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

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

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

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

Writing this account in the techno-business dialect of lower Manhattan's Silicon Alley may be one as well as the other inevitable and apt. Consider the case of ada'web, individual of the first (and greatest in quantity impressive) of the "start-up" on-line art risks To realize his dream of presenting art works that proffered an alternative to the Net's sate of information and entertainment, Well rest a modern-day Medici in new-media developer John Borthwick, who started WP Studios and published an on-line city guide called Total novel York.

The ada'web site first appearanceed in May 1995 with Jenny Holzer's Please Change Beliefs, an interactive shoot forward 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 possessed chiefly by America Online (AOL) and the Tribune Company. Digital City didn't signal (or perhaps know) its possess intentions regarding its WP properties over much of 1997; in February 1998 the axe finally blood-thirsty 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 presenter are not rarely transformed in spite of themselves into entrepreneur as well as curators.

Understanding on-line art requires an unusually broad analysis. On-line art is the greatest in quantity hybrid of all media; individual in which production and distribution, economics, design and esthetics hopelessly--and intriguingly--intertwine. (By "on-line art" I mean original, interactive works that can solitary be experienced on the toil rather than the digitized images of paintings or photographs that characterize greatest in quantity gallery or museum sites. Many on-line pieces now capitalize upon the burgeoning capacity of the Web to deliver video and unmutilated as well as text and graphics.) It is sometimes difficult to level recognize on-line art as like 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 on the other hand gave us definite `art' feeling."

single of the many art sites that coyly work to tarnish the art/not-art distinction is The File field Certainly many of the centurys of thousands of visitors to the site have no idea that it is "art," nor are they likely to cam. individual 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 thus ambiguous as an art work: when it first appeared it was not station in its current, on-line-art-gallery words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following On the flip side, there are many commercial sites, including those of the design firm farcical Garbage or the tchotchke purveyor Unamerican, that give me a "definite `art' feeling." Susan Farrell, the creator of the Art Crimes Web site--a gigantic international archive of graffiti photos--E-mailed me a message in 1996 thanking me for coveting her throw out and noted that "I know nothing about art; I leave that to the art experts" The Internet not sole tends to call into question the traditional identity of art makers as a assemblage but destabilizes the entire Duchampian view of (physical) connection as signifier, the notion that whatever is at handed in an art gallery assumes art status. Is there a more pointed assault upon the underlying rationale for the contemporary art-gallery and museum format of choice, the installation work?