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A Particular Site-specificity, or:
Do I Have a Good Reason to Be Here?
Inke Arns (Berlin)
Lecture at the conference „Netz, Kunst und Publikum - Vermittlungsstrategien der Netzkunst", Künstlerhaus Bethanien, October 1998. Published
in BE Magazin, Berlin, December 2000
Exhibiting net art (Internet art, network art, net.art, web art etc.) in an art space during festivals or in exhibitions in most of the cases consists of link lists featuring selected online projects. Last year, shortly before the conference at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, I participated in a conference linked to a net.art exhibition which took place quite far away from Berlin. The exhibition, located in the foyer of an art museum, consisted in a set of computers, lined up against the wall of the museum shop. Each monitor displayed the website of the exhibition, including links to the selected online art projects. Unfortunately only very few artists were present for the opening. At a certain point I asked myself: Did I really travel all this way just to see projects I could also access from my computer at home? Over the last couple of years,
there have been some attempts to think about new and different ways of
presenting net art to the public. Still, ‘exhibiting net art’ remains quite
problematic, and no real „solutions" have been found until now, as the
example mentioned above suggests. Therefore I would like to briefly elaborate
on the notion of „site-specificity" in relation to so-called ‘net art’.
Site-specificity „Site-specificity" means that a work has been conceived for a special place, a certain context; be it a street, a building, a landscape etc. It means that a „site-specific" work is organically connected to its environment. The context provides the conditions for its functioning. Art in the net deals with and is embedded in the specific possibilities that the medium Internet offers; it is „germane to the medium of the electronic networks, it plays with their protocols and technical peculiarities, it exploits the bugs and pushes the potentials of software and hardware - it is unthinkable without its medium, the Internet."[1] Within net art I would now like to differentiate two different kinds of „site specificities": 1) Internet site-specificity, works of net art that could be called „digital land art"; for example the works of jodi, or antiorp 2) Real space site-specificity,
hybridity; for example the works of Blank&Jeron / sero.org
Internet Site-specificity „Pure" net art is located solely on the Internet, playing with the peculiar protocols and specific environments this medium offers. The works of jodi and of antiorp clearly are created to function within the Internet. They are what I would call Internet site-specific works, or „digital land art" [2]. For accessing these projects there’s no specifically developed interface, but the visitor rather uses normal, everyday browsers and software. Exhibiting these kinds of projects in ‘white cubes’ poses a major problem. The worst thing a curator can do – as described above – is to „make a list of hyperlinks to selected websites, put them on the web pages of the festival or exhibition, not pay the artists a fee (using the argument that their projects are online and thus publically available anyway), and then put a series of online computers somewhere in the exhibition where the audience can look at the projects [...]. A variation to this worst-case scenario was the WWW-part of the Documenta X art exhibition in Kassel / Germany in 1997 where the artists were paid, but the projects were running offline and in a sad grey-and-white pseudo office. Do this if you want to prevent your audience from understanding what network art might be about."[3] The anonymous „Le E" writes: „As a matter of opinion, I am always a bit discouraged by attempts to fit web based work into traditional paradigms, just as I am discouraged by attempts to fit traditional mediums into the arena provided by the web. To be clear, I am equally disheartened by computer monitors featuring web sites in the space of a gallery as I am by web sites that feature scanned images of paintings as a means of promotion for a gallery."[4] Exhibiting Internet site-specific projects on online computers lined up in a gallery space is really problematic, and it is so for the following reasons: As soon as you do this, everything that surrounds the work, the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse, at worst the white pedestals on which the computers and the monitors are displayed -- all add this special sculptural touch to the project which basically has nothing to do with the work „exhibited". I am therefore quite critical about transferring net art in a traditional space aka the ‘white cube’. There were some interesting attempts to present „net art" in different ways, i.e. more „true" to the working situation, as a process: for example the Open X environment at the ars electronica festival '97 in Linz and - although this was not a ‘net art’ specific event - the Hybrid WorkSpace which took place in Kassel during the last Documenta. The problem with these kinds of workshop-like events are obvious, as we noticed during the Deep_Europe workshop which some of the Syndicate members organized within the Hybrid WorkSpace: there, it was very difficult to convey to the audience what the workshops were about, given the short attention span of the rushing documenta visitors. New digital spaces should
be developed for so-called „pure" net art; spaces that are closer to the
original net context of that kind of art. I think that more self-confidence
is at stake here (on the side of artists and curators/organizers). Do your
net thing, do it well on the Net, or the Web, and don’t try to fit web
based work into traditional paradigms. Develop spaces that are germane
to the kind of work you are doing. Some interesting examples could be Olia
Lialina’s online gallery Teleportacia.org, or Rhizome and the projects
they have been initiating, like "Some of My Favourite Websites are Art".
It is a survey of Internet art projects, curated by Rhizome editors Rachel
Greene and Alex Galloway. These spaces are "nodes in the net", or net art
clusters that obviously don’t need a physical or real space representation
as an alibi.
Real Space Site-specificity, Hybridity As I mentioned before, I see little reason to go to a gallery space to see projects I can as well access from my computer at home [5]. Besides trying to develop workspace situations, there are also other attempts to develop „hybrid, plural and porous interfaces" (Broeckmann), in short: a Real Space site-specificity. This means creating haptile, tactile interfaces, which can be only experienced in a special place, be it a gallery space, be it somewhere in the street, in a public building etc. Good examples for this hybridity are the projects by Gebhard Sengmüller and Blank&Jeron (sero.org). On the occasion of the Medienbiennale Leipzig 94 the Austrian artist Gebhard Sengmüller installed his project TV Poetry (1993/94). Sengmüller set up satellite TV receivers in Vienna, Rotterdam and Lüneburg, which switched the TV channel every ten seconds. On the computers connected to the satellite receiver, a text-recognition programme was running, filtering out the text elements; e.g. subtitles or news headers. The software then converted the graphical text into ASCII characters. Depending on the size and the clarity of the ‘original’ texts in the TV images, the result was more or less correct. Every ten minutes the computers connected via a modem to the central computer in Leipzig, where the results - easily readable texts alternating with machinic gibberish and vice versa - were displayed as an infinite text stream on a monitor. TV Poetry, a silent meditation on the aesthetics of the machinic and the uncertainties of communication, could be experienced at the same time on the Internet (LambdaMOO located at the MIT) and in real space, in the exhibition where Sengmüller created a special context. Scanner++ (1998) by Blank&Jeron / sero.org is a "walk-on" scanner, developed for the exhibition „body of the message" in Berlin: "real" bodies enter the virtual realm, their physical mass becomes information, "traces of bodies"; compatible, globally retrievable and archivable. The principle of the search engine, actually an industrious, invisible software program scouring the Internet for information, is here lent almost obscenely material form as a symptomatic object now superimposed over real space, which it proceeds to systematically scan. Absurd, this machine – while its size alone embodies the constant growth in information consumption, it simultaneously serves as a production site serving our need to leave behind traces in the data galaxy through active participation this side of the interface. In the two hybrid projects
I just described, there is definitely a „good reason" to be in that specific
place and to experience this kind of interface which cannot be experienced
elsewhere, e.g. „on the net".
Conclusion: It’s good to be here „Net art is online, and it is for those who are online" [6] – this might be interpreted as a very exclusive viewpoint. But I think that this is the only possible way of approaching the problem. For some years already, the audience for web based work has been growing. There are, as „Le E" writes, „more and more individuals who are able to appreciate web based works for what they are. With a little patience, I believe the recognition will come as the sympathetic audience grows, but there is little sense in settling for sub-standard public presentations of work that was created for a medium that is about a very different kind of space than the space of the gallery." [7] I have tried to describe new forms of distribution and presentation of net art that differ from the (still much too common) „monitors-in-white-cube" installations, using the somewhat crude distinction between „Internet-" and „Real Space site specificity". Concerning Internet site-specific projects or „digital land art" projects, I argued in favor of developing clusters or nodes on the net, environments that are germane to the ‘nature’ of these kinds of work and that do not necessarily have to have „artsy" extensions to the physical world (well, except the machines that we’re using anyway). Concerning Real Space site-specific projects, I described two exemplary projects that have developed hybrid, haptile or tactile interfaces, which can be only experienced in specific physical places. Both the „Internet-" and „Real Space site specificity" give you a „good reason" to be where you are. When one thinks about art in the public space or „Kunst am Bau" [8], one could even muse on still more radical ways of presenting especially Internet site-specific projects or „pure" net art. Just think about the new and yet unexplored fields of e-commerce and online-trading – spaces that are exclusively virtual. One could think about infiltrating „net art viruses" into these systems... this is what I would consider an even more genuine site specificity on the Internet. But we should leave this to the activists. (Berlin, August 1999)
Links: jodi <http://www.jodi.org>
Notes: 1
Andreas
Broeckmann, ‘Are you online? Presence and participation in network art’,
ars electronica '98 catalogue
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