<nettime> The Latest in Digital Art: Stunts and Pranks

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[Funny, all posts from 0100101110101101.ORG are always about
0100101110101101.ORG]

>From �New York Times�, �arts@large� column.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/01/cyber/artsatlarge/06artsatlarge.html


The Latest in Digital Art: Stunts and Pranks

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

Perhaps the joke is on us.

Just as the art world has started to take the idea of digital art
seriously, the artists have stopped. It sometimes seems as if most of the
digital-art works that have appeared on the Internet in recent months have
been little more than a series of conceptual pranks. 

The latest involves the Web site 0100101110101101.org, which last year
began to display copies of well-known digital-art projects to protest the
commercialization of the genre.  On Christmas Day, the Los Angeles artist
Amy Alexander put up a duplicate of the duplicates on her own
http://www.plagiarist.org site. This week, the anonymous "creators"  of
the 0100101110101101.org site responded by copying Alexander's site,
inspiring her to update Plagiarist.org so that it now contains someone
else's clone of her own site. 

In an e-mail message, Alexander acknowledged that cloning the site was "a
prank on a prank." But she also described Plagiarist.org as "a character
who bounces around inside the hall of mirrors of the Net. Plagiarist never
sees outside the Net, but doesn't seem to realize it. When you live in a
hall of mirrors, it's hard to tell there aren't any windows." 

As the "arts@large" column enters its fifth year, the art world is finally
making an effort to peer through the window of the monitor glass. The
Whitney Museum is planning to show Internet-based works in its next
biennial survey of American art. Foundations are cutting decent-sized
checks for digital-art commissions. College art departments are offering
courses in digital-media history and theory as well as its practice. 

What observers are apt to see, though, are works that are, at best, online
versions of conceptual pieces from the past. Alexander's cloning of the
0100101110101101.org site is a devilishly clever exercise, but it is also
a cyber-era iteration of appropriation art, which takes existing materials
and puts them in a new and, one hopes, thought-provoking context. 

Other playful pieces that surfaced in recent months included Net.Art
Consultants, which allows visitors to donate Internet-based works to seven
cultural organizations;  "Installation Art," which for 24 hours gave
unauthorized access to the computers at London's Institute of Contemporary
Arts so that visitors could upload and retrieve unlicensed software; and a
project at the California Institute of the Arts where a student group,
Akshun, used the eBay online auction site to sell a week of gallery time
(the proceeds, $550, went to a caviar-and-champagne reception). 

That's at best. At worst, observers will find publicity stunts, like the
September episode in which someone purporting to be an Ars Electronica
Festival judge sent out an e-mail message undermining the jury's top award
to the Linux operating system. The hoax wasn't even a recycled stab at
identity art; instead, it was ultimately meant to draw attention to the
perpetrator's Web site, which won't be named here. 

Traditionally, the first "arts@large" column of the new year has been
devoted to suggesting a few artists and projects that might be worth
watching in the coming months, and there are still plenty of reasons to be
cheerful in the year 2000. Among them are the more than 30 online works
that will appear in the Walker Art Center's "Art Entertainment Network,"
which opens Feb. 12 as a related exhibit to the Minneapolis museum's
"Let's Entertain" show. 

But Andy Deck, a New York artist who will launch a stimulating new piece
on the Internet-art showcase Turbulence.org in March, asserted that it is
getting more difficult to produce meaningful work as the medium matures. 

"Net art's low-hanging fruit is getting scarcer," Deck said. "There are
millions of things that haven't been done yet, but real work is required
to stand apart from what's already out there. I don't really feel a need
to crack down on Web-art conceptualism, although I would like it if more
people understood the difference between sending a clever e-mail message
and producing a well-designed Web site that challenges assumptions about
what is possible. 

"The question I'd like to see people addressing in the coming years is how
to raise the profile of autonomous and artistic projects vis-�-vis heavily
marketed entertainment products. Perhaps there are forms of synergy that
haven't been tapped yet that will lead more people to want to make
ambitious Web-based art." 

Robbin Murphy, a New York artist, had a different explanation for the
recent lull in the Internet-art action. "The war in Kosovo had a great
deal to do with it," he asserted. "A lot of the energy coming from Europe
was redirected or extinguished. The online party ended, and so did the
collective intelligence that had been developing. What was a
self-organizing group aesthetic turned into a continuing series of
individual pranks." 

But Natalie Bookchin, whose computer-game adaptation of a Borges short
story was one of 1999's aesthetic highlights, objected strongly to the
characterization of many current works as jokes. 

In a telephone conversation from her Los Angeles home, Bookchin said, "To
call something a joke makes it seem not important." 

Instead, she argued, the Internet encourages a kind of play that pushes
boundaries, particularly those related to property, leading to works that
are neither traditionally decorative nor narrative in nature. For example,
she said, the Akshun auction was a genuine attempt to bring together the
spheres of e-commerce and the fine-arts economy. 

"There's a lot of work that's quite serious," she said, "but there's also
a little bit of play, and the Net allows for the play. So much of the work
is not just about making something that you put on your wall, but it's
about a kind of dialogue between people, or community building. It's all
of the things that sitting in a studio and making painting never allows
for, and we're all trying to figure out what to do with that." 

But Lev Manovich, an artist and critic in San Diego whose book "The
Language of New Media"  will be published by the MIT Press next fall, was
less sure that more conceptually oriented work was necessarily a byproduct
of the medium. 

"The phenomenon of pranks and provocations is interesting sociologically,"
Manovich said.  "On one hand, it seems to be appropriate for the Net as
medium. But ultimately it contributes to making Net art too much about
social communication and too little about symbolic representation or other
more traditional artistic functions." 

Bookchin was sanguine about the prospects for art on the Internet. "It's
only the beginning," she said, "and I'm incredibly confident that it will
keep going because it's the most important medium of our time and if
artists aren't doing things with it, then it would be tragic." 

Precisely. 

In 1972, the rock critic Robert Christgau said of the musician Roy
Buchanan: "Yes, he really is a hell of a guitar player, and no, he doesn't
have any idea what to do about it." 

Yes, the Internet really is the most important medium of our time. Perhaps
we'll start to have some new ideas about what to do with it in the coming
year. 

And that's no joke. 



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