Add to that the museum's acquisition of the pioneering äda'web and you have what Atlantic Unbound calls "one of the best and most ambitious efforts to capture the essence of the moment."
The Walker site features 24 Internet projects, ranging from Piotr Szyhalski's densely textual "Ding an sich: The Canon Series" to Lisa Jevbratt's"Stillman Project," which creates traces of color on the Walker site based on a visitor's selection of one of three statements.
The site's Digital Art Study Collection and Gallery 9 is, like the Walker's physical collection, a delicious selection of the obscure and the absurd, the playful and the dour, the linear and the linked, the pretentious and the profound. Related site ArtsConnectedEd features 12,000 works of art and 1,000 audio and video files from the Walker and the MIA.
Site curator and new-media initiatives director Steve Dietz, who began creating the site in 1996, discussed with Wired News the state of digital art and how he sees it evolving.
Wired News: What are you attempting to do with the Walker site that differs from other museum Web sites?
Steve Dietz: The primary difference is the depth and breadth of information. The fact that we have this collaborative educational site, artsconnected.org, and Gallery 9, works designed to be viewed online, makes us different. What I consider to be the Internet's strength is as a metamedium, that it can both deliver information and be a medium for expression. We have significant projects on both sides of the fence, and that's not as true of other museums.
WN: Some museums simply digitize part of their collection and put it on their site and leave it at that. Is that an effective use of the medium?
SD: I think three years ago, museums began putting up an image, or 50 images from their collection with some basic text information and that was a big step. But now you get to the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Walker, and the MIA doing this in a database way, so it's not just about a collection of 20 highlights, it's a collection of all 8,000 objects you can get at in ways you're interested in.
WN: But what's next?
SD: I think the next and looming issue -- and we see this in our user testing -- is getting beyond providing comprehensive facts to telling compelling stories and providing compelling online experiences. I think that's really the direction that museums need to be thinking in considering their physical objects.
WN: So what is good digital art?
SD: I think one of the things I start off with is trying to understand what an artist is trying to do and withhold judgment in an early stage development.
I don't think, "is this as good as Jackson Pollock?" I do look at what I call distinctive characteristics: interactivity, computability, and networkedness. I look at how those interact.
Generally they always do so, but the difference ends up being whether this is something that's a compelling experience online, and if you come back to it, it is still compelling. If you look at a good painting, you [will] go back to it, if it was really compelling to you. And there has to be some kind of content, social view, issue, something besides "I know how to use Flash."
WN: Isn't this is a difficult medium to work in considering the limitations, especially the viewing area?
SD: I think if you look at it historically, there has been huge rethinking and redesign of how to build a museum based on the fact that painters started painting larger paintings. If you wanted to show a contemporary collection, you had to have higher ceilings.
I think the fact right now [that] we're limited to 19- or 21-inch screens, in general, is a momentary factor. There will be all sorts of solutions for projections, smart materials that can display digital pages as if it was the wall. I don't think we have any clue what the possibilities are over even the medium term. A lot of those issues in a relatively short order will seem like DOS.
WN: Don't digital artists seem to struggle with a balance between text and visuals?
SD: I'm a huge admirer of äda'web, and I think they balanced that. Jodi [a digital artist (sic)] is much more visual, while Doug Aitken is more about balance. I think that issue of balance really implies there's an ideal way to create networked art, and I don't think that's true.
The fact you can combine all these different aspects is an incredibly rich substrate to work from, but I don't think that means you have to use all of the possibilities or that you have to balance them, or that you can't be extreme toward one end or the other.
WN: Do you find traditional artists are willing to learn the technology required to do Web pieces, or do they farm it out?
SD: My experience to date is that artists who are rooted in another practice -- painting, video -- up until a couple of years ago were not seduced by the online medium. One of the extraordinary things äda'web did is really think of themselves as a digital foundry. They would work with Jenny Holzer or Lawrence Weiner to, in a very collaborative way, create projects. The Jenny Holzer project is clearly hers -- a slam-dunk one where you could make her truisms interactive -- but other people actually implemented it.
WN: Does that change the role of artist from auteur to project leader?
SD: One of the interesting things digital media does is it brings to the fore at least the possibility of collaborative art making. There is give and take between the people who are named artist, designer, architect, coder. In a really good situation there's a lot of interaction and that's more like a movie model, or something like that.
WN: Is digital art a grant-driven medium now?
SD: Right now it's mainly passion-driven. There really is an inadequate support system, especially in North America. That's why we're so grateful to the (St. Paul-based) Jerome Foundation for giving a series of four grants, but that's pretty unusual.
Most of our artists, because they have skills in high demand, can make a decent amount of money as a film animator or a Web-site designer or as a consultant to someone and they make their art in their spare time. I don't think that's an ideal situation, but I think that's a common situation right now.
WN: Describe what an online gallery will look like in, say, five years.
SD: I think it's really important that the artist lead us to what the online gallery will need to look like, so just as we needed to build new museums that could hold a Clyfford Still painting, I think it's important we try and follow the artists' efforts and support them as best as possible. That said, I think there's going to be a hybridity between the online world and the physical world that's less common now.
WN: How so?
SD: One of the goals is for cyberspace to be more social, less about an individual interacting with a program, and to allow more social kinds of interactions that are a little more difficult.
I keep thinking what would it be like to walk into a room that was like a Web page, where everything was a hyperlink away, and visitors could find what they were looking for and interested in. I don't know what that means, but bringing all the wonderful avenues of the Web into physical spaces -- which are really social spaces -- could offer a hybrid setup where there are not clear distinctions between something that's online or in a physical space.
WN: You're talking about a new sort of gallery, right?
SD: That's what I'm getting at: What would it be like to walk into a physical gallery where you could look at the painting and find out anything you wanted about it without it having to have a catalog in front of you. It would be interactive, engaging, and individualized. I don't think we know what that will look like. One reason people like the online world is this ability to direct and discover, and I ask, can we bring that ability into the galleries in ways that don't upstage physical works of art but complement them?
