/Interview/ The brains behind: Hanttula
01/08/2007 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Mike Hanttula’s online presence, www.hanttula.com, features sections as bizarre as the Museum of Food Anomalies and the Bunnyocalypse. Mike tells us what it’s all about
.net: What’s hanttula.com for and what’s the inspiration behind it?
MH: Why, it’s “Your Home for Internet Fun,” of course! Or, at least that’s the tagline that’s followed the Hanttula.com URL for the past several years. In slightly less absurdist terms, Hanttula.com presents an online collection of projects and exhibits that are intended to first entertain, then motivate visitors into creative participation. I started the site with the hope of promoting alternative endeavours for artistic and creative work. To me, traditional media like painting, literature, photography and film and video kept art at an arm’s length from the layperson. My experience with art was that it was something viewed on a museum wall rather than being an active part of our lives. So, I wished to experiment with the idea that creativity was more a notion of how one sees rather than what one produces. From that, I tried to create projects that were exercises in the application of creativity to everyday circumstances (such as shopping for food, writing emails, disposing of old toys, having a party or keeping a journal). The Hanttula.com site is intended as an ever-expanding documentation of that overall experiment and the various projects I come up with to accomplish the goal of making creative thought a more integrated part of the standard lifestyle.
Of course, there’s also the mysterious Infobox 10000, a micro-blog in which visitors find gems from other sites around the internet, or just slices of Hanttula-grown wisdom.
.net: How do you come up with the ideas for your somewhat dark exhibits and projects?
MH: I wish I could say I had some repeatable process, but in actuality, the ideas seem to find me. I have a loose, primary goal of “thoughtful entertainment”, but I’m never sure which idea I’ll end up producing until it, in a way, consumes me. For example, the wildly popular Lost Notebook (for ABC’s show Lost) came to me in a conversation with friends one night and was built over the course of the following week. Although it seems crazy now, I couldn’t rest until I worked out all the ideas I had for the project. It ended up being one of the highest-rated Lost websites for the period of time that it was being maintained.
While the other “dark” projects start in much the same way (The Museum of Food Anomalies began when I found the famous piece of “Edvard Munch Honeycomb Cereal”), they’re definitely motivated by my intense childhood interest in the spine-tingling entertainment of elaborate spook houses, showy horror films, wax museums and circus sideshows. However, I now enjoy using the metaphor of those dark environments to underscore, of all things, the humour of my projects. Without the framework of the circus/sideshow theme, The Circus of Disemboweled Plush Toys would just be a collection of mutilated children’s toys, which would be creepy in a fashion that would make one worry for the sanity of the creator. But, with the circus-themed surroundings, it’s absurdist and humorous. At least, that’s the idea.
.net: What’s your favourite section of Hanttula and why?
MH: It’s usually whatever I’m working on next. Each existing section represents something that was a bit of an experiment when first developed, and the excitement of that experimentation is one of the greatest thrills for me. In fact, my favourite aspect of working on Hanttula.com is trying to solve the problems of how to bring a certain idea to life. Once the project is online, most of my work is done, it’s then up to the visitors to figure out ways to become a participant in the piece. That being said, I had a lot of fun with the Website Blessing Service (for which I became an ordained minister). That project led to many interesting email conversations about the reasons for which certain individuals needed their sites blessed. Also, the Spoon Journal (one of the site’s earliest projects; inspired by those somewhat ridiculous souvenir spoons that tourists collect during their travels) was my first foray into posting personal experiences on the internet, which wasn’t so common at the time.
.net: What have you got against plush toys and marshmallow bunnies?
MH: They once looked at me the wrong way. Actually, The Circus of Disemboweled Plush Toys was a response to the absolutely mindless craze for Beanie Babies here in the US a few years back. People were spending unthinkable amounts of money on these cheaply made, mass-produced atrocities that were believed to be collectible. I thought that there’d be no better way to countervail the evil sweetness of Beanie Babies than to create a visual forum for depicting the ill fate of their plush-related brethren.
On the other hand, I came up with the Bunnyocalypse (the Marshmallow Bunny Apocalypse) after reading a statistic that 80 per cent of people first bite the heads and ears off when eating chocolate bunnies. It made me consider ways that the other 20 per cent might put a candy bunny out of its misery – which, naturally, awoke my childhood fascination of places like The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, or The London Dungeon and the various scenarios of doom that they depict. I chose Marshmallow Peep Bunnies instead of chocolate because there’s a greater affection for these sugar-coated critters, and because marshmallow is a more flexible medium than chocolate.
.net: What kind of feedback do you get from the viewers of your site?
MH: I usually get the response I’m hoping for: a humorous sense of shock and surprise, then a desire to participate! Even though some of the exhibits are slightly macabre, there’s a sense that it’s all tongue-in-cheek and in good fun. Most importantly, the pieces are not exploitative, are not at anyone’s expense, nor are they over-graphic or vulgar. The viewers that write in seem to really appreciate that delicate balance and end up having a lot of fun exploring the site.
.net: Which section of Hanttula is most popular? What do people mostly contribute to?
MH: The Lost Notebook garnered a frenzied fan base during the period in which it was being maintained, but then my interest in the show waned and I couldn’t justify the time involved in maintaining that portion of the site. However, the MoFA (Museum of Food Anomalies) has been an unbelievable success. It’s been the section that’s received the most attention, fame and contributions over the long haul. At this time, I’m developing a method for more efficiently updating the MoFA just to keep up with the stream of submissions that I receive each week. There are a couple hundred entries that I haven’t had the time to post, which is very sad (to the contributors as well, I’m sure).
.net: Who are you anyway? And what does a typical day in the life of Michael Hanttula look like?
MH: I’m a 33-year-old male residing in sunny and sometimes too hot Los Angeles. I like chicken and waffles and beer, sometimes in tandem. I spend my days working as a web producer for the fantastic Spark3 internet development firm and benefit from having some of the greatest clients for which a 33-year-old web producer residing in Los Angeles could ask. My days and nights are long, usually starting at 6:30am (with coffee!) and running until at least 12:30am to 1am each night. I try to squeeze work on personal projects (for Hanttula.com or some offline endeavour) before and after the regular working hours (which are anything but regular). I spend a lot of time studying, cooking or attempting to convince my friends to create mischief. I also spend too much time trying to mastermind social activities, since I believe that the people with whom we spend our time ultimately determine the course and quality of our lives. I want to learn to take naps. I rarely remember my dreams.
.net: Your site’s more than 10 years old. What does it take to survive on the web?
MH: The five keys to surviving on the web? Originality, flexibility, patience, quality and prolificacy.
Originality – it’s easy to realise a great idea when someone else has already produced it. Don’t waste time with copycat or “me too” projects. Come up with something all your own. (Yes, the internet’s a big place and there’s bound to be overlap, but you know when you’re trying to hitch your wagon to someone else’s idea.)
Flexibility – realise that your ideas may not communicate to an audience in the way you had originally intended or envisioned. Being open to a “conversation” with your site’s visitors will take you far beyond your original plan.
Patience – starting a website (even a brilliant one) doesn’t mean overnight success. The MoFA was launched in 2001, but it didn’t really take off until about 2005. Likewise, a project I made in 1999 was responsible for 40 per cent of my traffic last month (simply because one major website found it and started a deluge of links from other sites).
Quality – the quality of a site’s work (whether it’s the design, presentation or individual sections of content) is what, ultimately, seems to capture an audience. There’s a lot of mediocre material on the internet. Dedicating the extra time to producing quality work will quickly put a site well above the online median. A good example of this is the Lost Notebook, which was simply presenting information from the TV show, yet doing it in a clear and somewhat beautiful fashion spoke volumes to the show’s fan base, making the site the mini-phenomenon that it was.
Prolificacy – while I’m a huge proponent of the “do one thing well” philosophy, it’s important to note that audiences are drawn to collections of material. Whatever you’re producing online, produce it well and often. Fresh content results in engaged and returning visitors.
.net: How much money are you making from your store and your site?
MH: Almost nothing at all! Over 10 years, I estimate that I’ve made $172.54 which comes out to just over $17 a year. I have almost no markup on the store items and there are not really any advertisements on the site. Because of the high traffic, I could probably make a good chunk of change running something like Google Ads, but my informal research has shown that there’s a inverse correlation between the degree to which a site owner likes making money from advertisements and a site visitor who enjoys having to deal with viewing the ads. In short, ads are rarely fun. Although I’d really like having money, to me it’s more important to provide an enjoyable experience. Until I can figure out some way to transparently monetise the site, I’ll have to take that satisfaction in lieu of sweet, sweet cash.
.net: What are your plans for Hanttula.com?
MH: The biggest plan is to develop a much faster distribution model, so that I may finally produce several of the items in my long backlog of exhibit and project ideas. I’d also like to work out some new methods to engage site visitors, going from regular “interactivity” to a truer sense of collaboration. But, perhaps most importantly, this year will see the emergence of a new theme, which I’ll share publicly with you and your readers for the first time. Replacing the famous tagline of “Your Home for Internet Fun”, Hanttula.com will become a repository for “Unmitigated Brilliant Magnificence”. What precisely does that mean? We’ll all have to wait and see.
Comments
snurffel / 03/08/2007 / 03:45
This hanttula.com guy sounds effing interesting! Thank you for spotlighting such an creative and dynamic individual!
Neeraj / 24/10/2007 / 19:29
Fantastic!!!! Simply the best "Brains Behind" thus far. Maddox's interview was great too, but this interview with Hanttula was strangely inspirational. Thank you!!
