainment of a type we don’t often see. It is more a digital interactive art installation than a game.  It’s just plain fun to play. A piece of interactive art to be explored at your own pace. Spend a couple minutes or an hour. Lose yourself. Feed your head. Escape. Click.

   
   Feed the Head

3. Flow

   Created by Han Hoogerbrugge, a Dutch digital artist known for his unique and eye-catching animation style so representative of MTV media era. Flow is an interactive tale of a contemporary man and his travels trough the landscapes of our time. Sometimes he goes up, sometimes he goes down. By the guidance of the frantic music from Gil Kay, we see the man struggle with faith and religion, sport and health care, stress, the power of medicine, gambling, death, identity, free floating and an eye-ball. It’s an interactive extravaganza.

   
   Flow

4. Spin

   Another creation by Han Hoogerbrugge, designed for Sony/Playstation. The concept centers on the idea that PlayStation 2 is a gateway to another world – the Third Place. This is a mental or spiritual place, which can’t be defined as it’s different for everyone. No one can tell you about your Third Place, you have to discover it for yourself. It is about exploration, discovery and adrenaline. Neither inside nor outside, not waking nor sleeping, here nor there – it is what you make it. The presentation undergoes constant mutation through use/play, and the impossible becomes possible.

   
   Spin

5. Yenz

   This site, created by German designer Jens Schmidt, was born from a ‘wish to create a webpage which allows things which are not usual for the Web, such as full-screen animations and big images, without the problem of bad Web resolution’. As you enter you will find there are many ways to explore and play.

   
   Yenz

6. This Sand

   Designed by Johanna Lundberg and Jenna Sutela in collaboration with the Flash programmer Timo Koro, this website is a playground of colours and sound for people to play with. It is a sandbox – within the computer screen. With a simple click of the mouse, you can change the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes, Clemens-style sand paintings, mandalas and so on. Sometimes the resulting pieces are expressive, sometimes they become more abstract. And just as a real world sandbox, the digital one can be smoothed out and re-sculpted again time after time.

   Just like the actual sand gets its colour from its origins, the sand used on thisissand.com covers the RGB palette natural to digital environments. Also the sounds of the falling sand on thisissand.com resemble a real life phenomenon: singing sand is discovered in about 35 desert locations around the world where the wind triggers a low-pitch sound in the natural sand. Instead of nature’s frequencies the digital sand generates white noise, which is a random signal with a flat power density. It is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies – like the RGB sand on thisissand.com.

   The specialities of the digital sand lie in the possibility of saving the original pieces of sand art in the gallery or printing them out.

   
   ThisSand

7. Kaleidoscope

   A great online time-waster, virtual kaleidoscope was created by Ze Frank, an American web designer who likes to combine technology and art in his work. Remember the awe you felt the first time you looked through the kaleidoscope lens? The virtual version is more addictive and it works without holding it up and pointing it towards the light. Just drag the shapes and colors onto the rotating wedge and you’ll see the kaleidoscopic patterns appear in color.

   
   Kaleidoscope

8. Glitch Scape

   This is a very interesting experimental web musical instrument designed and programmed by Tomasz Slawnikowski. It is an interactive sound-vision generator that allows the user to create music with a simple click of the mouse marking the pixels to make visual patterns on screen.

   
   Glitch Scape

9. Dream Lines

   Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience, a project by Leonardo Solaas. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association. The pictures are never actually shown. The drawing itself is produced by 1500 autonomous particles in perpetual movement. The last image loaded serves as a sort of virtual terrain for them. The direction and speed of each particle is given, at each step, by the color values of the pixel they are stepping on. Different sets of formulas translate the hue, saturation and brightness of the pixel in angle and velocity values for the particle. The path of each particle is traced to the screen, and this forms the output seen by the user.

   Thus, the work is at the same time a study on population dynamics, or on the emergent behavior of a multitude of very simple autonomous agents. Who is dreaming? The user, or the Internet itself? In a certain way, both. The program generates a personal moving picture, unique, unpredictable, and forever gone when it is finished, just like dreams. But that dream is made out of pieces taken form the subconscious of the whole net, gathered by some words of the user and the obscure logic of searching algorithms.

   The subject of this work is, many times, multiplicity. That of the particles in endless movement, that of the vast contents of the Internet, that of the users and the dreams they wish to dream. All this multiplicities get together on the verge of chaos, on a process that mixes randomness and strict but complex logics, very much alike the processes that take place in our heads. Even when we rest.

   
   Dream Lines

10. Celestia

    Celestia is an amazing free space simulation that lets you see the universe in three dimensions. The exponential zoom feature allows the user to explore space across a huge range of scales seamlessly. A ‘point-and-go-to’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

    Celestia

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