Statement
This is a sketch for a new home page for www.three.org. The goal of the adversarial collaborations at www.three.org is to foreground conflicting perspectives rather than hiding them, so my collaborators and I have always insisted on listing our individual names instead of hiding behind some moniker that would imply a "unified front." Yet even listing the names alphabetically--Joline Blais, Janet Cohen, Keith Frank and Jon Ippolito--makes it seem like we are all part of one happy family, whereas in fact the opposite is the case (Or maybe I'm just sensitive to my alphabetically challenged last name.) To level out the playing field, Keith and I rewrote the www.three.org home page to position the collaborators' names randomly so no one would get top billing. But whenever we included a script to prevent the names from overlapping, the browser crashed. I couldn't figure out why until I sketched out the regions of the screen outlawed by overlaps, and realized that I had inadvertently ruled out anything directly above, below, or in the same vertical register as the name-i.e. just about everywhere. The virtual obstacle course that resulted was just too much for the browser to handle. Substituting an "AND" for an "OR" fixed that problem. This little bug sums up pretty well how genuine collaboration depends on fine-tuning the level of interference: you need enough to stop any single view from dominating, but if you have too much you'll never get anything done.

Bio
The artists working at www.three.org have been exploring the conflict inherent in the collaborative process since Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito began working together in 1992. While early adversarial collaborations by these three artists took the form of an installation, book, or drawing, in 1995 they began to take advantage of the Internet's capacity for encouraging flame wars and other clashes of perspective. In recent years other collaborators have joined Keith Frank and Jon Ippolito to make new work on the site, including "_Fair e-Tales_" (with Joline Blais). The artists' work has been seen at ZKM/Center for New Media Karlsruhe, the Walker Art Center, and Sandra Gering Gallery. When they're not arguing or throwing stuff at each other, Joline Blais writes novels, Janet Cohen makes drawings, Keith Frank designs Web sites for Oxygen Media, and Jon Ippolito curates media projects at the Guggenheim.