"Space" Panel, Medi@terra 2000, Athens, Greece, November 4, 2000
Telematic Space and the Museum
First of all, I would like to thank Medi@terra for inviting me to participate in both the physical and intellectual space of this program. It is an ambiious event, with the participation of many fine colleagues, both formally and informally. Naturally, I come with the selfish aim of engaging as many answers and provocations, as I offer.
In the United States, of course, "space" has connotations particular to our history, which are undeniable. From the space of mannifest destiny and westward expansion to Frederick Jackson Turner'sfamous thesis on the end of the frontier and the compression of the national psyche in this collapse of space to the space race to be the first country to land someone on the moon to Timothy Leary's internal space of psychodelia to the virus of the commercializaation of the Internet space" as little more than the commodification of transactions.
The issues raised by any of these spaces are not unique to the United States, of course, but arguably one thread they share in common is the relationship of space to power -- like the royal gaze in Velazquez'sLas Meninas, the implied geometry of these spaces is hierarchical and primarily uni-directional.
On the other hand, as we all know, the Internet, "properly understood," is rhizomatic, interactive, bi-directional, and point-to-point. The very concept of center and peripherary and all that such space implies is displaced onto a different geometry of nodes in a network.
On the Internet, to paraphrase a famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows that easylife, irational, jodi, vuk.org, or teleportacia, let alone V2, C3 or ada'web are not important institutional "centers" because they are such important nodes in the intertwingled spaces of art and the network. Let me hasten to add, that this is in no way to suggest, of course, that institutionalization is the goal of these artists and artist-run entitities. Rather the opposite.
The danger is that we map these new virtual spaces to our old mental geography, nullifying or at least minimizing their effects. In my own case, for instance, one could interpret Gallery 9, the virtual space of the Walker, which I run [ran], as an archaic rather than ironic metaphor. In the case of the Medi@terra event, I would suggest that identifying artistic practice by national spaces may be worth interogating, whatever the pragmatic reasons for its construction.
Be that as it may, what I'd like to look at in my remaining 3 1/2 minutes is how artistic network practice can/could/should influence the construction of our physical institutions so that they have at least the possibility of contributing catalytically to our future rather than merely archiving and classifying our past or, even more problematically, historicizing our present.
To give a bit of context, the Walker Art Center, which is in Minneapolis in the Upper Midwest of the United States, is a multidisciplinary institution--self-consciously a center, although, like a museum, we do have a permanent collection--with major programs in the visual arts, film/video, and the performing arts. Since I formed the new media initiatives department in 1996, one of the constant challenges has been to treat the virtual space of Gallery 9 in particular and the Web in general as real space. Space that where programming happens not just is described. Space, in fact, that is as much about process as presentation. Real space that has real visitors, even if 90% of them are outside of Minnesota.
Currently, we are embarking on an expansion of the Walker's physical facility, which will be designed by the architects Herzog & De Meuron. In fact, some of the traffic you are seeing on the screen may be the dregs of the opening of an exhibition of their works last night at the Walker. The expansion will about double the public space of the museum. It will include both a space dedicated to the presentation of "new media," and it is expected to significantly incorporate technology to create an egaging experience with the audience. For the next 4 years, then, much of our effort will be toward how to understand the physical space of the expansion as also a virtual space. How do we use the telematic networks to be both a center for people to visit and a node for people to interact with, even remotely?
I do not have solutions for this issue, but I do think it is important for artistic practice to inform the investigation. One of the significant and challenging aspects of BangBang, in the exhibition here, is the explosive way it inserts events at a distance into a local situation. Far more than a webcam panning from the top of a building, one aspect of BangBang, the installation by the Bureau of Inverse Technology, is as a kind of automated updating of a certain kind of "content" into a distant (from the source) context. What would it be like to have such telematic "pushes" into the new Walker space, insisting on a more global frame of reference into one's current consciousness? What would the filter be? How would people respond to an interactivity, which is not under their control, when no facile mastery of the world is offered? How might we envision an open-ended, potentially self-organizing network of "collectors" like BangBang?
Audience content creation is another important aspect of the network, which many institutions are almost viscerally resistant to. Yet, many artists are defining their practice around creating an environment, software, if you will, which enables process and content creation by others. A small selection of such works are presented in the Open Source Lounge at the Helenic American Union, which I hope you will be able to visit this evening. In terms of telematic spaces, it's one thing to thing about identifying -- that is, filtering -- information or other actions that you are interested in telematically transporting into the institutional context, but what would it mean to use the network to allow for globally distributed authorship of -- or participation in -- the context for the activities sited inside the physical musuem?
Finally, there is the hack, the topic of Jenny Marketou's selection of projects for the Open Source Lounge. Jon Ippolito, a media curator at the Guggenheim has suggested that the essence of the artist use of technology is, as often as not, the misuse of technology, whether it is Nam June Paik'sMagnet TV or Rachel Baker'sTm Clubcard. There is, of course, legitimate debate about whether and/or how "real" hacks can effectively occur in any authorized context, but I think there is a different way of thinking about it in terms of the telematic institution. How do you use the "institutionality" of the institution to make the effect more effective, not compromised? In this regard, I think Graham Harwood / Mongrel'sUncomfortable Proximity for the Tate Modern is instructive, and I would just like to end with an excerpt from Matthew Fuller's text about the piece:
The action goes on independently. Artists set up web-sites and circulate the information via the net. Mailing lists and news-services have grown up to link the information to people. When galleries and museums are used, it's mainly as an adjunct to a process that is already ongoing. They provide legitimation, a range of vocabularies, theoretical tools for thinking through and making work, and importantly, access to other audiences and participants. It's this, from the artist's point of view that makes them worth dealing with. ... There's a certain kind of utopian opportunism that dovetails nicely with the technology. This, on the one hand allows artists a greater realm of manouevre. ... On the other hand, it finds in the nets a way to initiate or take part in a process of producing clusters of data, of signs, but not pretend or even hope to have any determining control over their outcome: data can be moved and data can be mutated.
