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Unlike the more established
environments and circumstances where artworks are staged and
exhibited, the Internet is an utterly homogenized space, where
certain aspects of an artwork both co-exist and to some extent
merge together. As supposed to a gallery or museum, the net
is not only the site for the artwork but also the means by
which an artwork is disseminated or made accessible to its
potentially world wide audience and by extension, the computer
we use to view the work is the same tool used to build it.
These days, the computer is also the place where the press
release about the work is often written and subsequently where
any critical analysis of the work might be concocted. In addition
to hard copy such as this, the world wide web is the same
arena where on-line art is documented, discussed and advertised
not to mention where more and more of us are shopping, chatting,
banking and entertaining ourselves. Our monitor screen becomes
a single window through which we see the medium's associated
messages and to some extent form, content and their means
of transfer collide and collapse together.
The hypertextual nature of the internet also allows anything
to be connected to anything else. A recipe for garlic chicken
can be just one mouse click from a Kennedy assassination conspiracy,
while the homepage of Shreddie the hamster can be directly
linked to the latest British government report on genetically
modified foods. Theoretically and only for the time being,
the same pet homepage constructed by one person with an internet
account is just as accessible as the larger corporate sites
such as BBC on-line or Amazon Books. Yet such democratic accessibility
combined with relatively low costs incurred when establishing
a website come with their own price tag. The shear scale and
density of the net makes finding specific sites very difficult
indeed and browsing for on-line artworks can be almost impossible
without a list of exact addresses at your disposal. As an
example, try typing 'on-line art' into a search engine. The
first results will tend to be clip art archives, animated
gifs or small commercial galleries. At this generic level,
the likes of Alexei Shulgin, Antonio Muntandas or JODI who
are all fairly established practitioners remain largely invisible
to the search engine's gaze.
So faced with such a murky mass of disorganised data, many
on-line artworks are actually built around a need to advertise
their presence or end up commenting on the communicable processes
inherent to the network.
In various ways, the business of attracting visitors becomes
inextricably linked to the work itself. After all, if nobody
visits the site where the work resides and no-one is aware
of its existence, then it amounts to little more than a mis-timed
echo of a Fluxus happening. Furthermore, the bulk of on-line
art is still originated without curators, funding or the support
of institutions and while this can be quite liberating it
also requires an even stronger need for some sort of self
promotion.
This is not to say that the internet is the only realm where
such concerns exist: many other artists have an ongoing and
ever evolving relationship with advertising and its associated
strategies, while almost any exhibition requires some level
of marketing, but it is only really on the internet where
these concerns are almost mapped on top of each other giving
rise to the creation of curious conceptual games and commentaries.
www.tablet.org
is a deceptively simple exercise in self promotion relying
solely on the participation of its audience. On visiting the
site, the user is encouraged to enter an email address into
a small console window whereupon the message, 'Thank you'
is sent to that address from o@tablet.org. In this way, the
visitor is at liberty to use the work as a way of anonymously
disseminating this rather enigmatic gratitude to anyone they
choose. In turn, curiosity or confusion may well urge the
recipient to visit the site and consequently tempt him or
her to repeat the activity. Tablet becomes a conduit through
which any amount of visitors wittingly and unwittingly instigate
series of gentle electronic chain letters all of which further
the visibility of the tablet site.
Heath Bunting's, 'Graffiti Street Internet Interface' uses
graffiti as a way of attracting, creating and extending a
wide and disparate audience to www.irational.org/x.
On visiting the site you are simply asked where you saw the
site's address, why you thought it was done and who you thought
did it? Consequently, all a visit to the site actually achieves
is to proliferate more questions, although on completing the
form, you are then able to see how others have responded.
To some extent the roles of the artist as producer and the
viewer as consumer are reversed by forcing the viewer to perform
(tasks) while Bunting uses his viewing experience as a kind
of market research into what the site's visitors make of these
shifting connections between electronic and real spaces.
More recently, works are appearing on-line that push against
the inherent connectivity and openness of the network by obstructing
the user in some way or other. An illustration of this can
be found at www.kalx.com/x/
where security protocols built into the browser are used repeatedly
and meaninglessly to catch the user in an endless cycle of
being asked for passwords and identities, only to be repeatedly
refused access or authorisation to continue. On entering kalx
at www.kalx.com, we are ambiguously encouraged to navigate
an eclectic mix of disposable animations, text and audio fragments,
which taken en-masse seem to advocate the activity of browsing
itself above anything else. The user is lulled into an almost
tranquilised state of clicking and looking and listening.
So it really does feel like falling into a trap when the link
to www.kalx.com/x/ is eventually clicked.
Perhaps the biggest advertisement of them all is www.hell.com
-a collective of designers, artists and programmers who all
seem to share a common love of high-end technical trickery.
This site is closed to all but the initiated. A fact that
is spelt out to any visitor with a series of provocative statements
intended to make us all want to see what is behind the electronic
curtain. We are of course given a glimpse of hell in the form
of a featured site of the week and a few months ago, a temporary
password was issued through some art related on-line discussion
groups allowing access to a project called, 'surfacing' -a
showreel presentation taking us through a series of highly
designed interfaces and environments. More about design and
technical innovation than anything else, and certainly rather
puzzling as the artwork it seemed to be presented as.
Nevertheless, hell has spawned some heated on-line discussion,
predominantly focusing on their arrogance and exclusivity
-how they go against everything the internet stands for. Consequently,
their domain name has enjoyed a substantial amount of free
exposure and in its own way, this article proves no exception.
So while the need to find an audience amidst the vastness
of the internet has a very real effect on the kind of work
that some artists are producing on-line, hell shows us that
if you really want to be known, the old tricks are still the
best.
Jon Thomson is an artist based in London
www.thomson-craighead.net |
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