State of the Art - On-line - art on the World Wide Web - includes related article on Web sites

Art in America, April, 1999 by Robert Atkins

Following up his earlier report, the author revisits cyberspace to explore new examples of Internet art.

Just over three years ago Robert Atkins published an introduction to the nascent on-line art world in this magazine ["The Art World & I Go On Line," Dec. '95]. It chronicled, in diary form, the 1994-95 season during which on-line art emerged. This essay discusses ensuing developments in the digital medium.

If the 1994-95 season will be remembered "as the year the art world went on-line" (to quote myself), then the 1997-98 season might be characterized as the year that on-line art first needed a business plan. Two pioneering projects which debuted during the 1994-95 season lost their sponsors in 1998: Antonio Muntadas's The File Room, an interactive archive of social and cultural censorship cum conceptualist art work, and ada'web, a site that produced and distributed on-line art works by more than two dozen artists ranging from Julia Scher to General Idea. Conceived by curator Benjamin Weil, ada'web is named alter Ada Byron King, the 19th-century scientist and daughter of Lord Byron, whom many consider one of the first computer programmers.(1) The Walker Art Center has acquired ada'web, although no money will change hands. But The File Room's fate is less certain. Since the demise of Randolph Street Gallery [see A.i.A., Nov. '98], the artist-mn organization in Chicago that produced the project, the archival art work has lost its home on the University of Illinois's server. Muntadas is currently negotiating The File Room's transfer to another institutional server, but no agreement, which must include provisions for maintenance and operation, has yet been signed.

Writing this account in the techno-business dialect of lower Manhattan's Silicon Alley may be both inevitable and apt. Consider the case of ada'web, one of the first (and most impressive) of the "start-up" on-line art ventures. To realize his dream of presenting art works that offered an alternative to the Net's glut of information and entertainment, Well found a modern-day Medici in new-media developer John Borthwick, who started WP Studios and published an on-line city guide called Total New York.

The ada'web site debuted in May 1995 with Jenny Holzer's Please Change Beliefs, an interactive project that encourages site visitors to rearrange Holzer's aphorisms. Everything was fine until late 1996 when Borthwick sold WP Studios to Digital City Inc., a company owned chiefly by America Online (AOL) and the Tribune Company. Digital City didn't signal (or perhaps know) its own intentions regarding its WP properties throughout much of 1997; in February 1998 the axe finally fell. Weil is now fatalistic about Digital City's cancellation of financing: "This was doomed, inevitable. When companies restructure and refocus, certain areas are going to be outside their interest." In the "age of the producer," on-fine-art presenters are frequently transformed in spite of themselves into entrepreneurs, as well as curators.

Understanding on-line art requires an unusually broad analysis. On-line art is the most hybrid of all media; one in which production and distribution, economics, design and esthetics hopelessly--and intriguingly--intertwine. (By "on-line art" I mean original, interactive works that can only be experienced on the Net, rather than the digitized images of paintings or photographs that characterize most gallery or museum sites. Many on-line pieces now capitalize on the burgeoning capacity of the Web to deliver video and sound, as well as text and graphics.) It is sometimes difficult to even recognize on-line art as such. Alexei Shulgin, a Russian artist, asked in his prospectus for his satirical WWW Art Medal (1996): "What is WWW art? Is it public art? Advertising?. More data noise? ... We give it [the WWW Art Medal] to web-pages that were created not as art works but gave us definite `art' feeling."

One of the many art sites that coyly work to blur the art/not-art distinction is The File Room. Certainly many of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site have no idea that it is "art," nor are they likely to cam. One of my favorites of these in-between sites is Mouchette, the chronicle of a fictional 12-year-old Web artist who will commit suicide at age 13. The site is no longer so ambiguous as an art work: when it first appeared it was not set in its current, on-line-art-gallery context. On the flip side, there are many commercial sites, including those of the design firm Funny Garbage or the tchotchke purveyor Unamerican, that give me a "definite `art' feeling." Susan Farrell, the creator of the Art Crimes Web site--a huge, international archive of graffiti photos--E-mailed me a message in 1996 thanking me for coveting her project and noted that "I know nothing about art; I leave that to the art experts." The Internet not only tends to call into question the traditional identity of art makers as a group, but destabilizes the entire Duchampian view of (physical) context as signifier, the notion that whatever is presented in an art gallery assumes art status. Is there a more pointed assault on the underlying rationale for the contemporary art-gallery and museum format of choice, the installation work?