Online exhibitionsPosters American Style at the National Museum of American Art is one of the most stylishly laid-out exhibitions online. It does not try to replicate the physical installation, but it does include the curator's essay and every poster in the show, with descriptive text and one detail. In addition, however, there is a concise explanation of the printmaking process with appropriate annimations. Three artists discuss their poster-making process, which is used as the basis for activities the viewer can try. In the final section, a subset of the posters are used as jumping off points to discuss larger cultural issues, such as the Vietnam War. One section discusses the Beat movement, and you can listen to or read Allen Ginsburg's Howl, as well as link out to other related Web sites.
"When all the collected works can be assembled in the virtual museum, each visitor can be the curator and director. So, when we speak of the history of 20th century art as a discourse of freedom emancipating the color, form, and screen, we can now also emancipate the spectators and make them curators."In the online version of Rings of Passion, you can make your own selection of four objects, create thematic (or not) thread, even send email announcements to your friends and have it judged by the former director of the National Gallery of Art. Another example of this curate-your-own exhibition genre is Laurie Novak's Collected Visions site. The Museum of the Person (Brazil) is a virtual museum that has only stories to tell. With DissemiNETion, artists Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker have created a database-driven interface that automatically links in obvious (keywords) and not so obvious (words that look alike), different stories "curated" into the story-base--or added by visitors to the exhibition. The Moscow-based artist, Alexei Shulgin, produced two watershed online exhibitions. Refresh. is like an early forerunner of Web rings. Anyone can add a page to this "net.art Web ring" as long as it refreshes in 10 seconds and links to another Refresh site. In a similar vein, anyone could submit a screenshot of their computer desktop for Desktop IS, which Shulgin then curated through an interface/list linked to his Desktop manifesto. The conundrum of online exhibitions, of course, is that physical objects, even in immsersive-like environments, just don't look, act, feel, behave the same projected onto a small (or large) screen. Even for something as well executed as American Posters, the operative term may be tour, not exhibition. Or perhaps, as Weibel suggests, it's the museum as archive. (The museum as unreliable archivist?) Yet, if you look at a project like Bowling Alley, there is a clear difference between the archive of the installation and the exhibition of the Web site, which even though it has been disconnected from its telematic embrace of the real, retains a certain real presence. What does it mean, however, to curate the digital projects native to the network? Shulgin and the net.artists certainly point to one vector--it's in the linking. But they provide a curatorial algorithm that structures the result, however subtley, not just a "hot list" . . . a cybrarian's catalog. The Guggenheim's CyberAtlas takes the approach of creating an architecture--in this case maps--for guest-curated links. Emergence, for instance, by Benjamin Weil and Susan Hapgood, "is a grouping of contemporary art web sites that are mapped to show the structures that emerge from an inherently networked environment. it is a time-sensitive selection of web sites which best reflects the interesting directions of the rapidly evolving online art community."Beyond Interface is an online exhibition that provides a different kind of context, more in line with the idea of museum as filter, although, I hope, in the spirit of Freeman Dyson and Leo Steinberg, as an exploration not under the guise of theoretical authority. Besides a great interface that is retro, techno, and experiential all at once, Eugene Thacker's [techne]W3LAB :: an online node of projects for the web is an important effort, and his introduction is worth quoting at some length: The laboratory is a site, a space configuring certain kinds of activities, generating particular forms of knowledge, situated within a range of scientific, social, political, and institutional contexts. The lab is a site that is also a context; the possibility for putting into practice a variety of questions is also materialized in this context. This online node of works for the Web - let's call them "projects," "research," "experiments" - this online node focuses on the kinds of practices that are formed when (net)art, theory, performance, techniques and technical knowledge, and digital technologies intersect and coalesce around questions of experiment: How are the rapidly developing computer and communications-based technologies of the Internet and Web challenging, changing, and more importantly producing different types of activities that frustrate the boundaries of what may be considered "art," "theory," "science," "communication," and "politics"? The [techne]W3LAB is an attempt to gather a group of projects which in different ways address the question of what it means to participate in digital culture - here every choice in programming, image-processing, hypertextual linking, and webcasting bears some proximity to this question.[techne] is precisely a response to Dyson's call for tool-driven revolution, although it is also unusual as a node for both art experiments and theory explorations. In their text contribution for [techne], _new new media art_, Rachel Greene and Alex Galloway of Rhzome write: Each time that technology, subjected to certain cultural imperatives, ceases to be that which we expect of it, then art, always victorious, defends itself by inventing new tools. At the margins of the art world is new media art and at the margins of new media art is internet art. Here, art massively disengages itself from mainstream practices in order to find its own space. Net art is a nomadic space, a kind of rupture. All else will not be art.They also say, "Forget net.art. It's over. All our heroes of yesteryear have moved on, to biotech, radio, and... the depths of hell." A year earlier, however, in the introduction to the online exhibition, "Some of My Favorite Web Sites are Art" they wrote, "This has been the year net.art broke into a wider mass consciousness. . . .These are not caricatures of art, nor are pixels and software any less effective than paint or marble: this is real art with real substance behind it."The point is not some hobgoblinish need for consistency. To the contrary. Fluidity is vital, and while exhibitions such as CyberAtlas, Beyond Interface, Some of My Favorite Web Sites are Art and [techne]W3LAB are interesting and significant efforts, they are perhaps best looked at as failures--the kind of experimental failure that is expected prior to discovery; that is a necessary learning experience when mapping unknown territories. I suspect that over the long run (in Internet years, of course), the successful digital museum will have a lot of the attributes of a community-based, networked, interactive entity like Rhizome, whose emergent properties may auger the future: RHIZOME maps this territory by publishing and indexing a wide range of net art discourse--from the self-promotional emails that may eventually prove to ground net art history, to critical writing, chatter and email art. These sometimes banal, sometimes personal, sometimes critical rivulets of data have revealed, lately, a certain topography. . ./BLOCKQUOTE> |
next | previous | index National Museum of American Art, Posters American Style, Rings of Passion. "Imagine having forty of the worldıs greatest works of art available to you as raw material for an Internet exhibition. . . . First, spend some time on the site, and examine J. Carter Brownıs ideas about how and why these glorious works relate to each other. Then, see how fellow visitors have responded . . . And now, itıs your turn." Welcome to Collected Visions. Drawing upon snapshots collected from over 300 people, Collected Visions examines how family photographs shape our memories. We invite you to explore and contriubute to our archive of images and stories. Museum of the Person: a Brazilian Experience of Virtual Museum
DissemiNETion "The initial material for the site was gathered in collaboration with Pro Busqueda de Los Ninos, a nonprofit organization in El Salvador that gathers the testimonials of families whose youths were "disappeared" during the civil war there. These stories, some with photos or video, are then stored in a database . . . One can browse the site using key terms such as "born in Thailand", or "adapted". But the browser also takes input from a search and creates "cross-roads" between stories intersected by key terms. In these cross-roads, new digital root systems begin to emerge, "scattering widely" these new diaspora family trees that would otherwise remain lost." Alexei Shulgin, Refresh. A Multi-Nodal Web-Surf-Create-Session for an Unspecified Number of Players. Desktop IS Cohen-Frank-Ippolito, The Unreliable Archivist
". . . the more pages of "search results" we scan the more advertising we see. The significance of editorial selection and algorithms that shape the resulting view of the internet extends beyond aesthetics. Yet the concentration of authority around the mass market internet portals engages discursive formations that have emerged in recent years with respect to art and the public sphere, institutional critique, and freedom of speech. Artists are posing questions about the limits and function of the arts in the sphere of the internet. Insofar as public institutions treat their web sites as publicity tools glorified pamphlets one must turn toward the margins of creative production for clues about latent alternatives. Fortunately the margins and centers of the internet continue to mingle, especially in a technical sense. So one may still entertain some marginally central questions: If an art form overturns the paradigm of broadcast, allowing reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver, in what consists the act of curation? Is the curator then a moderator? An artist? A programmer? Malleable aesthetics provoke such questions." Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net
"The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explored."
"When critics approach unfamiliar art practices they [should] hold their criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today. While he seeks to comprehend the objectives behind the new art produced, nothing is a priori excluded or judged irrelevant. Since he is not passing out grades, he suspends judgment until the work's intention has come into focus and his response to it is - in the literal sense of the word--sympathetic; not necessarily to approve, but to feel along with it as with a thing that is like no other." Eugene Thacker [techne]W3LAB :: an online node of projects for the web |