Art for the net's sake

If you have a spare moment in the next couple of days, and an internet-ready PC to hand, log on to www.praystation.com .

Strange, you will think, what are they trying to sell me here? Shapes emerge and start to move to a variety of mechanical and electronic backing "tracks", swaying grass turning into graphic strips or fragmenting geometric shapes according to where you click on an indecipherable binary-style menu. Is Damien Hirst designing wallpaper for Laura Ashley? Has your computer caught the most aesthetically pleasing virus yet?

Neither: this is the work of Joshua Davis, a universally acknowledged guru of international web design. And if you weren't aware that there was such an animal, it's time you were.

"Web design is an increasingly important part of our lives," says Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum, which is hosting Web Wizards - Designers Who Define the Web, from Friday. "This exhibition is here to recognise that." The museum is giving over a large space to screens presenting some of the ground-breaking work of names that will be unknown to all but the very switched-on few: principally, Davis, Danny Brown, James Paterson and Amit Pitaru, Yugo Nakamura, and Tomato Interactive.

Davis is unusual in that since winning the Net Excellence section of Prix Ars Electronica 2001 in September and earning a place in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he is able to devote most of his time to praystation.com, and spreading his aesthetic gospel. Most web designers have to make a living, so while Nakamura, say, offers an ingenious interactive dancing qwerty keyboard at yugop.com , a couple of clicks can take you through to his equally whizzy site for electronics giant Matsushita.

"Danny, Yugo and Joshua have all had a lot to do with creating user interfaces, to convince you to buy," says Rawsthorn. "As the technology improves, and they can create forms that mimic nature, you are tricked into believing in it as an organic thing, and that gives a different level of engagement and pleasure." So a timeline by Davis at Motown Records' site motown.com/classicmotown has friction and acceleration to get you involved.

Which doesn't detract from the innovations that make their web experiments possible. "It's not like any other media. When these people started, there were no rules," says Rawsthorn. "They made them up themselves."

Like Liverpudlian Danny Brown, who started designing 10 years ago at the tender age of 14. Unable to afford a computer himself, he started fiddling around on machines at Liverpool John Moores University - "it was pretty basic stuff back then", he recalls. After lots of backroom experimenting, he became renowned in the Nineties for cult site noodlebox.com , making butterflies that follow your mouse around like a torch, and futuristic flowers that grow perpetually across your screen.

"The net can have an infinite number of new media," adds Brown. "You have all kinds of genres, from simple galleries to interactive design and computational aesthetics". Yes, there is beauty in maths, and Brown and his cutting-edge colleagues want to prove it to you (see singlecell.org ). In his Angel piece, a project featuring Icelandic pop star Björk and others commissioned by design house Showstudio , your cursor streams with little rivers of colour that "summon" an angel from the picture that emerges. "It's a collaboration between me and the user," says Brown. "Painting a picture that already exists." Paterson and Pitaru's work with Björk is on the site too - you should also check out their own insertsilence.com for a dynamic musical graphic thrash (Pitaru is a jazz pianist).

The web cannot hold all this talent, says Patrick Burgoyne, editor of Creative Review and a keen webwatcher. "Everybody is talking about getting off the desktop and into shops, bars, even into your phone." We will all be coming across it before too long.

For him, nowhere plays with interaction and information like the web. At the ingenious theyrule.net , a complete diagram of who sits on the boards of different American companies is shown on a series of "maps". Built-in links take you to details of donations to politicians and related sites. And the whole thing is movable on-screen, making it all rather ludicrous and strangely sinister at the same time.

At boobytrap.org , a clever, if rudimentary, graphic action-movie demands you choose the right option to get the narrative to continue. "It's pretty crude," admits Burgoyne, "but it gives us a clear idea of the possibilities."

The one thing all these have in common is that, being cutting-edge, they require you to download the latest plug-ins and versions of web browsers - even with a fast connection, this can be frustrating (with company firewalls etc). So if you tune in and see nothing, despite hours of patient application, you will just have to go down to the Design Museum anyway.

Web Wizards is at the Design Museum, 28 Shad Thames, SE1, from 30 November until 21 April. For information, call 020 7940 8790 or go to designmuseum.org .

Praystation
Yugop
Classic Motown
Noodlebox
Singlecell
Showstudio
Insertsilence
Theyrule
Boobytrap