By Tilman Baumgärtel The future goes „popp!“. Just like you were putting a bowed (?) finger into your closed mouth and take it our quickly. At least that’s the sound that you keep hearing when you look at a new website of the exhibition „010101”. And this exhibition is the future. That’s at least what David Ross says, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco (SFMOMA), where the medien art-spectacle that is scheduled to launch on March 4th. The show is supposed to deal with the influence that digital media have on our world. Apart from showing pieces by well-established artists such as Andreas Gurksy, Sarah Sze or Karin Sander, the curators have commissioned five net art pieces by Erik Adigard, Entropy8Zuper, Mark Napier, Matthew Ritchie, Thomson & Craighead. These pieces are well-hidden behind a “unusual” - and predominately difficult to manouver – website, which contains every design flaw that is needed to make net surfers mad – from weird Flash graphics that take forever to load to texts that can’t be printed out. Like in the early days of the WWW the webdesigners have invented a whole new navigation system that includes a strange pattern of swirling points that occasionally produce the “popp” sound mentioned above. The site includes a manual that is badly needed. Needless to say that a simpler HTML-version of the page is not available. Just like the important exhibition "net_condition" at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM; center for art and media technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1999, "010101" doesn’t show „only“ net art, but "Art in technological times", as the subtitel of the show promises. Yet the organizers run into the same problems that a number of other curators who have attempted to show net art in a museum context have encountered. As it appears now the internet pieces will be shown on the website nealty kept away from the “real art” in the museum, or are at best accessible from a computer kiosk at the exhibition space. Curator David Ross was more brave in the 70ies when he started his career with a number of exhibitions that presented video art and helped to launch the genre in the United States. But with net art Ross seems to have more difficulties, even though he has recently published 20 thesis on the art on the internet. At “010101” he is supported by media art curator Benjamin Weill, the founder of the New York Online-Galery Adaweb. With such capable people in charge you wonder why the didn’t take up the challenge of finally doing a show that focuses on net art as a genre itself, instead of just commissioning a number of web pieces that accompany the exhibition on its website. Internet pieces that were concieved for the WorldWideWeb are certainly difficult to present in a traditional museum space - that’s the trouble with net art. Installations, sculptures and performances, that use the net, however are not. The first examples have been shown at various smaller exhibitions in off-galeries. Right now it seems that net art as a genre is not a topic that traditional contemporary art museums are willing to present to their audience. All there is are a number of art institutions such as the DIA Art Foundation (New York) that have commissioned pieces for their websites and a number of “net art portals” such as the “Art Entertainment Network” of the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis) that provide links to net art pieces on other servers. This is something ambitious grad students can do without the support of a museum, as the master thesis “Protocol Prone” by Jennifer Crowe has demonstrated last year. Maybe the curators of more traditional art venues have been intimidated by the overwhelming negative reaction that the net art presentation at the last documenta received. The sparse office space with a number of online-computers in Kassel was in fact disappointing. But with the support of artists and the courage to come up with more innovative ways of presentations, there will be should be more succesful ways to show net art in a museum than a souped-up cybercafe. URL’s 010101 http://010101.sfmoma.org/relaunch.html David Ross: 21 Distinctive Qualities of Net.
Art http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/ross.html net_condition http://www.zkm.de/net Documenta www.documenta.de Art Entertainment Network http://aen.walkerart.org/ Protocol prone www.artnetweb.com/protocol As a special service for eystorm-readers/customers, here are the hidden URLs of the net art pieces that are on display of the “010101” exhibition for easy access without going through the hassle of manoeuvering the over-designed website: eric adigard: timelocator http://timelocator.projects.sfmoma.org/ entropy8zuper!: eden.garden 1.0 http://eden.garden1.0.projects.sfmoma.org/ mark napier: feed http://feed.projects.sfmoma.org/ matthew ritchie: new place http://newplace.projects.sfmoma.org/ thompson&craighead: e-poltergeist http://yahoo.projects.sfmoma.org/ Tilman Baumgaertel Tilman Baumgaertel Tilman Baumgaertel