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The economy of the art world
is highly peculiar and archaic. Contemporary art's major collectors
like to be thought of not merely as people who buy stuff but
as 'patrons', enlightened protectors of exclusive taste against
the erosion of values threatened by mass culture. While all
forms of mass-marketed culture have long since been factory-built
in large numbers, fine art holds itself back from such availability,
finding value in exclusivity. Even, or rather especially,
when art actually takes the form of reproducible media such
as photography or video, it is generally issued in tiny editions
(three is not an uncommon number), destined to be placed,
or so artist and dealer will hope, in select public and private
collections.
While artists have made numerous attempts to undermine this
system, they have generally stumbled over the apparently unrecoupable
costs of production for the mass market and the even greater
difficulties of distribution. So what if artists could make
works of art in an unlimited series, and what is more make
each work in the series unique, selling them for little more
than the cost of videotape that they were recorded on?
This is the result of Thomson and Craighead's latest endeavour,
Short Films About Flying. Since the mid-1990s, John Thomson
and Alison Craighead have established themselves as among
the best-known British online artists, though they also have
also made much work for the gallery, and have produced pieces
using sound, surveillance equipment and mobile phones. In
previous work, they have assembled pre-existing online material
to make works of art that comment tartly and humorously on
net culture, drawing for instance on memorial pages to the
dead that contain advertising, or links from the deceased's
favourite books to Amazon.com. In one simple, effective work,
CNN Interactive Just Got More Interactive, they created a
soundtrack menu for the CNN news site so that users could
pick from a range of equally cheesy electronic tunes of varying
emotional resonance to put to the day's headlines.
With Short Films About Flying, on display at Mobile Home,
various online elements are assembled by the computer to form
the said films: first, a video-feed from a camera at Logan
Airport, Boston which is controlled remotely by Web-users
who track aircraft, pigeons or suspicious persons as fancy
takes them; second, intertitles of the kind found in silent
movies, selected using a search engine that picks out particular
series of words (such as 'he says...' and 'she says...');
and finally, a soundtrack randomly snatched from the online
ether. The results are curious and often eerie films in which
the soundtrack sets a mood, the intertitles often seem to
build the beginnings of a narrative and the pixellated video
footage, banal though it is, holds out the promise or threat
of some impending event. The viewer knows that each film is
randomly or near-randomly generated, and questions their urge
to find coherent meaning in the conventional association of
video images, music and words.
The computer can go on manufacturing these little films without
limit, and it is a simple matter to sell them as videotapes
over the Web, or even make them available free online. Can
anyone, then own a Thomson and Craighead 'original' if they
choose to? Not quite, perhaps, because the authorship of these
films is uncertain: the artists set up the framework into
which content is poured, and wrote the complex program that
assembles the work's elements but they have no control over
their precise combination and over the camera's movements
(indeed, if you would like to make a contribution to a Thomson
and Craighead film, you can manipulate the camera yourself
at http://www.livewave.com/).
Short Films About Flying videos will be among one of a number
of items sold out of Thomson and Craighead's online shop,
which has been active since the Christmas shopping period.
These include old tapes of mobile phone conversations scanned
using surveillance equipment and sold in sealed Walkmans,
tea-towels displaying Google search results, tiny '3-D' badges
that flicker to display the Mac or PC wait logo, and harmonising
mobile phone ring-tones. These goods, amusing and containing
a partially submerged critical point, are displayed in an
elaborately designed website that unites many of Thomson and
Craighead's concerns over their career, particularly the connection
between commercial and personal behaviour online. Again, many
of its elements are lifted unaltered from the Web, and their
display serves as a primer in online anthropology.
Behind the panoply of bad taste, however, there is a genuine
attempt to discover whether artists can viably sell their
work online viable. Net art as a whole raises a series of
challenges to the art world. Its products, being immaterial,
can be copied perfectly and distributed for very nearly no
cost--and this in a world dependent upon shutting up rare
or unique objects in museums and bank vaults. It is hard to
control the display of online art or to claim ownership over
it. Art sites that have attempted to shut people out or impose
membership schemes have had their contents copied to freely
available 'mirror' sites. Less dependent upon art institutions,
professional curators and corporate sponsorship, a culture
has emerged online in which the old borders between art and
public, and art and other culture or even political activism
have eroded, and in which there is much collaboration and
conversation. Many works online have been less polished, completed
and closed pieces than statements in a dialogue to which other
artists or critics respond. The established art world, naturally,
resists such developments strenuously (not least by trying
to put them in its own frames), and will no doubt seek to
establish, as it did with photography and video previously,
the barriers necessary to the generation of its traditional
income. Even so, the Net's users have proceeded far enough
to hold out the possibility of an art that is inclusive, not
merely in terms of the numbers or types of people that passively
consume or even possess it, but in the sense of active participation. |
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