When I was asked to devise a Web Site for National Libraries Week by responding to Cambridgeshire's theme of A Sense Of Place I immediately made a connection with the five human senses and then remembered the party game where a person's identity is guessed by asking questions such as: If the person was a colour what colour would they be? and so on.

(Es)senses of Place is a web site which contains material generously donated by a wide range of people: from 9 yr old Emma Symonds to well known author and academic, Germaine Greer, from Simon Reynolds, a sweet stall holder on Cambridge Market to Rev. Sykes, the Bishop of Ely. They have each thought about a place that is particularly special to them and attempted to distill their complex relationship with that place into 5 simple essenses based on human physical senses.

My hope is that an equally wide ranging group of people will visit (Es)senses of Place, that they will both enjoy the game and perhaps think in a different way about a place which is special for them, for whatever reason.

Making work for the world wide web has been a new experience for me as an artist - it is an exciting place where people from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences can meet and exchange information, ideas and experiences. It's definitely worth wading through the, at times, baffling technology and hopefully (Es)senses of Place will demonstrate both the potential and the accessibility of the world wide web for everyone from all walks of life.

Kirsten Lavers

For more about my work, you can visit my personal pages

My part of this project has been the building of the site itself, and in partnership with Kirsten, designing it's visual identity.

When making a web site, there is almost always a compromise that needs to be made between sophistication and accessibility. Many technically exciting things can be built into web pages, but the more of them you include, the fewer people will have the necessary equipment to look at the result.

There is of course the option of limiting yourself to building technically simple sites, but I think that when 'artists' are involved in a project, there will always be the expectation that the medium will be pushed harder than might be the case in a commercial or academic context.

Consequently the (Es)senses of place site has been built in two versions. One is 'low tech' and should be accessible to the vast majority of web users. The other is a lot more complex (at least under the surface) and will therefore only work correctly with specific equipment. This compromise hopefully satisfies the dual objectives of accessibility and technical adventure.

The Game site (the complex bit) is programmed in 'Javascript', and we have restricted access to it to users of Netscape Navigator version 2 and above.

Users of Internet Explorer 3 and above may wonder why they have been excluded, and the answer is that although I tried hard, I simply couldn't make a version of the game that would work in it with Explorer running in less than 30Megabytes of ram. I felt this was an unrealistic requirement, and regretfully decided to drop support for this browser.

Martin Baxter

For more about me, you can visit my personal pages