(New) Media Art in Museums:
Curediting | Contextualising Internet-based Art

0.

The essay Curediting — Contextualising Internet-based Art reflects on the conditions of exhibiting and archiving Internet-based Art in the real space. From the viewpoint of the curator it assumes that “curating is translation” and “translation is a mode” and tries to merge the concepts of “curating” and “editing”. Bearing in mind that with each new work of Internet-based Art new models of display must be discussed and developed, the text proposes experimental methodologies of how artistic creation on the Internet and the processes of its re-formulation can be combined to develop appropriate presentational formats for traditional institutions of Contemporary Art. Embedded in the examplary showcase of an exhibition of Internet-based Art, realised in a setting which is usually dedicated to Modern and Contemporary Art, the proposed methodologies can be understood as an attempt to demonstrate exhibition and archiving methods as well as contextualisation strategies without making claim to be complete. Thus, by means of a concrete example, the intention of this text is to encourage disucssions about curatorial practices which are settled between institutional and independent work, between reality and virtuality, and, finally between materiality and immateriality.

I.

exhibiting internet art is something that is in its early stages. putting computers in an exhibition room and leaving it open to the visitors to browse the artworks is not suitable anymore (in fact it never was). new models of displaying have to be developed. (carlos katastrofsky, artist, 2008)

More than fifteen years after the first experiments with the online medium as an artistic tool, Internet-based Art still finds itself in a continuous developmental stage — and so does its relation to the traditional gatekeepers of Contemporary Art as for example museums are. A main reason therefore might be that artworks based on the Internet are still difficult to define: between art and technology they are bound to an art historical context as well as to a programming aesthetics, between immateriality and required hardware they are anti-institutional but use commercially owned networks and software to be distributed, and, finally, between models of self-evalution and the traditional parameters of categorising art, a whole variety of interdisciplinary genres of Internet-based Art exists. Nevertheless, two fundamental subgenres can be destinguished: “works that exist solely on the Internet (thus are ubiquitous and un-embodied) and those works that have a physical component, for instance in the form of an installation or an architectural space (thus embodied and limited).” (1), while fluidity, interactivity, and participation are among the main characteristics regarding the first one. Apart from all attempts to define Internet-based Art the question is not primarly what it is, but, if it is art — and perhaps, to hand this responsibility on to art institutions, the answer might be found in museums.

Traditional art institutions today continue to filter what the public at large understands to be art. The selected and thus privileged art forms and art genres as painting and sculpture, or even younger art forms as installations, performances, and video then enjoy the further attendance the institutions offer: exhibition, documentation, study, preservation, archiving, etc. By those means the art canon, the art history, and last but not least, to talk in economical terms, the material value of art on the art market are created. From the viewpoint of the reclamation of cultural value museums should take the question into account, how a traditional institution — more or less characterised by strong hierarchies and centuries-old customs and habits — can come to terms with the artworks the 21st century ‘networked society’ has developed during more than a decade and still is developing. Outside a few already existing institutions for New Media Art as the Germany-based Center for Art and Media, Eyebeam in New York or festivals like Ars Electronica in Austria, numerous alternative production and distribution channels have been relevant in the development of Internet-based Art as an art form. Just to name a few examples, non-profit online organisations like Rhizome, Turbulence, or the online collective Furtherfield are continuously working on the promotion, the archiving and the presentation of Internet-based Art and of the cultural system those artistic practices are part of.

In parallel to the emergence of new challenges for museums and art institutions, “the border between the work of an internet artist and the curating done by a curator who wants to show the work in a physical exhibition is shifting. internet works have to be adapted to be shown in an exhibition space. since the original context of those artworks — the private surroundings of people consuming internet art on their computers at home — is lost…” (2) On the one hand this is the task of the curator, on the other, it it the task of the artist too, who — much more than in a traditional way — is involved in the process of transforming her/his artworks into goods which are suitable to be presented in real settings without losing their ephemeral and immaterial characteristics. One possible way to escape from this dilemma might be to consider the context and the discursive environment art on the Internet is created in.

II.

Cultural production and meta-discursive activities on the Internet have been expanded to use the online medium as an exhibition space, a distribution platform, and a social aggregator. Accordingly its practitioners/performers have been characterised with terms like context producers or community enablers to specify those various tasks of an online curator. Since the first generation of net.art (3), the Internet has come a long way and so did the curatorial activities concerned with it. Many of the early enthusiastic ideas, developed to draw multifaceted images of possible digital worlds, are still utopian, many of them are outdated, but some of them have successfully flourished. A driving force of the present web-culture is the idea of social networking.

The social component has been central to the debate around cultural activities in general and has re-enforced the idea of curating on the Internet within the context of “a community-based narrative of everyday life”. (4) Web 2.0, nowadays commonly described as an accumulation of technologies which “enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users” (5), has shifted the focus of attention from a more traditional, consumption-oriented content to a rather autonomous and socially driven system of production. Nevertheless the platforms attributed with the token 2.0 “are not just products but also services, watched and updated according to the constant dictates of their makers and those who can pressure them.” (6) Despite the criticism against the ongoing commercialisation of those technological systems and bearing in mind that its users may be reduced to the role of consumers constrained by pre-designed templates, the discourse — which itself is mainly based upon language, text and talk — can be viewed as a form of broader social practice which has made possible that “acts, ideas and products are authorised and made credible through processes of mediation and communicative exchange”. (7) As a consequence, within this ‘system of legitimisation’, the person of the curator is more than an expert of display, modelling the reception and interpretation of art; the curator may be a “global collaborator in art’s social relations” (8) who is not only responsible for the linkage of the protagonists of the art field but — especially within the context of Media and Internet-based Art — for the conjunction of different cultural and artistic disciplines.

Within the framework of discursive strategies the curation of Internet-based Art, online as well as offline, can be specified as translational work. The transfer of structures, meaning and (personal) experiences into documentary, mediative and distributive formats is one of the core activities of the curator and often bound to the production of written documents: the mobilisation of participants via invitation mails, calls for papers, and the creation of temporary discursive and/or dialogical situations are only some parts of the work of a curator, as are the visualisation of processes and workflows by means of online publishing systems, the collecting of contextual information about artworks, the inventing or re-using of taxonomies or even — on a more basic level — the writing of code for the display and visual representation of an online exhibition. Unlike the working conditions of a traditional curator, the curator of Internet-based Art is working in and within the same medium as the artist which brings up inevitably the consequence that curating can only be “an adaptive discipline, using and adopting inherited codes and rules of behaviour.” (9)

Those explanative, meditative and finally translational strategies of curatorial re-shaping are also meant to be forms of visualising power structures and the role of Internet-based Art within the global processes of political and economical relevance. “The fact that the world around us is increasingly programmed means that rules, conventions and relationships, which are usually subject to change and negotiation, are translated into software, where they become fixed. (…) This withdrawal beyond the reach of vision and perception, the world is secretly and eerily made to vanish by means of software also entails a dematerialisation of structures.” (10) Translation, brought up on a global level by the proclamation of a “translational turn” (11), mainly within the Cultural Studies, is a helpful metaphor to describe the task of the curator. Nevertheless the concept of cultural translation, as understood and widely used today for the description of transcultural communication and the effects of globalisation on our society, has arisen out of the criticism of linguistic/literary theory. Walter Benjamin’s articulations in his essay “The task of the translator” (12) therefore can be applied to the field of Media and Internet-based Art and brought back to the curator’s daily work with texts. This inter-dependency illustrates “the relation between the so-called original and translation by using the metaphor of a tangent: translation is like a tangent, which touches the circle (i.e. the original) in one single point only to follow thereafter its own way. Neither the original nor the translation, neither the language of the original nor the language of the translation are fixed and persisting categories. They don’t have essential quality and are constantly transformed in space and time.” (13)

III.

If Internet-based Art wants to become recognised as art and not as a ‘funny gadget industry’ then the display of those artworks in the real space needs to be done carefully and the focus has to shift away from the notion of technology. As today’s technology is more than old tomorrow, it is the cultural context which should be rendered in the center of interest of the presentation of Internet-based Art in a setting which is dedicated to exhibit Contemporary Art. One can argue that technology itself is a cultural context, and nowadays even one of the most powerful ones, but it is not alone: “technology is embedded in a framework of cultural developments that exists for a much longer time and by thus reaches much deeper into what is known as perception of man.” (14) The aim of the following second part of this essay is to access what can be understood as translational work within the context of Internet-based Art. Driven by the desire to create practicable and realisable methodologies for this transfer from the virtual to the real, different contexts are brought together under the term “curediting” (15). This hybrid between the two concepts of “curating” and “editing” is meant to describe a working method which is based upon institutional museum work, editorial/journalistic tasks and the textual work bound to the curatorial activities and finally the networking methods of a curator, acting in the digital world. The following ideas are developed and concretised along an exhibition (16) of Internet-based Art which was shown at Mala galerija/Moderna galerija (Ljubljana/Slovenia), and Miklova Hisa galerija (Ribnica/Slovenia) in 2008.

In regard of the wide variety of Internet-based Art, the methods are centered around three fundamental traits, bound to the production processes, to the ‘final’ artwork and last to its perception by the spectators/users. This ‘working plan’ stays incomplete and intends to stress out curatorial practices oscillating between institutional and independent modes of operation.

IV.

As a first mode the term production focuses on the process of creation. It deals with the artist’s identity, his/her working methods and the different ways the artwork was created. A personal interview with the artist provides information about the artwork, the context the artist is settled in and even the working conditions he/she had to deal with. In the case the process of creation is executed by several people, which means that the authorship is not clear enough to identify one single artist, the personal interview might be extended to the programmer, the designer, or any other relevant person.

In opposition to the personal interview an extended interview refers to the networked environment of the artist. Mostly available as a link list on the artist’s homepage this issue is very specific for Internet-based Art and a networked community in general. For the contextualisation of the artwork it must be of interest to reveal the different ways this network of people and/or institutions percieves it. This is a viewpoint which is not really from the ‘inside’ — as it is the personal interview — , nor is it from the ‘outside’ — it can be called a ‘networked viewpoint’. The creation of transparency and the self-presentation of the artist on the Internet is resumed under the issue net idenitity. More than in reality, in the virtual space fictive identities like avatars or pseudonyms are used. This means that the artist as a real person (with a name, a nationality, etc.) often stays in the background of the artwork. The Polish Internet-based artist Codemanipulator® (17) e.g. presents himself exclusively with his pseudonym and provides more detailed information about his person in form of the binary and/or the hexadecimal code: “lives and works in 01… also referred to as 4b 72 61 6b f3 77.”

Besides the clarification of the artist’s net identity an extended biography and bibliography provides information about the background of the artist — amongst others about her/his origins in the economical, technological, political, philosophical, or in any other field. Referring to the upper issue, this can be seen as a kind of identification of a virtual person or artist in the real space which gives further information about the context the artist works and lives in. Finally the preservation of technological environments and emulation of programs for future computer generations is called technology. It is actually not part of the present topic but completes — as one of the characteristics of Internet-based artworks — the mode production.

V.

The second mode concerns the artwork itself. It deals with the idea of translation from the digital into the real space, furthermore with the settlement in an art historical context and finally with the specification of its Internet-based characteristics. In the center of the development of translational forms is the exchange between curators and artists who are — much more than in a traditional way — involved in the process of transforming their artworks into formats which are suitable to be presented in real settings. In “_s[p]erver[se]_: 404 poetry_” (2007) e.g. the reader is confronted with signs, numbers, symbols and snippets of programming code, all integrated into the system of our natural language by means of associative techniques. Originating in the micro-blogging system of Twitter, this piece of poetic writing was presented in Slovenia as a wall-text, developed in collaboration with the Australian artist Mary-Anne Breeze (mez) (18).

The development and the creation of references and relations within the art historical context is called positioning. This context must be drawn within as well as beyond digital culture and should focus on the comparison of single artworks and historically relevant working methods and artistic strategies. In the course of the artwork “landscapes” by the Vienna-based Media artist carlos katastrofsky (19) IP-adresses were brought to paper by means of printing transfer, in order to provide the viewers with an extract of the virtual in the real space. The artist works on the Internet as cartographic concept and copies the context, in which websites like Google, CNN or Wikipedia are anchored. Translated into the gallery space, the viewer finds him- or herself vis-à-vis works on paper whose aesthetics remind of conceptual, text-based strategies of design. In this way, the context of the shown IP-addresses is also reflected formally: in a landscape open downwards and upwards, consisting of numbers, letters and signs.

What is introduced with the term specification refers to one single character of the artwork. It means the transfer of the artwork from digital into real space with regard of what is gained and not what is lost in translation. The website-processor “nam shub web” (2005-2008) by the Austrian artist Jörg Piringer (20) e.g. is originally based on the Internet and allows the user to apply his or her individual rules to the textual content of external websites so as to generate visual poetry. In the work’s gallery adaptation, a printer is installed which endlessly reproduces the content of the dynamic websites as hard copies. Over time, the floor of the gallery is covered with single sheets of paper. In the exhibition the website was not shown and therefore the participatory part of the artwork was extinguished, but, it was worked out in a way that focuses on one of the main characteristics of this work: the overflow of information and the text-based characteristics of Internet-based Art.

Chronology means the documentation of the historical development of the artwork on the Internet. This can be information like the date of the first appearance, off-line periods, changes due to technical improvements as well as an exhibition chronology. One example for this chronological viewpoint is a work by the artist Codemanipulator®. He produced one work twice: the first, “HTML-Malevich”, in 1996, and the second, “HMTL-CSS-Malevich”, in 2001. In this case the viewer is confronted with the historical dimension of using text code as painting referring to Kazimir Malevich’s “The Black Square”. In the later re-interpretation of the artwork the size of the code is further reduced to a few lines by a newer standard of coding. Furthermore the issue outlook offers a general theoretical framework for the artwork and therefore opens it to further contexts, e.g. by installing a simple reading space either in the exhibition room or as a link list on the exhibition webpage.

VI.

The last mode with the title reception focuses on the output of the artwork as it is percieved by its spectators/users as well as this final point deals with the backflow of the artwork from the real space to the Internet where it originally comes from. A collection of links that lead to the artwork by using search engines and other research tools gives an overview about the positioning of the artwork within the networked environment and provides references. A collection of relevant comments and reviews in discussion forums and other platforms completes the upper issue. In the exhibition setting as well as in its online representation the mediation of the artwork happens via art information and explanatory material like e.g. exhibition folders or art guides talking about the artworks. Those strategies are applied in general with forms of art that are hardly understandable at the first sight, as it is e.g. Conceptual Art.

As the main characteristics of Internet-based Art the creation of temporary discursive situations enables dialogues between artists, curators, spectators/users, and any other involved or interested person. Such a discussion forum is e.g. “Curating, Communication & Open Source” (21) run by carlos katastrofsky for CONT3XT.NET. This forum was opened to the public before the opening of his solo-exhibition in Denmark in December 2008. In collaboration with the curator, Annette Finnsdottir, the forum was installed to discuss their collaborative working methods publically. The input from the real space to the Internet is called backflowa. This is made possible by the communication within the ‘scene’ and different Internet-affiliated networks or by the creation of possibilities to interact with the artist’s network and other people. In Slovenia a virtual representation of the exhibition — with links to the ‘original’ artworks being on the Internet — was created. Additionally, an interface at the entry page encouraged people to alter the exhibition concept by adding links and therefore to continue the curating and the creation of further Internet-based contexts.

VII.

Today it is still easier to get an entire museum collection on the Internet than to get a single exhibition of Internet-based Art in a museum. Provided that there is a computer with Internet access, Internet-based artworks can be viewed at any time and any location and therefore be left in their own medium of production. But, even if Internet-based Art does not require to be exhibited in the traditional context of institutions, it is the responsibility of curators to find ways to present the multifaceted forms of virtuality in real spaces and to transform them into a discursive setting that even might raise the importance of a whole genre. In return, the integration of art that derives from the Internet in the exhibition programme by juxtaposing it with an art historical and theoretical context, opens the work of museums to questions which are pervading more and more the daily digital life.

In regard of the wide variety of Internet-based Art, the present essay is centered around the fundamental traits Internet-based Art can be described with: the production process, the artwork, and finally the perception as the main characteristics of artistic communication. Despite all proposed methodologies the question of contextualisation strategies must be adapted and broken down to the characteristics of each new Internet-based work of art and can only be generalised in a way that operates with a specific working process. Described as a mixture between traditional museum work and journalistic/editorial practices the result of such a translational process leads into various formats: an exhibition of individually adapted physical objects, as well as a discursive/explanatory accompanying programme combined with the issues of contextualisation mentioned in the text above (IV-VI).

Finally, the entire artistic and curatorial process could lead into an archival portfolio for each of the shown artworks, seen as one step in the continuous progress of development of Internet-based Art. Working like the ‘footprint’ of a virtual artwork in the real world — which keeps the artwork visible even after closing the data file or hiding the object in the stock — (traditional) values are generated and the immaterial finds a way to be materialised.

References:
(1) Verschooren, Karen A. (2007): art. Situating Internet Art in the Traditional Institution for Contemporary Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (master thesis), p. 15., http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/KarenVerschooren2007.pdf
(2) katastrofsky, carlos (2008): display and communication. Curating, Communication & Open Source (online discussion forum). http://cont3xt.net/interference/discuss
(3) Greene, Rachel (2004): Internet Art. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 55 – According to Rachel Greene this first wave of people working during the 1990s is centered around the names Vuc Cosic, Alexej Shulgin, Jodi.org, Heath Bunting and Olia Lialina.
(4) Ault, Julie (2007): Three Snapshots from the Eighties: On Group Material. in: O’Neill, Paul (Ed.): Curating Subjects. Amsterdam: De Appel, Centre for Contemporary Art, p.34.
(5) From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
(6) Zittrain, Jonathan L. (2008): The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. Yale: Yale University Press., http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/6
(7) Andreasen, Soren / Larsen, Lars Bang (2007): The Middleman: Beginning to Think About Mediation. in: O’Neill, Paul (Ed.): Curating Subjects. Amsterdam: De Appel, Centre for Contemporary Art, p.28.
(8) O’Neill, Paul / Fletcher, Annie (2007): Introduction: Paul O’Neill interviewed by Annie Fletcher. in: O’Neill, Paul (Ed.): Curating Subjects. Amsterdam: De Appel, Centre for Contemporary Art, p.13.
(9) ibid.
(10) Arns, Inke (2008): The Serpent’s Coil. Minoritarian Tactics in the Age of Transparency. in: Kastner, Jens / Spörr, Bettina (Eds.): cannot do everything. Civil and social disobedience at the interfaces between art, radical politics, and technology. Münster: Unrast-Verlag, p.133.
(11) cf. Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2006): Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
(12) Benjamin, Walter (1972): Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux parisiens. Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. In: ibid. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. IV/1, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.
(13) Buden, Boris (2006): Cultural Translation: Why it is important and where to start with it, eipcp – european institute for progressive cultural policies. http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0606/buden/en
(14) katastrofsky, carlos (2008): context et al. Curating, Communication & Open Source (online discussion forum)., http://cont3xt.net/interference/discuss
(15) The term “curediting” was first used by CONT3XT.NET for a project in collaboration with the Canada-based online journal Vague Terrain., http://vagueterrain.net/journal11
(16) The exhibition was called YOU OWN ME NOW UNTIL YOU FORGET ABOUT ME. and shown in Slovenia in 2008., http://cont3xt.net/youownmenow
(17) http://codemanipulator.com
(18) http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker
(19) http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net
(20) http://joerg.piringer.net
(21) http://cont3xt.net/interference/discuss