A visitor to Juliet Martin's Instant Future (http://www.julietmartin.com/future/) is instantly confronted with a circular animation of a crudely-drawn rabbit tracing the outline of a moon. Beneath this pulsing animated gif, a text-link reads: "Your future is rabbit-moon-guilty." It's a fortune-cookie message from a strange precocious child; following this link, one enters the enigmatic, charming world of this classic net art piece.
Instant Future is a poem, mostly, a fairly linear html piece with a great deal of JavaScript thrown in for a Flash-like effect. The text---aphoristic fragments scrawled (instead of typed--part of the piece's charm is that you can see Martin's hand in the work, as opposed to the usual rigidity of typeface seen in far too much cookie-cutter net art) in, through and around various animations and similarly scrawled images. The effect is something like looking at the secret sketchbook of that aforementioned precocious child; except that child has already gone through menstruation ("Before I was bleeding from my crotch like a leaky faucet," Martin writes in one part of the sequence, "I was thinking I am going to loose myself. I didn't say a word.") and suicide ("My overdose of disappointment when I didn't drown from the tears was about 24 sleeping pills. But the sun did come up the next day.").
Martin's work has been praised widely; not only has the prestigious rhizome.org lauded her efforts, but she's also been featured in the New York Times and SIGGRAPH 1998. And it's no wonder; Instant Future is an engrossing rumination on determinism. Asking, "Can the future truly be changed?", Martin occupies the inner space of an abused child/abused woman here (and don't think for a minute that I believe that child and woman are synonymous terms). That the two states coexist in one body here, and that that existence is so scrupulously (yet impressionistically) rendered by Martin in this piece is proof that Martin's artistry is far above your average prankster-at-a-terminal. The piece is both a structural and thematic whole.
Why is it linear? I immediately asked myself when examining the piece. With the freedom of the computer, why create an artwork that's meant to be read like a book? Then it struck me--future! In a strictly modular design format, there is no future, only self-contained spaces arranged in some random nonhierarchical
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