Net Art's Broadening Niche

Afterimage, May, 2001 by Berin Golonu

Weil qualified the site's complex design by likening it to an architectural metaphor for the SFMOMA building designed by Mario Botta. In the same way that one has to navigate the physical space of the museum in order to see the work hanging in the galleries, he said, one would similarly need to maneuver through the virtual halls, virtual walls and doorways of the Web site in order to view the projects on-line. The architectural metaphor was intended to create a link between the Net projects and the gallery installations of the exhibition.

A positive aspect of positioning the work on-line for viewers to access from their preferred remote locations is that it enables viewers to spend more time with each project, thereby allowing them to fully explore and become immersed within pieces that contain a great many layers. Pieces like Matthew Richie's The New Place, a sci-fi narrative that interweaves the storylines of various characters within a labyrinthine, Flash-animated universe can be more fully experienced when accessed from a personal Web space. But the effect of packaging the work within an elaborate Web site, complete with various "think texts" and a slew of other informational material, mediates the experience of viewing this work to a great degree, having almost as much impact on the experience as placing the work within the physical space of the museum. That is precisely the museum's job however: it must provide a specific context for viewing this work, in this case, an educational one, thereby introducing the work to audiences who might not be familiar with Net-based art. It would be impossible for the museum to present work in any medium--whether it be performance, video art or Net art--without certain "filters" through which to view this work. The compromise that Net artists--or anyone else creating work that is bleeding-edge radical--must make when agreeing to exhibit this work within the museum context is to take the chance of having the work lose its subversive potential in exchange for the prestige of being included in a museum show. This is a compromise that many Net artists are choosing to make.

In the discussion of their recent byte-based curatorial projects, Dietz and Paul gave presentations of works that were hybrid in nature, ones that lived on a network but also had a physical interface that extended into the gallery space. "Telematic Connections" is a show that emphasizes process; Dietz believes in the importance of trying to document the artist's ideas and their development rather than being concerned with qualifying the work as "visual alt" or presenting it as an aesthetically appealing art object. "The audience response to the show has been that a lot of the work doesn't look like art," proclaimed Dietz. With its "Telematic Timeline" chronicling the history of technology's impact on the arts and on popular culture, and with its virtual "Data Sphere" documenting pivotal Net art projects created over the course of the past few years, "Telematic Connections" does indeed come across as a comprehensive resource for the recent history and progress of Net-based work. [5] The hybrid manifestation t he gallery projects--where the user taps into a network to affect an installation that has a physical presence elsewhere, or vice versa, affecting the network's configuration by interacting with the physical components of an installation--intends to demonstrate the ever growing impact that technology is exerting over our social interactions as well illustrating the latest, museum-friendly direction this rapidly evolving medium has taken.