The WEB'S ART * Internet Art's special history
The 12 years of Internet Art in Book and Web.
„The
Rationality of language strikes back, up to destruction by
complexity“ promised 1995 an email note in Heath Buntings
Cybercafé. From the center of the 90's up to the turn of the
century Internet technologies were still so little conventionalized,
various and exotical that they brought out aesthetic experiments in a
nearly natural way. Beside a still thin layer of commercial offers
and a tremendous amount of filling of scientific text in simple HTML
various artsy communication projects played around in the
pleasureground of the new media.
The
early Internet art, which Rachel Greene draws out in her
English-speaking classical book about „Internet Art “,
published 2004, merged raw code of abstract programming languages,
the medium's military origin, informaticity and code conversion into
the consumer range and new, experimental styles. After an
introduction to the technical and institutional prehistory of the
Internet Greene presents important protagonists of its early art,
whereby Eastern Europe plays a special role, in particular Vuk Cosic
(Slovenia), Heath Bunting (Great Britain) and Olia Lialina (Russia,
since 1999 Stuttgart), ain some way because of the consideration that
their webart served as reflected compensation of national control.
The representation of Internet Art is however rather enumerating and
punctual, whereby an applicable overall view appears, but no work
really becomes accessible as such. The author distinguishes between
Internet art using technologies and methods of the web and
webprojects more in regard of content, especially sites anmd artists
of the late 90's and the turn of the century. The early period is of
interest for the development of the Net Art Community, those on the
exhibitions at e.g. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2001, like
„010101: Art in Technological Time" of Benjamin Weil or of
Christiane Paul, who became one of the first New Media Curator of the
Whitney Museum in New York. On the other hand the acknowledgment of
Internet Art was a comparatively outward aspect within museums's
attention, whereas the actual Community consolidated itself on
special sites in the web, via net art itself and other media like
books and magazines. That Alexander Galloway's essay „net.art
Year Review: State of net.art 99“ stated in the net culture
magazine „SWITCH“, Internet art, represented by Vuk
Cosic, Heath Bunting and Olia Lialina, was dead, had a very drastic
effect on the entire art form, although the mentioned representatives
participated further in important art exhibitions in the subsequent
years: Vuk Cosic was a 2001 representative of the country Slovenia on
the Kunstbiennale in Venice, and Olia Lialina became already 1999
professor at the Merz Academy - Hochschule für Gestaltung in
Stuttgart. The real background of this dead saying is thus more the
establishment of the early internet art, not its end. Thereby a
certain fade out of the innovative platforms in the web was evoked,
so that in the subsequent years until 2002 the short US's exhibition
boom about the topic did not continue. Greenes book weakens about
this period around 2002, thus, the impression that Internet art does
not have developed itself any further or became altogether obsolet,
is in principle not examinable just based upon Greene's
representation.
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Two current Screenshots of the Internet narration „My boyfriend came bake from the was “from Olia Lialina
The aspects which crystallize out of the book by the excursive view of the entire variety of the phenomenon, show first, how the new medium opened the art term for other discourses - scientific and social in particular. The initial Cybercafe quotation, which announces "destruction by complexity", feeds itself quite conservatively with informational over-flow theories, that are always good servants against any just new medium. Examples for less critical art, which counterbalanced simply the aesthetic manifestations of the new technology, were works like „form kind“ and „Desktop Is“ (1997) from Alexei Shulgin, Fullers „DATA mapping“ („The Web Stalker“) or „Every Icon“. The experimental games with desktop and picture designs changed from the pure picture form into an interactive or communicative form, as arrangements and manipulations of the web pages were accessible for any website visitors.
Following Greene, the important phase begins with artworks, that concern topics like individuality and identity, monitoring and forming. 0100101110101101.ORG and Luther Blisett e.g. succeeded to produce in the Internet a fictitious Serbian artist named Darko Maver. His web pages and works of art consisted of photographies of crimes like rapes and murders. The "artworks" were fastly admitted and adapted. When the artists behind the artist spread, Darko Maver had been arrested in connection with a series of acts of violence and had died in the solitary confinement, Darko Maver immediately became a hero in the world of art circles. The Venice Biennale proclaimed him to be a victim of the Serbian crisis. 0100101110101101.ORG and Luther Blisett outed themselves briefly afterwards as inventors of the fictitious figure Darko Maver. Following Greene, with this project the Web became redoubtable as place „of anarchical impersonality “, where it was nearly impossible "to verify any concrete truth in data flow". (P. 102)
After the millenium's turn Greene sees irony and persiflage as continuing contents of web art. Companies of E-Commerce, the beginnings of CyberSpace Games, and the occupation with questions of biotechnological identity. The legendary actions of the web page operators etoy marked the beginning of radical subversion of the web's commercialization. The group of artists named "etoy" had established her name in the net for years, but became accused by a relatively new company for misuse of its new registered brand name. The art team etoy, of course without mark entry, lost in court and had to give up the use of the website ww.etoy.de and the label name. In the weeks before etoy launched on the website www.toywar.com a defense campaign, within whose framework a lot of groups like The Thing, Rhizome.org and others supported etoy with projects. (R) TMark developed a game named „The Twelve Days of Christmas “and EDT besieged the toy company's website with emails about the topic, in order to undermine the enterprise's use of this site. Accordingly the project "toywar" was celebrated despite the legal failure as epitome of successful co-operation.
Important milestones of Internet art up to and around 2002 are, like this example points out, in Greenes book in detail present. Registers allow furthermore to research for additional information, exhibition catalogues are listed, important web platforms and websites. Thus. it is easy to investigate artists and names of art-groups with the help of the book. For the Internet Art within this period it is to that extent a difficult, but extremely informative book and without saying the unquestioned standard.
What drives the Internet art today? If one looks up with google, the concept seems hardly distinguishable from art galleries in the Internet, advertising themselves as "internet art". Some exciting individual websites show web art qualitites, frequently as appendage of design and advertising agencies and used as aesthetic - technological playground. Recently however the exhibition „My Own private Reality - Growing UP on-line into the 90s and 00s.“, 12. May - 01. July 2007 at the Edith Russ House for Media Art in Oldenburg, showed that since 2002 the idea of internet art were continuing. The title "My own private reality" signals that the criticism of the great discourses (like the three Ps of power, patriarchy, psychology) do not stand any longer in the center of the art the medium produces. Likewise the hacker aesthetics known from Cult of the Dead Cow, a kind of unappointed and unofficial OFF-police, has been replaced with websites, that compete with the pastel romance of ICQ, Yahoo or msn.
As
one of the most interesting artist can probably be considered
Angelica Waller, who fills usual Web forms such as community chats
and forums with new contents. In her project www.myfrienemies.com
she invites to justify
friendships with other community members on the basis of common
ambivalent attitudes towards others. In the own profile one can
indicate, which material or fictitious, prominent or everyday life
persons one for what reasons do not like, and on the other hand
estimates or finds at least fascinating. (Picture: Diagram
from myfrienemies.com, Internetproject by Angie Waller)
The organization of Wallers web page does not really deviate from those of commercial Websites of this kind. The internal postings - e.g. comments and advices from the described "frienemies" - are accordingly completely normal like one can find it in any other forum. The art character is here thus more that one does not only offer conversation to float separates - but instead to experience, during a quasi authentic use of the offer, including negativity, the difficulties of clarifying ambivalente relations. As the frienemie project shows in such a way that the usual production of communities in the Internet maintain the actual content of many relations not by the technical structure of communication or anonymity, but by the conventionality of their contents, like representing with „age, hobby, residence, friendships“.
In another project Angie Waller had analyzed consumer structures of amazon.com in a similarly "deviating" way. Spying individual purchase decisions of unknown individuals along reviews, references and wish lists, which are usual at Amazon. Numerous other projects, e.g. Ebay Longing, Armored Cars, couchproject vers. 1 Angie Waller is one of the discoveries of the Oldenburger exhibition, even if the hacker romance of the web's early years is rather missing. The Website offers extensive information over the participating artists and artists:
http://myownprivatereality.wordpress.com
The homepage of Angie Waller:
Really embodied in the international scene is Miranda July, whose Website appears very webby in particular on the portal side with a typical Cybermind formgame. Then it goes on in flaky styles with different media projects and especially an annual rite called „The Thing“ - not only as melancholical „reminder“ to the early years of web art but also as mirror of the changes in media consciousness. „The thing“ should be an object that contains text. (Who will not immediately thinks of its first Notebook, which lost - still containing texts - its life to a 1MB-picture file). Every now and then tubes from pasteboard are provided to this rite, thus things of paper, what shows the quasi parents-like maturity of internet artists like July and their preoccupation with the grandparent-media of the internet (like first message boxes, the telegraph a.s.o.). The resulting project are attainable at the website of Miranda July
(Miranda July)
The Website of Olia Lialina:
http://www.teleportacia.org/olia.html
Vuc Cosic:
Heath Bunting:
http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/front/front.pl
Rachel Greene: Internet ART. Thames & Hudson world of art 2004. 224 sides, 232 illustrations, 174 in color. ISBN 0500203768 ISBN-13 978-0500203767 21,0 x 15,0 cm PAPER-bake. ENGLISH-LANGUAGE.
Text: Dr. Ulrike Ritter
© copyrights of all illustrations by the artists
Look up german version at www.kunst-spektrum.de and www.artou.de
