Animate animate.

Regular readers may remember my enthusiasm several years ago at the moving images of the website of the big Sydney practice Rice Daubney at www.ricedaubney.com.au. The first animation you come across is a moving silhouette, a website ringmaster who shows you the various sections of the site and pops up to do things like displaying, with a flourish, all the staff names on a board. Someone in Sydney worried about his insubstantial nature for a naturalistic heart located in roughly the right spot in the silhouette's chest now spookily fades in and out when he first appears. An outline with heart. The second animations are the aerial views of figures walking purposefully around plans of an office. Later the walking figures appear in elevation in a cross section of the building and its atrium. Some of the figures are parametric and, when you linger your cursor over them, their name appears in a little box. When you click, a mugshot appears and they announce their names in their own voices. It means you spend hours obsessively tracking down all the staff and the architecture is almost irrelevant--although it is there.

OK, a while ago I came across the site of Glasgow architect, Jason R. C. Brown, whose site at www.abbozzo.co.uk is of interest because it also has some animation. Apart from the name Abozzo, which is neatly spelled out in hand-drawn script, there is a little stick figure (the client) who has the idea of building a house, gets together with (presumably) an architect. Symbols of time and money are then displayed and finally the client appears, happy under his new roof. So there you have the mechanics of a building commission in a few scenes. I think this is a classic case of not bothering to think about what the client might want. It is merely the process understood by the architect. But what client cares about that? I suspect that what the client wants more than anything is reassurance that the architect is going to spend millions of pounds wisely and responsibly and is going to produce a terrific place in which to live or work or experience drama or art or whatever. And who is going to be comfortable to work with for the next couple of years. Where Rice Daubney's marching figures score is that they represent an organisation, a college of special talents, working in their big, efficient building doing big architecture and marching purposefully in your cause while the shadowy ringmaster makes sure everything happens as it should.

Sutherland Lyall, the AR's diligent web vole, plashes questingly through the autumn mire of cyberspace.