>>Community Report COMMUNITY REPORT 2001: Susan Hazan Susan Hazan Curator of New Media, Israel Museum, Jerusalem NET>COM.ORG.MUSEUM Since the Duchamp benchmark, artworks have slipped out of the painterly horizon or sculptured form and there probably isn’t a substance on the planet, animal, mineral, or vegetable, legal or illegal that hasn’t been incorporated into a contemporary art exhibition at one time or another. While there is nothing intrinsically new about new media projects online or off, this has been a year of the proliferation of online net-art projects, but more importantly, of the institutionalization of these projects. While digitally-born projects have been out there for many years, this is perhaps the first year that we are witness to the museum or art gallery acting as the framing device for online projects, with tremendous implications for these institutions concerning net real estate, web architecture, curatorial methodology, vocabularies, conservation and documentation. Where once the art exhibition has remained an ontologically recognizable category, now plastic and performing arts no longer fall into two distinct categories while at the same time, they seamlessly blend into the intertextuality of television documentaries, advertising, academic discourse, literature, action movies, print media, historical and political discourse that contributed to our media-scape. Critical theory, with its roots in Saussurian linguistics and Barthes’ exploration of the linguistic message and iconic message has been instructive in analyzing the circulatory nature of these experiences, but as digitally-born, networked projects are introduced and absorbed into the institutionalized frameworks of art galleries and museums, these new articulations now demand further critical exploration. Modifications of the ICOM Statutes were recently adopted by the General Assembly in Barcelona on Friday 6th July as (viii) cultural centers and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity). This modification clearly brings into focus the realization that museums are as much about digital creativity as well as the historical mandate of preserving, exhibiting and interpretation of material collections. Where essentially, the museum was about space-based experience, and material collections, new media architecture is closer to the time-based experience of the traditional media world, and the intertextuality of mediaspace. Not only are these artifacts now viewed in vitrio, in vivo, usually on a standard monitor, digitally-born art projects are essentially viewed in the same way either from a museum portal or when accessed from their home domain. What then is role of the institution that is hosting the project taking on in the public sphere? This brief statement addresses a few of the web, location-based and hybrid exhibitions produced by a number of leading art institutions and how they have made their online screen debuts in 2001. SFMOMA launched its 010101:ART.IN.Technological.Times, <http://010101.sfmoma.org/> on January 1st, with the gallery component that opened on March 3, which according to their web promotion was to be one of the most ambitious exhibitions in its history, a show filled with animated "paintings," virtual reality art, cyborg sculptures and other technological creations. From the moment it opened, one minute after midnight on January 1, 2001, it proved to be a popular show, with audiences forming long lines to go in. In spite of the fact that some of the interactives, interacted less satisfyingly than the producers had intended, most visitors seemed to find the show novel and engaging, with some even going as far to say that it was an exhilarating experience (Medium Isn't the Message; Art Is by Jason Spingarn-Koff) <http://www.wired.com/>. Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, curated by Steve Dietz, of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and curator of Beyond Interface and Shock of the View produced a traveling show of some 40 works by 25 artists that opened on its first leg of the tour at the San Francisco Art Institute on February 7. "About half the works are world premieres, said Dietz, "and many of the others are "classics" which are rarely seen. The web-site <http://telematic.walkerart.org/> reflects not only the real and the hybrid elements of the gallery space, but also places the cornucopia of net works of the emerging net art medium into historical context. In March, BitStreams was unveiled in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art, including some 30 sculptors, painters and video artists, as well as 15 to 20 sound artists exhibited in especially designed sound stations. This type of project was not new to the Whitney who in 1994, was the first major institution to collect a work of Net art, with Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence. <http://ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/davis/Sentence/sentence1.html> and is an institution that has showcased such projects over many years. The long waited Guggenheim Virtual Museum <http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/virtual/virtual_museum.html> seems to be more a virtuality than a reality at this moment. Designed by Asymptote and billed as a “Virtual Museum that will emerge from the fusion of information space, art, commerce, and architecture to become the first important virtual building of the 21st century”. While the .org version is promoted as a morphing three-dimensional palace for digital art and architecture that will exist only on the Web, it seems to have taken second place at the moment to the Guggenheim’s ambitious project, Guggenheim.com. In their legal notice, we are admonished to use this site with responsibly and treat other visitors with respect and as innocent surfers, we are granted a non-exclusive license to browse the content on the site. (I hope that I haven’t offended anyone by taking the name Guggenheim.com™ in vain) and please note that I have not included a link to their site as I haven’t yet notified them of my intentions. No doubt, this impressive net real estate hybrid or .org and .com will cause not a little confusion in the days to come, but with the integration of the pending .museum status now under construction, (see <http://musedoma.museum>) I suspect that we have a rather bumpy road ahead of us. To return to my theme of digitally-born art/web projects, there have been interesting developments with the Tate, UK over recent months. "Uncomfortable Proximity" <http://www.tate.org.uk> at the Tate Modern was one of the first net projects this institution has hosted, and seems to have now become a regular feature. Where the 'real' Tate provides floor plans, the Tate Mongrel Project, created by Harwood, took us under the floor of the Tate and their latest online showcase, includes the work of a contemporary artist in the Collection. Pharmacy, an installation by Damien Hirst, <http://www.tate.org.uk/pharmacy/default.htm> can be seen at Tate Modern, in the Still Life/Object/Real Life suite. This online project has been developed in collaboration with the artist and offers an IPIX rendering of the installation, first exhibited at the Cohen Gallery in New York in 1992, and subsequently in New York in 1992, at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, 1994 and at Tate in 1999. What Do You Want To Do With It? <http://www.ica.org.uk/season/ADigitalFestival/?version=1> is a Digital Festival that took place at the ICA in London in November, and was featured as a major and promiscuous festival, full of extraordinary music, design, exhibitions, talks and film - all fuelled by the digital revolution. The range of activities is too comprehensive to include here, but as with all digital online art projects it does raise some interesting questions about documentation for archivists. One interesting, interactive project is Tim Etchell's 'surrender control' SMS project, a series of 75 instructions sent via text messages over 5 days….. one minute … I just received message no. 49 and I need to go and tend to my cell phone. The list of net projects currently vying for attention for art-lovers online is too long to be included here and without the ambience of a concrete museum and the sensation of mingling with other real art lovers, this has become a very solitary experience. This is remedied to a certain extend by the profusion of online discussions that have evolved in the field, with Rhizome the obvious leader. Rhizome, <http://rhizome.org/> is supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and is filtered by Alex Galloway (alex@rhizome.org). Please note the .org, but remember that checks may be sent to Rhizome.org For new media curators, CRUMB, <http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/phase2/> is an impressive curatorial resource that sets out specifically “to help curators meet the challenges found where curatorial practice and new media overlap”. This site aims to ‘help independent and institutionally affiliated curators, producers, technicians, facilitators, directors, and commissioners’ and invites members to join the dynamic discussion at <http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/new-media-curating.html>. This is a productive and dynamic forum that goes a long way in hammering out the issues that have evolved for professionals over recent months. But if, for some reason you are lost, are unable to find the Wired World's Gallery at the National Museum of Photography Film & Television, in Leeds, UK <http://www.nmpft.org.uk/guide/galleries/wiredworlds.asp>, or the internationally renown ZKM in Karlsruhe, < http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/> the world's largest specialized institution of electronic art and media technologies, there is always the map! Rather the maps! Online histories of digitally-born art projects are springing up all over the place. Randall Packer’s, From Wager to Virtual Reality charts the evolution of the discipline through "the aspirations of artists, scientists, writers, musicians, and cultural renegades <http://www.artmuseum.net/>. The Guggenheim’s Cyperatlas will guide you through the pixels http://cyberatlas.guggenheim.org/home/index.html as Dietz’s Telematics Timeline <http://telematic.walkerart.org/timeline/index.html> attempts to highlight some of the historical technological innovations through time. A newly launched electronic guide to all you ever needed to know about online art is now available at the Whitney. Let the Net Art Idea Line map you through the lines of thought through time! http://www.whitney.org/artport/idealine/. While discovering so many landmarks of the digital artworks strung together so aesthetically does serve to clarify the impressive accomplishments by artist, designers, and engineers through time, but it also serves to challenge the framing device, first as the archive as artwork and secondly an artwork in itself that is hosted by the Whitney. This has been a year of new challenges for net real estate brokers, web architects, curators, conservators, and archivists and from where I am surfing; this only seems to be the tip of the iceberg.