________________________________________________________________________________
This is intended for inclusion in a forthcoming issue of
_Science as Culture_, edited by Korinna Patelis and Les Levidov,
which will be dedicated to all of our favourite subject: THE
INTERNET!!!! This essay was written in June and so does not take
into consideration the collosal Net_Condition show at ZKM,
amongst other venues. The footnotes have got a bit scrambled up
too, but references for source material have survived and can be
found at the end.
Information as Muse: Net Art and the Market
(June 1999)
In 1999, net artist Valery Grancher sold his piece
Longitude 38 to the Cartier Foundation for
$5,000 . This sale, widely held to be the highest sum yet raised
for a net artwork, is proof positive that net art's putative
evasion of the maws of commercialisation is at an end. The
conversion of art into information, a process which finds its
roots in 1960s and '70s conceptual art, has traditionally
provided a foil to the principles of art's market and
institutions which rely on the uniqueness and objecthood of art
to support structures of ownership and evaluation. But in an era
when information increasingly provides the basis for economies,
the means of production and the paradigm for investment, art's
status as information can no longer be held to provide any
inherent resistance to its own commercialisation. Here it will
be argued that net art's relationship to information, whose
earliest instantiations after 1994 cleaved to an understanding
of its deterritorialising and decommodifying potentialities, has
become increasingly ambivalent. Net art's status as information
entails a similar set of contradictions that attach to readings
of the Internet in which it is held to imbue both mechanisms of
specular power, control and free market capitalism as well as
freedom of speech, direct democracy and identity redefinition.
As art seeks to outwit and evade commercialisation it has,
ironically, come increasingly to rely upon strategies of
advertising and marketing. Art's conversion into information has
led it both towards and away from commercialisation as its
infinite replicability breaks with traditional conditions of
ownership as well as simultaneously playing into the hands of
the information economy. In this article net art's relationship
to the market will be examined through the implications of one
of information's chief attributes - mutability.
In her essay Virtual Bodies and Flickering
Signifiers, N. Katherine Hayles formulates a
fundamental characteristic of the information age: the shift
from both a representational and material economy of presence
and absence to one of pattern and randomness. Drawing on the
linguistics of Lacan and techno-cultural theory of Kittler, she
links the phenomenon of the signifier's uncoupling from its
signified to the informational revolution in the means of
production. Lacan used the term 'floating signifier' to indicate
the double lack at the heart of language, the absence of
signifieds as things-in-themselves and the absence of any stable
relationship between signifieds and signifiers. Further,
signifieds are understood as existing only in so far as they
are produced by the signifier and as an ungraspable flow beneath
a network of signifiers whose operations entail difference,
slippage and displacement. The behaviour or information, argue
Kittler and Hayles, has undergone a parallel development. Before
the advent of IT, information storage depended on a stable
'material substrate' (books, the typewriter, the mark on the
page) which is not only a form of information transmission and
storage in one, but which also "incorporates [it's] encodings
in durable material substrate" . In the case of IT, magnetic or
electronic encodings can be easily erased and rewritten as
information becomes increasingly separate and non-proportional
to its carrier. Information theory, it should be added, holds
information to be conceptually distinct from the markers that
embody it. The change in relationship between signal and
materiality that occurs in IT has fundamentally altered the
relationship of the signified to the signifier by creating what
Hayles terms 'flickering signifiers' which are "characterised by
their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations and
dispersions" . It is then reasonable to state that IT has
concentrated the behavioural characteristics of information and
that this behaviour has a cultural effect.
Early net art sought to identify itself with this slippery
quality of information which both facilitates the
destabilisation of the signifier itself and the related
uncoupling of identity from its material substrate (the human
body, physical space, being in time etc.). Hayles and Kittler's
proposal that the pattern/randomness paradigm has gradually
gained dominance is borne out by the phenomenon of net art in
general, and perhaps most idealistically interpreted in its
early instantiations. Taking advantage of the hyperlinked
structure of the Internet, the artworks which ensued shortly
after the introduction of the graphical browser interface to the
World Wide Web in 1994, were characterised by a nomadism which
is both redolent of and dependent upon the movement of
information packets within a network. Alexei Shulgin's
Desktop Is, 1997, Heath Bunting's Own,
Be Owned or Remain Invisible ,1997 , and Rachel Baker's
TM Clubcard, 1997 , all employ hyperlinks
between data stored on separate servers. This harnessing of
information's flux and mobility was used strategically to flit
the viewer in and out of corporate webspace, to put them in an
indeterminate relationship to the author (one jumps between
artist and corporate designed space) and to a point of origin;
we are left asking where the work begins and ends and whether,
when we move out into the web at large, we are still within the
bounds of the artwork . Information's replicability, its
availability to redeployment and especially to being purloined,
were used by these artists to dissolve the naturalness of
ownership (a one-to-one relationship between owner and owned) as
well as the status of the (data)object as such. These artworks
create feed-back loops between corporate and private space
which is entirely dependent on the dissolution of information's
oneness with its material substrate and the predominance of
pattern and randomness.
Early net art identified the informational instability which
businesses were so sucessfully deploying (the ease with which
behaviour is converted into data commodities inside the network)
as a corporate Achilles heal. Heath Bunting's work Own,
Be Owned or Remain Invisible took a review written
about him in Wired UK magazine by the
journalist James Flint, and linked nearly every word to the
corporate generic Top Level Domain '.com'. Thus a sentence such
as, "His CV (bored teen and home computer hacker in 80s
Stevenage, fly poster, graffiti artist and radio pirate in
Bristol...).." would convert into URLs such as 'www.bored.com',
'www.teen.com' and 'www.pirate.com'. Although the corresponding
URL may or may not exist or have become obsolete subsequent to
the date of the work's making, Own, Be Owned
tangibly manifests the collapse of individual into commercial
identities. Here, one might say, the signifier flickers between
its designation of a private individual and a what Arthur Kroker
and Michael A. Weinstein have called the 'encrypted flesh' of
the data body. But as the title reveals, ownership can be turned
around in the hyperlinked context of the Internet; in this
scenario the viewer can enter the corporate site 'www.bored.com'
through Bunting's interface thus simulating the artist's
ownership of the corporate data object. In this early net
artwork, the artist makes use of the dissolution of identity
within informatics to rupture the representational power of
commercial interest. In this new system of relations, the
commercial representation has been subordinated to an (albeit
commercial representation of) the individual; when its powers of
communication are directed at a simulated individual (the
journalistic construct) instead of a real one, a hall of mirrors
effect is triggered which forbids the fulfilment of commercial
interests. In this classic deployment of Situationist
détournement, the artist is able to recuperate
his own identity from the simulacral remains of its
commercialisation through a sequencing of information not the
proffering of an authentic self. Representation's status as
information has created a high level of mobility in which the
referent is neither present nor absent, but patterned and
unstable.
In the 1960s and '70s conceptual art also made use of
information and communication systems for ends which are
different but related to those of net art. Their interest in the
dematerialisation of the art object was predicated on a mistrust
of materiality which was identified as the primary realm of
capitalist operations. Working against the backdrop of the
Vietnam war - one of the most viscous expressions of Western
democracy's desire to protect the interest of capital at any
and every cost - this largely U.S. based movement selected the
slippery realm of the idea as a site of resistance to the
voraciousness of post-war commodification. In 1967, Sol LeWitt
declared: "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it
means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand
and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a
machine that makes the art." . Note that even at this
high-point of ideational romanticism, the idea was marked by
its role within the cycle of production. Importantly, however,
through a certain 'mechanisation', production was uncoupled from
the notion of the artist's touch. For similar reasons
information in the form of lists, diagrams, measurements, and
numerical systems started to be introduced into artworks; such
'banal' signifiers of consensual rationality were deployed to
upset the boundaries separating art (understood as an
expression of the individual, idiosyncratic self) and life.
Previously, and here one need only think about the paintings of
Jackson Pollock, touch - the opposite of a standardised unit of
information - had operated as a cipher of individuality and
creative genius; accordingly the point of reification was the
point of sale. As a strategy of resistance, works such as Yoko
Ono's early Fluxus pieces posit scenarios - in the form of
instructions - in which the pursuit of reification is poetically
cast as impossible or destructive: "'Take the sound of the stone
ageing' (Tape Piece 1, autumn, 1963); 'Take the
sound of the room breathing: at dawn, in the morning, in the
evening, before dawn...Bottle the smell of the room at that
particular hour as well' (Tape Piece II,
autumn, 1963); 'Use your blood to paint, keep painting until
you faint (a). Keep painting until you die (b)' (spring, 1960)"
Art on the eve of the information technological revolution was
still operating within the presence/absence paradigm. Ideas and
information - two centrally important constituents of conceptual
art - were perceived as existing independently of their material
substrate, or better, information was perceived as belonging to
the (platonic) realm of the idea. Their 'perfunctory'
reification spelled a sort of fixity or immutability which was a
consequence of the analogue nature of the storage media.
Conceptual art of '60s and '70s often relied on typed and
printed text, audio tape, photography, film, video and Xerox
copy to preserve the ephemeral event or to store the idea for an
action that might be performed at some unspecified future date
Writing in the 'postface' to her 1973 book, Six Years:
The Dematerialisation of the Art Object, Lucy Lippard
remarked:
"Hopes that 'conceptual art' would be able to avoid the general
commercialisation, the destructively 'progressive' approach of
modernism were for the most part unfounded. It seemed in
1969...that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would
actually pay money, or much of it, for a Xerox sheet referring
to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of
photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a
project for work never to be completed, words spoken but not
recorded; it seemed that these artists would therefore be
forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and
market-orientation."
From this list one gets a sense of how separate the actual
artwork (the idea, the action, the spoken word) was perceived as
being from its capture, and therefore the surprise with which
artists watched as these second order documentations of their
work started to gain a commodity value of their own. If we
compare this notion to the perception and operations of net art
- for which not only is the medium far more pointedly the
message, but also for which its reification does not imply
stasis - we can apprehend quite how different these two
historical moments are. In short, for conceptual artists of the
'60s and '70s the information economy had not yet become a
reality and hence ideas and information could remain sites of
resistance to commodification so long as they remained unreified
(which artists inevitably failed to achieve).
A feature of conceptual art that more closely anticipates the
practices of net art is the interest which artists and curators
took in harnessing the portability of the work and the
increasingly cheap and available technologies of reproduction
and communication to accelerate its distribution, bypass art
world structures, forge closer and alternative networks between
artists and break through the parochialism of art practice to
create a real internationalism. The informationalisation of art
was seen as a prerequisite to its transmission through
presence/absence based media (speech, documents carried in
suitcases, letters, phone calls etc.) Information and
communication were intimately linked attributes of art's
dematerialisation and the attendant desire to route around the
dominated field of art practice. Artists were looking to take
mediation into their own hands. As curator Seth Siegelaub
explained, in 1967:
"Communication relates to art three ways: (1) Artists knowing
what other artists are doing. (2) The art community knowing what
artists are doing. (3) The world knowing what artists are
doing...It's my concern to make it known to multitudes."
Early net artworks such as Alexei Shulgin's
Refresh project displayed a similar wish to
connect up individuals (there was no stipulation that they be
artists) from around the world. Primarily using mailing lists -
one of the Internet's key community building devices - Shulgin
sent out invitations to participate in a collective artwork.
Participants had simply to build a webpage that would act as an
interface. The webpage, once built, was then incorporated into a
'refresh loop' - this involves inserting a command into the HTML
code which instructs the page to be refreshed after 10 seconds
and then substitutes the first downloaded file for the next in a
chain of files, usually stored on different servers. The effect
is a flickering chain of downloading webpages, all designed by
different individuals and groups, more often of interest in
combination than in isolation. It functions as a snap-shot of a
community of enthusiasts and artists at a particular period in
the Internet's development. Shulgin describes the project on its
homepage as: " poetic - exploring instability, unpredictability,
flow of electrons, feeling the universe, exstasy [sic] of true
joint creativity, hopping through space, countries, cultures,
languages, genders, colours, shapes and sizes...".
At least as significant as the collaborative art projects such
as Shulgin's Refresh are the dedicated media
arts mailing lists and bulletin boards such as Syndicate,
Rhizome, 7-11 and The Thing, which have knitted communities
together, driven the development of new media art discourse and
often constituted a site of communications art in themselves. In
an important respect, these electronic communities provided net
art with its earliest support system (a site of meeting,
representation and debate) in the absence of interest from the
established art community. One of the earliest Internet-based,
dedicated forums was Wolfgang Staehle's electronic Bulletin
Board called The Thing, set up in 1991 and run on a computer in
his basement in New York City. In Staehle's words, it was "a
forum making a direct exchange of ideas and positions between a
closed community possible. Promotional material was not
approved. The main focus was to exchange opinions and ideas."
In the early days of community-forging mailing lists and
newsgroups the understanding was that participants contribute
their ideas 'for free'. In subsequent years, however, the
notion that this exchange of ideas might have occurred in the
absence of self-interest or beyond the commercial sphere has
been persuasively rejected in Ghosh and Barbrook's discussions
of the gift economy. The theory of the gift economy or cooking
pot market as it's also known, posits a system of asymmetrical
exchanges in which participants freely contribute gifts to a
forum (e.g. a piece of perl script, an argument, a list of
recommendations) and, due to the number of participants, receive
disproportionately greater amount in return. Despite their
attempts to cast the Internet as the site of a radical
alternative to the commodity-exchange relations which structure
capitalism, Ghosh and Barbrook both agree that the gift economy
is buoyed up by the conversion of reputations earned online into
job contracts or, in our case, exhibition opportunities etc.
offline. Acknowledging that it is beyond the scope of this
article to sufficiently analyse the relationship of the
so-called gift economy to the capitalist economy per se, it is
possible to identify a shift in the nature of the information
exchanged on these mailing lists and its treatment thereafter
that has occurred in the last years. A shift which certainly
suggests that the gift economy model could well have been a
brief moment of pioneering camaraderie that receded as soon as
the culture itself became stable enough to tolerate
competitiveness.
In the days before online culture had developed its present
caché, the rule of thumb was "you own your own words" and this
seemed to produce little controversy. However, increasingly art
mailing lists such as Rhizome (run by Rhizome Communications
Inc., a not-for-profit private company) in step with non-art
mailing lists such as the Net criticism list Nettime (with their
largely university educated participants ) have come to view
such specialist debates as a valuable commodity. In the absence
of any other such in-depth documentation of Internet culture,
the texts generated by these mailing lists act as crucial
historical sources. Rhizome's founder Mike Tribe commented: "I
agree that Nettime and Rhizome are, in effect, writing histories
of this moment, and that our editorial practices thus have
long-range consequences." Nettime has already brought out it's
first publication Read Me: ASCII Culture and the Revenge
of Knowledge, The Thing has been attempting to auction
off its old interface and content through the online auction
house E-bay, and subscribers to Rhizome are required to comply
with terms and conditions which grant Rhizome Communications
Inc. "the non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free
right to reproduce, modify, edit, publish....[etc.etc.]"
The point at which co-operative efforts are converted into
commodities, regardless of whether they are used to create
profit or to provide capital funding for not-for-profit
institutions, marks an important shift in the entire ICT arts
context. One of the effects is to highlight the material
disparities which exist between the online cultural
participants. In this putatively international community, a U.S
company's decision to convert a 'gift' given, say, by a
Bulgarian artist into a commodity for sale is an unavoidably
divisive action no matter how strong the arguments concerning
the intended redistribution of proceeds may be. Furthermore,
the recent perception of the information exchanged on specialist
mailing lists as cultural commodities inflects the nature of the
information itself. In the case of art mailing lists, the
community of participants is increasingly perceived as an
audience and conduit for information relay rather than partners
in dialogue. As the participants, often through the support
structure of these online communities, ascend to positions of
power within the international art system, the discursive
quality of the lists tends to diminish as self-promotional
material such as exhibition announcements increases. Far from
the gift economy guaranteeing, across the board, an increased
return on investment, some people really do get more out of the
system than others.
In seeking an alternative to existing institutionalised
structures of display, discourse and exchange, net artists have
created a new object for those self-same institutions to
territorialise as well as creating new institutional structures
within the Internet itself. This development, which hinges on a
'flickering' relationship between online and offline activities
and protagonists, can be said to mimic the signifier's
relationship to the signified described by Hayles in her
analysis of the informational paradigmatic shift. The online
sphere of operations floats like a signifier above a set of
relations (institutions, national economies, physical
communities, events etc.) which act as their dislocated
referent. The net art community seems to be marked by two
divergent tendencies; on the one hand the will to map online
onto offline art worlds and, on the other, to see the
dislocation as crucial to the conceptual and institutional
development of net art.
An example of the pitfalls in the rapprochement approach was net
art's unsuccessful inclusion in the prominent DocumentaX
exhibition in Kassel, 1997. Hidden away between the café,
lecture hall and bookshop in the basement of the Documenta
Halle, the exhibits were barely distinguishable from the other
recreational alternatives to viewing 'actual art'. In an
interview given during the show, the art duo Jodi described how
net art's existence in computer space afforded it low status in
the physical space of the gallery. Net artworks were stored on
local hard-drives thus robbing them of their proper
Internet-specific status, and set in a space insultingly
reminiscent of an office: "All the different works disappear in
the set-up by one guy who deals with the real space. The real
space is of course much more powerful than all these networks.
When you are viewing the work you are in the real space. If you
only do your work on the net, you become a fragment of the local
situation and you can easily become manipulated in any
direction." Jodi also spoke disparagingly of their artists'
fee: "In total we got DM1200. It is a clear example of
exploitation. Which artist would move his ass for this amount
of money?" Here is a case of net artists losing out by trying to
collapse the informational signifier (net art per se) into its
non-equivalent real world referent (museum art).
Surprisingly perhaps, and despite the partly understandable
incompetence of the 'art world proper' to deal with net art and
the general lack of will to seriously commit to a genre which
lacks the endorsement of wider market interest, the majority of
net artists prefer to cultivate than to kill institutional
relations. Shulgin, much of whose work is concerned with
escaping the 'cliché' of identity and harnessing the nomadic
movement of information, has stressed the need to prevent art
from slipping into a form of pure communication and the
usefulness of the art context: "..some people say that we
should get rid of the very notion of art and that we have to do
something that is not related to the art system, etc. I think
it's not possible at all, especially on the net because of the
hyperlink system. Whatever you do it can be put into an art
context and can be linked to art institutions, sites related to
art. And if we get rid of that word 'art', what shall we have
then? How shall we identify ourselves and how shall we find
contacts and how shall we create a context?" Another prominent
net artist, Vuk Cosic, has also remarked on the necessity of the
established art system's involvement with net art without which
it might as well be invisible:
"..how do you think you got your first Sex Pistol's record?
Because they didn't want to sell it to you?" Invisibility is
considered to be the price of disengagement from the efficiency
of the art machine with its conspicuous architectural edifices,
its army of partisan employees, its control over art's
narrativisation and its strategic publicity offensives.
Olia Lialina, net artist and founder of the first artist-run
online gallery Teleportacia , insists on the necessity of
creating a third alternative to what she considers a dichotomous
deadlock between, on the one hand, the belief that 'net art
should not be sold' and, on the other, the institutional will to
simply annex net art to established systems of archivisation and
ownership - "a heritage to forget" as Lialina puts it . In her
article Cheap.Art she discusses how the
classical anti-institutionalism of the former position was
"mostly welcomed by real galleries and institutions" in 1998,
and criticises the process by which collaborative projects are
coopted by institutions: "But again and again the worlds you
create easily become an exhibiting object at media venues.
Something that is invaluable tomorrow is sold for nothing
today." Lialina points to the dysfunction that sets in once the
world-like qualities of a net artwork are assimilated into the
museum which hinges on the transformation of a space designed to
be, in a certain sense, inhabited to a relic to be consumed.
In the last few years, long established arts institutions such
as the Walker Arts Centre in Minneapolis, the (increasingly
global) Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in San
Francisco and the ICA in London, have been setting up online
galleries and programming exhibitions which seek to legitimise
the genre through contextualisation, discourse and ownership.
Their multifarious strategies of ownership range from simply
creating lists of links to existing net art projects on other
servers, to buying exclusive or non-exclusive rights to display
artworks, to commissioning net artists to make site-specific
works for their 'virtual galleries'. An example of the latter is
the Walker Art Centre's recent commission of Lisa Jevbratt to
create a new component to her series The Stilmann
Projects, for their site ,.for which she was paid an
artists fee of $1,000. The institutions' attempts to find a way
to render net art amenable to the criteria of ownership
encounter two perennial problems. The first is the ease with
which files can be mirrored or copied often without causing any
perceivable alteration to the work itself, and the second is the
impossibility of designating a discrete art object in the case
of hyperlinked artworks. The information economy is at odds with
a classical model of ownership in which possession of the
individual and/or unique object guaranteed exclusive power over
its use. Currencies themselves have long since been cut loose of
the gold standard; a shift which definitively conceded the
preeminence of transactional speed and patterning of investment
over the presence/absence of its golden referent. Within
e-commerce, the patterns of consumption are often valued above
the commodity's ability to command a certain price. The
traditional art establishment's frustrations concerning the
display and ownership of net art are deeply entwined with their
inability to abandon the correlation between ownership,
materiality and uniqueness; a correlation from which their
institutional logic, power, and revenue-generating capacities
still flow. In a repeat of preceding struggles to maintain
control over video works, traditional institutions are
struggling to impose the paradigm of presence/absence onto a
condition defined by pattern/randomness. Despite Lialina's
comment that the anti-commodifying rhetoric of some net artists
is easily assimilated by institutions - which on the level of
content is certainly true - art as information does present
inherent resistance to the traditional logic of its ownership.
With astute and comical understanding of this predicament,
M.River and T.Whid's Visual-Text Art Venue makes the absence of
the material art object and physical gallery space the focus of
their online gallery. In their mission statement they explain:
"The focus of the venue is contemporary text-based artwork which
is composed only of ideas and words. No fonts, no design, no
paper, no materials, no actual physical objects are essential to
the work the V-TAV will show." Their decision to include only
text is a means of emphasising the condition of absence;
working within the theoretical context of poststructuralism with
its designation of the signifier's severance from the signified,
the word has all but become a symbol of lack. The interface of
the gallery is also constructed linguistically; using plain
courier font on a white background, the two 'gallerists'
describe a tour through the imaginary gallery and treat the
textual artworks as though they were physical objects. The old
world dealer becomes a figure of ridicule: "T. Whid
(slapping knee and laughing) Whew...almost dropped my
very large glass monocle, ahem...". Alongside their examination
of the absence of a material substrate for their
gallery-as-artwork, they also invert the hierarchy of uniqueness
over reproducibility. In their Sales Department 'artifacts'
(i.e. computer print-outs) signed by the artist are valued at
$50, whereas the price of full copyright is too expensive to be
specified. V-TAV's parody of the traditional centrality of the
presence/absence paradigm effects its conversion into a referent
within the latticed structure of online representation. But this
new informational order is marked perhaps more by a nostalgia
for the absence of presence than a wholehearted collusion with
the system of pattern/randomness.
The Ljubljana 2000 - Banner.art Competition, launched in early
June '99, is an example of a net based institutional critique
which attempts not only to use commodification's extension into
immateriality as the primary conceptual condition for the work
itself but also as an opportunity to develop new economic models
for artists. The organisers of the competition, Teo Spiller and
Brian Goldfarb, explain the rules thus: "Work must incorporate
at least one money-earning mechanism, such as the hosting of a
commercial banner or other economic scheme to prostitute their
work. ...the jury will base its decision equally upon the
aesthetic qualities of the art and the creative conception of
its relation to its commercial prostitution." The winning entry
will also be judged on its success in earning money and the
innovational nature of this strategy. In this example, the
degree to which art's flight from materiality has ceased to
concern itself with an escape from commodification is
abundantly clear.
Where the point of reification was conceived in conceptual art
as the point of sale and relegated to a 'perfunctory'
realisation of the idea, in net art - where reification has come
to mean informationalistion - it was initially harnessed to take
advantage of the flickering relationship between representation
and territorialisation. In other words, early net art identified
an insecurity opened up in the absence of a one-to-one
relationship between information and its material substrate on
the Internet. A corporate home-page, for example, does not own
the space it resides in the way its high street outlet does. In
a situation where control over material objects and space has
been replaced, as a defining characteristic of power, by the
control over attention and representation, early net artists
understood the value of reification quite differently. For them,
the point of reification had become the point of intervention
and leverage; no longer to be mistrusted but actively deployed.
At this juncture, it is worth just briefly observing that the
order of representation designated 'immaterial' or 'virtual' is
anything but devoid of physicality. Alongside the more obvious
physicality of the computer's dependency on the flow of
electrons, ocean spanning axial cables and so forth is the no
less crucial or physical faculty of sight. In this sense then,
we must take 'immateriality' to be a very imperfect description
of the ontological status of an HTML page and its reception. In
light of this consideration it is possible to say that some of
the signature attributes of conceptual art which were enmeshed
in its will to immateriality (speed, communication, resistance
to the forces of institutionalistion etc.) were realised at the
level of reification as information on the Internet.
Net artists of the recent past however have faced certain
problems also experienced by conceptual artists, namely, how to
stay visible, how to prevent an institutional take-over and how
to support oneself? Obsolescence, once prized as an inherent
condition of ICT by net artists, is increasingly being viewed as
a problem as the genre moves out of its early construction
period into one of historical consolidation. As with the history
of the words you no longer own on mailing lists, the initial
passion ignited by the novelty of the Internet and its renegade
status from the powers that be (which prevailed despite the
widespread knowledge of its military-industrial origins) has
incrementally given way to a recognition of the high cultural
status that it has achieved. Its inclusion in prestigious
international events like DocumentaX and the trend for
established art centres to stake their claims to its history
testify to this process. In a reciprocal move, non-commercial
discursive exchange on the Net has started to be commodified and
develop into a site of marketing, while information-based
marketing has started to provide the model and subject of net
art. (In June 1999, artist Jeff Gates attempted to sell his
individual demographics at the online auction house E-bay,
commenting: "What's stopping us from selling our own
information?" ) Not only has commerce started to occupy the
symbolic space formerly laid claim to by art, but art, in an
analogous gesture to pop art, has started to mimic the
strategies of commercialisation in dataspace. This new
mercenary gusto which has entered net art, far from predicating
itself upon its putatively autonomous status - "a circumference
which closes it off from actuality" as Adorno and Horkeimer put
it, and l'art pour l'art imbued - converts this status into
capital and uses it to deliver audiences to corporate content or
convert individuals into data sets. Art has become
transactional, its most core identity wrung through a process
of quantification.
But this bleak picture can, perhaps paradoxically, also be
ameliorated by applying another of Adorno and Horkeimer's
characterisations of art, namely its deployement of shamanic
mimesis. They have argued that the representational practice of
copying nature in prehistory - in our case sublime nature
becomes sublime informatics - displays an affinity with the
life-world subsequently lost through the objectifying practices
of the Enlightenment. When the world-as-referent becomes a
semiotic field of quantified information, then the mimetic
practices of artists could possibly be read in terms of a
de-alienating process that breaks the distance of
objectification. As Hayles and Kittler suggest, the stable and
structuring distance between signified and signifier has not
been closed but lost. Net artists have taken advantage of this
to literally convert art into information and thereby update our
understanding of mimesis. No longer content to skip and slide
across the patterns of corporate information deployment, net art
has started to convert itself into instrumentalised information.
This gesture, which must be interpreted as an expression of
fear, can also be read as an impulse to identify with and not
elude the conditions of information itself. This, I would
argue, in part seems motivated by the desire to deprive the
corporate/institutional complex of art as a benevolent object or
system of association. By withdrawing from its position of
autonomy or alterity and operating in as instrumental and
quantifying a way as capital, net art can be seen to be updating
realism. This variant of realism combines its traditional role
of (always inflected) mirror with the informational capacity to
replicate; as such we could term it a replicatory realism whose
function is to provide no relief from the instrumentalisation of
representation.
http://www.fondation.cartier.fr
N. Katherine Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers",
in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation,
edt. Timothy Druckery, Aperture 1996, p. 262
Ibid, p. 263
http://www.easylife.org/desktop/index0.html
http://www.irational.org/_readme.html
Cited in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the
Art Object, University of California Press, 1997, p.28
cited in Lippard, 1997, p. 14
Ibid, p. xxi
Ibid, p. xvii
cited in Monika Wunderer, Whose Art is it Anyway?, p.1,
http://st1hobel.phl.univie.ac.at/~wunderer/txt/artcom.html
See Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Cooking Pot Markets: An Economic Model
for the Trade in Free Goods and services on the Internet, 1998,
dxm.org/tcok/cookingpot/, and Richard Barbrook's The Holy
Fools: A Critique of the Avant-Garde in the Age of the Net,
Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster, 1998.
cf. RHIZOME's "Readership Statistics", http://www.rhizome.org
Mark Tribe, "Art Site Takes the Reins", http://www.rhizome.org,
1998
Ibid, "Subscribers Submissions"
Interview with Jodi by Tilman Baumgaertel,
Telepolis, 06.10.97, www.heise.de/tp
Interview with Alexeij E. Shulgin by Armin Medosch,
Telepolis, 22.07.97,
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/ku/6173/1.html, p. 3
Art is Useless: an interview with Vuk Cosic by Josephine Berry,
Mute, issue 13, 1998, p.56
http://www.teleportacia.org
Olia Lialin, Cheap Art, in Readme!: Ascii
Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, filtered by Nettime,
Autonomedia, 1999, p.267
Ibid, p. 268
"Cheap Art", Read Me, Ibid, p.268
see, http://www.walkerart.org/stillmanIndex.htm
M. River and T. Whid, "Mission Statement", The Visual-Text Art
Venue, http://mteww.com/VTAV/mission.htm, p. 1
Teo Spiller and Brian Goldfarb, The Ljubljana 2000 -
Banner.art Competition,
http://www.teo-spiller.org/banner.art/
see:
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=3DView
Item&item=3D1= 12157084
Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Verso 1997, p.19
See: Ibid, p...
///Josephine Berry\\\
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