Jess Loseby is slick. Well, maybe Jess herself isn’t slick; I mean, I’m sure she doesn’t shine in certain turns of light (or maybe she does?), but her art is slick. And that, despite all the often pejorative implications attached to the word slick, is actually a good thing.

This slick Bristisher, whose main site, is a feast of eye candy and thoughtful composition in several media (new media literature, images and poetry), creates work that centers around the “cyber-domestic” aesthetic, as her CV’s artistic statement puts it. “Is there room in the global arena that is the net for the small, the domestic and the whims of a neurotic woman?” she asks there, and those of us lucky enough to have stumbled across her work usually answer…well, yeah.

I first learned of Jess’ work through the rhizome list-serv, where I remember, either earlier this year or late last, her posting a link to a piece (I believe it was The Dream…go there now…see what I mean by slick? All those ominous somehow phosphorescent black clouds floating a steely gray poetry across the sun-warped negative of what looks like a stranded child…and the music, by her husband, musician Clive Loseby…). At the time, I was on dial-up, and loading this piece seemed to take forever. Happily, now, I use a cable connection, so I can view The Dream as much as I want to, whenever I want to.

Jess’ work was brought back to me as part of a feature at furtherfield, a rather subversive art site (check out all the erotic material there, especially The Feeler Twins take on the “nature” of the erotic, wink wink) that seems a strange place for her brand of cyber-domesticity to take root.

And yet, despite Jess’ claims of domesticity, there is something rather feral in some of these works (the threat of that child being carried away by wolves pervades The Dream, and fear itself comes under the slippery Loseby lens in Code Scares Me, where a short poem –“If i could only get rid/of this darkness//I could see you//and you could see/me”–gets buried in floating skein of html code the user can manipulate slightly by way of a few small click boxes at the bottom on the screen). It’s domesticity pushed to its homicidal, fight-or-flight dark side; the loving mother will, of course, kill anything that threatens to harm her children.

Often these days I wonder what academics will make of this particular period of artistic endeavor, and how hypermedia will be perceived. The only thing I don’t like here, in the online art of Jess Loseby, is that at times I find myself wishing for interfaces that were more complex. In Hello, Loseby speaks to us one word at a time in white Times Roman on a matte black screen; no music, no click-and-go, just one word popping up right after the other to form a friendly, breezy paragraph.

However, my gender may be getting in the way of my enjoyment of pieces like this: like theory, code may someday come to seem a patriarchal concept. a leftover whiff of the father, who may or may not be hungry enough to eat his own young. In the same way Gertrude Stein’s work has been lauded by some feminist critics for omitting by degrees the phallocentric narrative and development ghost, Jess’ work here may be quite conceptually solid (as if a work really ever needs to be): I miss the code because I’m male, and I want action, movement, as opposed to this rather quiet and domestic teletype text. It’s talking to me, slowly, but I’m not listening. I want food.