A Picture is Worth a Thousand Clicks
Some artists use the Web to show their work; for others the Web is the art.
Published February 10, 2006
By Adelle Caravanos
If it’s true that art imitates life, then it’s only fitting that technology is increasingly at the center of the art world. After all, commenting on modern life without mentioning, for instance, the World Wide Web would be to ignore one of the current driving forces in Western culture.
Since the beginning days of the Internet, technologically savvy artists have used it as both a medium and subject for artistic commentary. Generally, Internet art includes websites, e-mail projects, Web-based or networked installations, online audio or video projects, and online performances art.
On Feb. 6, 2006, Electric Arts Intermix, a nonprofit organization in Chelsea, hosted Net Aesthetics 2.0, where invited artists and curators teased out the history and future of Internet-based art, and also questioned the relevance of art created with content from the Internet.
The panel featured Wolfgang Staehle, an artist and founder of the art bulletin board service Thing.net; Cory Arcangel, a computer artist and curator whose work has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum and MOMA; Michael Bell-Smith, whose work focuses on popular culture and how it is mediated through technology; Marisa Olson, a multimedia artist most recently commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and editor of the online art community site Rhizome.org; Michael Connor, Head of Exhibitions at the British Film Institute and former curator at FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology); and Caitlin Jones, a curatorial and conservation research assistant at the Guggenheim. The evening was organized and moderated by Lauren Cornell, executive director of Rhizome.org.
A Brief History of Online Art
It was still the early days of the Internet, when only a thin, slow network of connected computers existed, when forward-thinking artists like jodi.org (a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) began creating artwork that played with the basic structures of the mid-1990’s Web. In one of their better known projects, 1995’s http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/, appears to be meaningless text, until one sees that the HTML source code reveals the diagram of a hydrogen bomb.
Online art continued to develop, largely in part due to Internet communities like Thing.net and Rhizome.org, both begun in 1996. With the dot.com phenomenon of the late 1990s came a surge of interest in Internet art, and Web art projects such as Ada’Web and DocumentaX, as well as art collectives such as ØtherLands, and UNMOVIE docs.
Now, 10 years on, the Net Aesthetics 2.0 event was named in a reference to the term Web 2.0 — a loosely defined “rebirth” of the Internet, in which blogs replace personal websites, podcasts prevail over mp3s, and the online encyclopedia of choice is Wikipedia.org. The underlying theme of this new version of the Web is personalization of information, and the artists spoke to the ways the new Internet is affecting their work.
A Means to an End
Wolfgang Staehle’s Thing.net is a bulletin board service that connects online artists, allowing multiple users to interact with each other online — a forward-thinking idea, particularly because the website was started in 1996, long before online forums were commonplace.
In another of Staehle’s major projects — Empire 24/7 at Postmasters Gallery — images of the Empire State Building were streamed into the gallery via the Internet. The piece took on an even deeper meaning as it captured pictures of the city skyline during the events of 9/11.
Unlike some of the other artists on the panel, Staehle has not made the Internet the subject of his work. He acknowledges he is wary of being called an Internet artist. “The Internet is a means to my work,” he said. “It simply moves my data from A to B.”
Mother of Invention
Brooklyn based Cory Arcangel says his first forays into online art was motivated by necessity: “There weren’t too many exhibition opportunities for abstract computer art.”
Among Arcangel’s first projects was Super Mario Clouds, a changing image of pixelated clouds, lifted from the popular Nintendo video game. He also posted a website that detailed how he took apart the cartridge and rigged it to remove everything but the clouds. According to Arcangel, the point of the work wasn’t the work, but showing people how he did it.
As art appreciators took notice of his work online, Arcangel began getting invitations to show his projects in galleries. He collaborated with Eyebeam, a New York center for electronic arts, to create Pizza Party. The piece is actually a computer program that hacks into the Domino’s Pizza computer server, enabling a user to order pizza directly over the command line of their operating system. “You just pick different variables and input your preferences, address, quantities,” says Arcangel. According to the artist, 3,000 people downloaded it, and theoretically are still using the program. The point of the project? “To prove it is actually possible to send a guy running around the city with a few keystrokes,” Arcangel says.
A Space to Show Art
Arcangel’s other online work includes Doogle, a Google engine that searches for “Doogie Howser, M.D.” regardless of what keywords are entered; the Christopher Cross song “Sailing” translated into Arabic (“I love thinking that someone will search for it, in Arabic, and it’s the only one on the Internet!”); and Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter, complete with Google ads generated by the letter’s content.
Arcangel sees a difference between the Internet as a space to show art, as opposed to a gallery. “My work for the Internet has got to be a bit fey — it’s for people at work,” to enjoy at the moment. “Looking at work in a gallery, there’s a lot of art history involved,” says Arcangel, and he likes the fact that some of his work is readily available and accessible.
That being said, Arcangel acknowledges that the artist in him craves the gallery space, as well as the educated eyes that come to a gallery. “On the Internet, nobody knows that I’m an artist. And as soon as my work gets copied and pasted to another blog, I cease to become an ‘artist,'” he says.
Under the Internet Influence
Michael Bell-Smith is another New York-based artist whose work explores the relationship between American culture and popular technology. His digital images and videos use collages and juxtapositions to emphasize the strained relationship between people and machines.
Bell-Smith echoed Arcangel’s view of the gallery as a place for art to be considered “special,” and the Internet as a place for art to be treated less preciously — at home or work there’s nothing to stop you from flipping between views of “Doogle” and a celebrity gossip website.
Filtering Pop Culture
The work of California-based artist Marisa Olson could be described as post-Internet. She derives all of her artistic content from the Web, incorporating blogs, midis (audio files), and online images.
Olson has created multimedia projects using audio midis and images culled from the Internet, including musical scores that she remixes and inserts into collages.
Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs is one project in which Olson manipulates material she has found online. In it, Olson and her partner, the mohawked Abe Linkoln, sing words taken directly from blogs to classic blues tunes. Olson says the point is to compare blues as the “music of the people” to blogs, the new “voice of the people.”
In another recent project, American Idol Audition Training Blog Olson blogged continuously about her experience training for the reality television show. A self-confessed pop culture addict, she says the blog allowed her to comment on the media, at the same time as she was partaking in it.
Whether the Internet is used for transmitting art, displaying art, or making art, one thing all panelists agree on is that the genre evolves and changes at every moment, and that one single definition may never be clear.
Also read: Art and Science at the Academy
