In the course of a busy life in a big city, between the nine to
five job, the commute, and maintaining of one’s household,
relationships, and figure, even the most avowed art lover may be
left without enough time to drive to the nearest museum at the
end of a busy week. For those of you who fit into this
demographic, or those of you who are just bored and curious,
looking to entertain yourself online and tired of surfing the
same websites, full of predictable gossip or your friend’s
myopic status updates, may I suggest you invest a few moments in
browsing online art. I don’t mean websites about art, of
which there are many which are useful for planning your next
trip, learning about new artists, or to see artworks in galleries
that are too far to visit in person. I am referring to “web
art,” more commonly referred to as “net art,”
short for “Internet art.” A simple definition is art
being made by an artist using the Internet as the medium.
Arguably, the most important website for net art is the New
Museum’s www.rhizome.org. I was originally introduced to
Rhizome while in Tiffany Holme’s Art and Technology class,
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tiffany is the
recent recipient of a 2010 Rhizome commission for the solarCircus project, a series of
online and real time events exploring artistic usage of solar
energy. When browsing the Rhizome site, there are links to actual
works of art, that you can only experience on the internet, as
well as online documentation of technologically based work.
Another great site for reviews with net artists, news and events,
is New Media Fix, which
serves more as a discussion and critique space than online net
art gallery.
Like the “real” art world, the virtual art world is
protean; it includes the highly conceptual, such as “Google Will Eat Itself or
GWEI a collective that manipulates the Google adwords system
to buy shares in Google (impressively, the group owns over 800
shares in Google, at a current value of just under 500 USD a
share), its own strain of the Op art movement, here in the form of an animated gif and here, by artist Mich Trale, in the form of something
that you might encounter on the wall of the world’s most
avant-garde dance club. There is online sound art, a category of art
using sound as a medium, often outside of the more restrictive
sphere of music, such as Weathersongs
a site which documents as well as provides samples of tunes
created using sequences from recorded weather patterns in Wales
over a specific period of time, by the artist Richard
Garrett.
Net art is ideally suited to maximize the contemporary art trends
of interactive and collaborative work, such as The
Dumpster, by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan
Feinburg, commissioned by the Whitney Artport, “an
interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice
through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real
postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the
project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic
relationships in which one person has ‘dumped’
another.”
The world of net art is sometimes difficult to define. It blurs
the boundaries between art and design, art and commerce, and art
and technology. Often whether or not something is art just
depends on who is looking, and with what intent. The MOWA or “Museum of Web
Art” appears to have exhibited wallpapers, experimental
animation, banner ads, even counters and buttons, from 1997-
1999. The museum’s founders even appeared on CNN. The
current site is the number one google result for “web
art” without having been updated for a decade.
In closing,
there are many reasons to explore the world of internet art. For
me, experiencing art online will never take the place of going to
museums and galleries. But as shopping, banking, even our jobs
become more and more digitized, why not, when in the virtual
realm, make room for art?
© 2009 Moira Cue for The Hollywood Sentinel