Rethinking Curating

The characteristics of the work of new media art raised here—its distributed nature, its networked existence, its combination of physical and virtual elements—are in some way all contributing factors to how it “behaves” in space and what physical manifestation, what material form, it takes. The next chapter investigates the temporal concerns of the work; here, the fundamental question is how the “where” of presenting art to a public has changed with new media and in particular with the Internet.

Space, Materiality, and the Exhibition

The more new media and public spaces, the more vital and omnipresent the exhibition.

—Jorinde Seijdel, “The Exhibition as Emulator,” 1999

In the early, heady days of the identification of new media art as a category of art practice, much was written about how exhibitions could take place solely on the Internet and how perhaps virtual shows of virtual art would replace actual real-space museums and exhibitions (Mirapaul 2001). The practice of curating Web art, specifically Net art, on the Web remains strong, and Christiane Paul (2003) has written extensively about this phenomenon.¹³ Net art demands the context of the Internet and the browsable World Wide Web, and yet curatorial approaches on how to present it have varied hugely as curators come to grips with what the Internet is and how deeply embedded it is in the work of art they are attempting to show. Should the work be shown solely online or in actual space? Or should it be divorced from its locative context and isolated in the gallery or be left in situ but presented formally? “The Internet remains free and quintessentially anarchic. Formally, the Internet is already more than digital image and hypertext, more than Real Audio sound and Quick Time video imagery, more than edited narrative constructions propelled simultaneously in multiple directions” (Ross 1996, 347).

The first hurdle for curators is to get past what are seen as the usual tropes of the Web—that it is a network for hoarding data and a window in which to look at these data. The curatorial role in relation to exhibiting Net art is often seen as filtering or highlighting or sometimes just list making (as described in relation to artist-led models of practice in chapter 10). What is more interesting is when curators view the Internet as more than just a distribution mechanism—a list of links—for art (as discussed in chapter 7). As Jorinde Seijdel cautioned in 1999, “We see the appearance of World Wide Web versions of exhibitions, cd-rom catalogues of physical exhibitions, physical exhibitions of websites and physical catalogues of cd-roms. The Web is largely a storage and display medium: it launches countless virtual exhibitions, presents itself as a public vehicle for the distribution of knowledge and art, and often imitates the presentation models and ordering principles of exhibitions by dividing information into various cultural sections and categories” (1999). Many of the initial Web-only exhibitions took this form—with pages of links to projects launched on other pages, sometimes in separate windows. As the founder of one of the first Net art galleries online, artist Olia Lialina has commented, “On-line galleries and exhibitions are nothing more than lists, collections of links. On one hand, it fits the nature of many-to-many communication; the Internet itself is also only a collection of a lot of computers, and it works. On the other hand, list by list compilation brings us to an archive-like situation, to a story about keeping and retrieving information. On-line galleries only store facts and demonstrate that a phenomenon exists. They neither create a space, nor really serve it" (1998). Although Lialina noticed these distinctions long before the museums that followed her lead, the so-called browser wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s, along with the existence of a variety of Net artwork that wasn’t cross-platform or that sometimes required specific plug-ins, seemed gradually to result in the demise of Web-only exhibition in an institutional sense (too many details to worry about and not enough curatorial control?).¹⁴ Instead, the move—by artists, with curators following—has been toward physical installations of Web-driven projects.

With many museums having abandoned their curatorial remit to commission, collect, and exhibit Web art, what lies before us now is a litany of dated projects or neglected interfaces and platforms, with only a few stellar shining lights to guide us and inform historians of this field, such as Steve Dietz’s exhibition Beyond Interface (1998).¹⁵ Both Christiane Paul and Dietz have written about their curatorial forays in presenting Net-based art and their move toward more direct contact with artists to realize their Net-driven pieces in physical spaces. As Paul commented in relation to her exhibition Data Dynamics (2001),¹⁶

I believe there is no one rule or model of [presenting this type of art in physical space]. I would always decide on a case by case basis. There are works where I would say, leave them alone, put up a kiosk or a computer with a monitor and let people interact with them one on one. I don’t believe that projection is necessarily the best solution because it can end up creating an experience similar to watching TV—one person having the remote control and 50 people watching in the background—that could really hurt the piece. All of the net art pieces in Data Dynamics are shown as projection-installations but mainly because all of them make sense in physical space or already have that component. (in Cook 2001c)

Many exhibitions have struggled with the presentation of Web-based art or Net art, and many attempts have been made to find a common physical platform for what essentially can be a simple html page of links. Widely cited is the example of Jeffrey Shaw’s The Net.Art Browser (1999) for the exhibition Net_condition.¹⁷ Extensively criticized at the time by visitors and artists alike for its clunky look and feel and for its overdesigned presentation, the “interface” consisted of a touchscreen that could be guided along a long wall, linking in to different projects at points along the wall. Artist Vuk Ćosić (2001a) likened it to Maya Lin’s Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, D.C., suggesting that the curators had made an inadvertent point about the death of Net art.

Given that Web works can be accessed from anywhere anyone has a computer connected to the Internet, the question “Why put this immaterial-seeming work into the gallery?” is raised repeatedly (Mirapaul 2001). Any form of locating the work for people to access it should be welcomed, although curators’ tactics vary enormously.

Art on the Internet—it’s not that it’s hard to understand, but it’s hard to find for some people and it’s hard to contextualize. Unless you go to Rhizome or some place that contextualizes the art for you, in some cases I’m not sure you’re going to understand what you’re looking at. I do think the gallery context has a benefit in terms of audience and potential for didactic material. I mean, I think you’re right—there’s no better way to present this work but on this wacky new thing called the World Wide Web. It’s huge—I hear it’s really taking off. I think Rhizome’s Artbase 101 was a good example of physical installation of Internet art. They had a flat screen monitor that showed a “recording“ of a piece . . . but they were also presented in their Web form in the gallery. So there was both this more physical presence and a network presence—which I thought was really engaging. It can exist in both of these spaces and both of these spaces are equally important. One is for you if you just want to stand back and see it. And another one is if you want to delve deeper into a project. (C. Jones 2006b)

Ćosić (2001a) suggested that there is a “minimum analytical unit problem” for curators—a term from archaeology meaning the minimum number of fragments that might suggest an ancient object. The CRUMB Web site has gathered some fragments that might be pieced together to inform a unique solution for individual artworks, including single or group viewing, beanbags or benches, desks or counters, locked-down browsers or offline locally held files (see also the discussion on display in chapter 7). Each fragment must suit the artwork itself and be flexible enough to deal with emerging media. As Patrick Lichty writes,

In a show that is based solely around the concept that art of the nomadic body is even more fragmented than the Net, the ideal model would be to give a person a Palm, a Cassiopeia [both types of personal digital assistant or PDA technology] and a WAP [wireless application protocol] phone and tell them to curl up and knock themselves out. However, the logistics for this would be problematic to say the least, as there would be guaranteed some loss of devices. In addition, the concept of a nomadic show once again begs for networked gallery space only. (2001)

In exhibitions of Net art, museums have to consider not only the computer and connection settings, but also the space of the gallery where the installation is sited, which has raised a debate about lounges alongside all the usual decisions curators have to make about the presentation of the screen-based work, such as, Should it be in the form of a kiosk, a wall-mounted display, or a revolving door?¹⁸ We address the specific questions regarding lounges in chapter 7, but the example of the exhibition Art Entertainment Network serves to open up the discussion here.

Exhibition Example: Let’s Entertain and Art Entertainment Network, Walker Art Center

In 2000, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis mounted an ambitious international exhibition dealing with the idea of the spectacle in contemporary art, Let‘s Entertain. The curator, Philippe Vergne, was interested in new media and design, and drew on the knowledge of his fellow curators in other departments at the Walker, going so far as to ask them to contribute elements to the expansive group show. The new media curator at the Walker, Steve Dietz, simultaneously curated an online exhibition of work with a similar theme, Art Entertainment Network (AEN), and commissioned design collective Antenna to create a “portal” or physical interface to the online show for exhibition within the gallery-based show.

In retrospect, AEN appears as a rare example of a curator making an inspired decision not to disadvantage the works of Net-based art by leaving them out of the physical space of the museum altogether. However, it also shows how to avoid two other common problems with presenting Net-based art in the gallery: either interfering with the aesthetic of the works by forcing them into a generic exhibition presentation (a room of computers, as was installed at Documenta X, as discussed in chapter 9, or a showy projection of the exhibition’s Web site for one visitor to click through while a dozen or more look on, as was the case at the Whitney Biennial 2000) or hampering them by divorcing them from the context of the Web entirely and installing them on individual machines, local servers, and sometimes even offline. Antenna‘s portal wasn’t perfect, but it did function in a way that not only allowed individual access to each of the works in AEN with a minimum number of “click throughs,” but it also held its own in the gallery next to some rather flamboyant works of art-for example, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work Untitled (Golden) (1995), a gold-plated beaded curtain, and Piotr Ulanski’s Dance Floor (1996), an illuminated disco dance floor. Dietz writes in his very comprehensive essay about “interfacing the digital” and the making of material installations from diverse distributed Net-based practices:

One of the challenges of presenting digital art is that the context and the work are generally displayed via the same means: the screen. How to differentiate between the metadata and the experience? One strategy is simply to open the project in a new window. . . . The complaint from artists about such a strategy is that it creates a curatorial gateway that viewers must pass through before getting to the heart of the matter, the actual experience. . . . Even with a painting exhibition, while there is reams of research about the best length, tone, style, etc. for didactics, the working assumption is that most people look at a painting first and then read the label—the help file, so to speak—if they want more information. Even when net art exhibitions present the artwork first, it is often because the only curatorial context is a list of links, which is an equally unbalanced approach. . . . [Antenna’s design] was appropriate to the concept of the online interface—as a portal. It also didn’t assume that the goal of the interface was to create a comfortable browsing situation for hours of enjoyment. Like much gallery behavior it was designed for more casual browsing. A holder next to the didactic label contained printed bookmarks, which visitors could take and use to later log on to the site at their convenience and in their favorite viewing position. (2003)

Although the intangible online works had been carefully selected and “installed” in specially commissioned spaces both on the Web¹⁹ and materially and tangibly in the gallery through the portal, their place within the framework of the parallel exhibition Let’s Entertain wasn’t secure. The Antenna portal was not added to the checklist of artworks traveling with the exhibition to subsequent venues and so physically didn’t go with the show; as a result, the physical, material connection between the two exhibitions—AEN online and Let’s Entertain offline—was lost.²⁰

Does it matter? AEN is still available online, but the physical static works in Let’s Entertain have long been dispersed, returned to their owners and collections. Yet the photographs documenting the physical exhibition of the mostly static artworks are now held up as examples of interesting installation design, whereas the online exhibition, with its clever programming and sympathetic interface, seems forgotten and neglected or perhaps considered just a remnant of a particular historical moment in Web interface design.

This example demonstrates that there are very different ways to include in physical exhibitions those digital networked art forms that are based on a single computer screen: from high-tech, designed interfaces such as that of Antenna’s portal to more low-tech and do-it-yourself approaches, such as putting a computer terminal on a desk within the exhibition and printing small cards with the Web address for viewers to take home to look up the work online. Of course, the variability of presenting dematerialized, networked art in physical space applies not just to the furniture surrounding the work’s presentation, but also to its active, engaged inclusion in the framework of the show as a whole, as the example of the Art Entertainment Network exhibition demonstrates. In the exhibition Use nor Ornament (2000), three Web—based artworks were commissioned from the New York artists group M.River and T.Whid Art Association (MTAA).²¹ The curatorial decision was made not to launch the new works at the time of the opening of the show, but instead at two-week intervals throughout the run of the show, anticipating that the audience would return to the Web site and the exhibition repeatedly to see each one in turn.

Plenty of artworks also use immaterial network data but have substantiations that exist in physical space as an intrinsic part of the work and are thus not just documentary in nature. Lisa Jevbratt and C5 have installed their database-driven piece 1:1 (1999)- which maps the Internet protocol (IP) addresses that make up the Internet and displays them through five different “map” interfaces—as a computer terminal where audience members can access the work and use the interfaces to query the database online. It has recently been shown both as a giant vinyl billboard image of one of the interfaces (Every), which functions as a kind of charcoal rubbing or impression of the Internet, like a map in real scale but missing any legend to make it useful, and as digital printouts of images of each of the five other interfaces.²²

The question of translation in transmission is raised again here. Consider, for instance, the example of different strategies to exhibit the art outputs of irational both in the exhibition The Art Formerly Known as New Media (2005) and in the group’s retrospective exhibition at Hartware in Dortmund (which toured to the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts in 2007).²³ In both instances, irational’s site-specific, process-led, socially engaged practice was translated into other media for exhibition in a gallery space. These media ranged from printouts from the Web site and a timeline of projects marked in chalk on a wall—sized chalkboard to archival documentation in the form of photographs and videos to online computers isolating separate projects for visitor interaction. This approach also reflected the characteristics of the work itself. For instance, one of irational’s projects, Heath Bunting’s Status Project (2005–, ongoing), uses Boolean logic and a database to chart all the possible routes between one type of state-recognized identification, such as a senior citizen’s bus pass or a tenancy agreement, and another type, such as a passport. The project takes the physical form of questionnaires, booklets, visualizations and mappings, and complete proofs of identity for sale online. “The variability and modularity of new media works implies that there usually are various possible presentation scenarios: artworks are often reconfigured for the specific space and presented in very different ways from venue to venue. However the changes in the curatorial role tend to become most obvious in online curation, which by nature unfolds in a hyperlinked contextual network” (Paul 2006, 86).

The methodology at work in the curating of online projects is often entirely conditioned not by any external or institutional constraints that the curator might encounter, but rather by the fluidity of the online working environment—the interconnected communicative space of the World Wide Web—and as such is more collaborative than controlled, subject to the back and forth of multiparty discussion.

Space, Materiality, and the Audience

Artefacts and even space itself can be “cyberized” by programming that simulates some other space, time or agency. . . . An electronic and virtual art may work through metaphors that are realised across different degrees of virtuality and materiality.

—Margaret Morse, Virtualities Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, 1998

The challenges of presenting Web-only works of art, not just in physical space but also in cyberspace, are also found in presenting other forms of new media art, considering that computer systems are capable of simulating and representing many types of lived experience. Distinguishing Web-based art from the rest of the cultural production found on the Internet is a challenge for an audience member not familiar with what he or she is looking at or for. Works of art that deal specifically with this melding of virtual and physical space are that much harder to “frame” for a viewer’s experience. So how does one present works of art whose primary characteristic is the simulation of another, not physically tangible reality?

Works of simulation-based art, such as immersive video games, are a challenge to present because they are premised on the idea that the awareness of the mediation should be the viewer’s primary experience. Aside from their physical interfaces—the headset and joystick—virtual reality gaming environments prioritize the mediation of digital intangible “information,” and the viewer encounters the work as a “user” making choices affecting how the experience unfolds. Each encounter is unique, so the curatorial role in the presentation of this kind of immersive installation may simply be in the entering and exiting of the mediated space. At the National Gallery of Canada, for instance, users of Char Davies’s immersive installation Ephémère (1998) had to sign disclaimer forms and be coached in the physical actions required to navigate the digital landscape.

Many forms of simulation work are time based, determined by the artist rather than by the viewer, and take on the form of event-based “experiences.” Rod Dickinson’s Nocturne (2006) was the recreation, at an empty racetrack on the outer reaches of London, of the soundscape of the standoff between the FBI and the Branch Dividians at Waco, Texas, in 1993. Seemingly immaterial in that the art work is aural, the setting and the conditions of the time and place of the experience were carefully planned and staged by the artist in collaboration with the curator. The audience is therefore the direct point where the work’s intangibility is made material. This isn’t the same thing as saying that the audience is the point at which the work gains meaning or value—which is true of any artwork—but rather that the conditions are constructed for a circuit to be completed by the viewer’s action or presence. This was the case with the installation Mountain Top (2005) by artists Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg (referred to in chapter 1). Their closed-circuit video camera captured the presence of people in the gallery, thereby completing the illusion for visitors to the Web site that gallery-goers were on top of a digitally crafted mountain rather than in a gallery in the United Kingdom.

As discussed in the previous chapter about user-generated content online and the possibilities of direct participation on the Web, here the question is how curators can best facilitate participation in these distributed, immaterial, variable projects (also discussed in chapter 5). Vivienne Gaskin comments: “To me in some ways [reenactment is] creating a virtual environment . . . an environment where everything is a signifier that will take you back to that original event, and nothing can be a distraction. . . . That’s an active suspension of disbelief, this isn’t a way of tricking people or a way of conning them, but the events only work once the audience believe that they are—or they deliberately believe—that they are part of an active event” (2004).

Space, Materiality, and the Institution

Caitlin Jones: Your work exists in multiple formats: as an object and as installation, but also as pure code that you freely distribute over the Internet. Now that you’re starting to sell work in the art market, what does this multiplicity mean to a collector or an institution that buys it? Is it something that you think about? Do you really care?

Cory Arcangel: Not really. [Laughs] It just means it’s better, right? That the work will exist in all these different worlds, that it is circulating in all these other forms—and, especially valuable, it will be circulating on the Internet. So you know eight trillion more people are going to know what the project is—and they’ve actually been able to see it [not just a photo of it]. Which, for me, was the whole point in the first place.

—in Caitlin jones, “My Art World Is Bigger Than Your Art World,” 2005a

Museum institutions are built on valuing objects and maintaining collections. What does that mean, however, when the work is seemingly immaterial and has no tangible value other than that of exchange? With conceptual art practice, the documentation became the commodity. The history of video art demonstrates other peculiar, ill-fitting attempts to make unique an infinitely reproducible material (as discussed in chapter 4). Matthew Barney’s films are sold in an edition of ten, but come with sculptural installations—display cases—that function as unique museum objects. When curator Caitlin Jones asked artist Cory Arcangel to comment on this tactic in relation to his own work, his answer was suggestive of what is an extensive debate with regard to Net art—namely, creating the right kind of space for it. “Net art seems to call for a ‘museum without walls,’ a parallel, distributed, living information space that is open to interferences by artists, audiences, and curators—a space for exchange, collaborative creation and presentation that is transparent and flexible” (Paul 2006, 81). The striving for a space that is “transparent and flexible” has led a number of museums to build “lounges” into their galleries, though it is disputable how successful these lounges are (an issue addressed in chapter 7). As curator Matt Locke commented in relation to the Tech Nicks festival (2001), “The Site gallery, who have recently built a gorgeous new white-cube space that is superb for showing photography and installations, had used informal furniture (including bean—bags!), artists at work, magazines, books, etc, but no matter how informal and accessible it was supposed to be, the austere architecture made it look like an exhibit, not a place you were likely to get dirty and play around in” (2001b). And according to Ittai Bar-Joseph,

As an artist, I personally find the idea of exhibiting my work in a “spacy,” “soft,” “comfy,” “funky” space quite intimidating. Every artist wants their work exhibited in a way that the presentation serves the work and not the other way around. Funky, cool “lounges” or “bars” might be very compelling and inviting to sit and hang out in, but tend to overshadow the works. It is difficult to give an artwork the proper semi neutral environment in a dominating place over-designed in order to achieve a certain “effect.” (2001)

Many other types of art organizations have emerged as a result of the need to engage with the immateriality of the artwork and a desire to present new media art in a formally appropriate fashion, such as on the World Wide Web. As technology develops, platforms for engagement that position themselves against the necessity of presenting work in an institution, such as Rhizome and low-fi Locator, are increasing in number and kind.²⁴ For instance, hundreds of artists are now choosing either to release their audio and video works—or possibly a “documentary after the fact” or advance promotional material about their work—through online platforms such as the iTunes music store and the video-exchange site YouTube. “Most shows of Internet art have failed to translate [the networks that exist for the participants] into the gallery. (Galleries are using a different operating system)” (Medosch 2002a).

Space, Materiality, and the Curator

The [so-called] Xerox Book . . . was perhaps one of the more interesting [projects] because it was the first where I proposed a series of “requirements” for the project, concerning the use of a standard size paper and the amount of pages, the “container” within which the artist was asked to work. What I was trying to do was standardize the conditions of exhibition with the idea that the resulting differences in each artist’s project or work would be precisely what the artist’s work was about. It was an attempt to consciously standardize, in terms of exhibition, book or project, the conditions of production underlying the exhibition process.

— Seth Siegelaub interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2008

As we have seen with the descriptions of the conceptual art exhibitions of the 1960s such as Siegelaub’s Xerox Book and the 1970 Software exhibition, with the dematerialization of the art object came a foregrounding of the curator’s role because someone had to select what of the seeming nothingness could be shown and in what form. Within new media art practice, this emphasis has led to the common characterization of the curator as a “filter.” If, indeed, the work in question is wholly immaterial, then the decisions not only about what and what not to include, but also about eventual presentation, naturally condition the work’s resultant aesthetics. In the 1960s, selection criteria and the curator’s role were not as fully developed as they are seen to be now—in part because of the overt political angle with which most conceptual art was imbued. For instance, there was a great debate around mail art that all works sent had to be included—no jurying could take place (Altshuler 1994; Saper 2001). It is far more common now for curators to be appraised for their editorial skills. The curator’s personality and taste has come to the forefront far more. With new media art, the selection criteria is similarly nuanced, though less determined by curatorial whim and more likely conditioned by available resources—space, technology—and by the preordained context for presentation—online or off. Steve Dietz writes:

In the call for submissions, I wrote “b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e is an online exhibition of juried and curated net art projects for which the Net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/experiencing/participating.” . . . We combined a modified Duchampian philosophy—it’s net art if the artist intends it to be—with an end-user perspective—no matter how integral the Net was to the project, if a network connection alone wasn’t sufficient to {insert your definition of an art experience here}, then it didn’t make it. The prime regret with this latter condition is that it precluded many fascinating, online, real-time, performative experiences that don’t really work asynchronously. You had to be there then, and we didn’t see a huge difference between documentation of such an event and documentation of a painting exhibition, although the two original events are obviously very different. (2003)

The curatorial politics of exhibiting dematerialized and network-based art are limited not just to its selection, but also to its installation. Yet at the time of the first mail art exhibitions in major museums, criticism was leveled at the curators’ judgment: “What you and I might deem fit for a wastebasket, the Whitney Museum of American Art judges worthy of its exhibition space,” wrote Hilton Kramer (in Held 2005, 97). For Net-based art, this debate isn’t as significant, in part because exhibiting it on a museum’s Web site doesn’t attract as much attention as giving up valuable real estate on the gallery floor does.

Summary: Dematerialized or Just Distributed?

These tendencies are even more legible in curation that undertakes to deal with art that is substantively information-based and not traceable to a single authoring subjectivity, like most software and net art. But does this then portend the dissolution of curatorial practice into these forms that it is embracing?

—Marina Vishmidt, “Twilight of the Widgets,” 2006b

Describing the telecommunications projects on view at Ars Electronica in 1982, Reinhard Braun says that the exhibition The World in 24 Hours was “used as both the coordinating platform and a medium for the artistic projects themselves. Differences between process and the product or between the creative medium and its presentation no longer made any sense” (2005, 80).

As we have seen, new media art isn’t necessarily always immaterial, although elements of its computability and connectivity can be invisible to the eye. Similarly, conceptual and systems art of the 1960s and 1970s posited that the idea was more important than the form, making the medium of the work often immaterial. One of the links among conceptual art practices of the 1960s, networked and systems-based art practices of the 1970s, telecommunications works of the early 1980s, and Internet-based art of the 1990s is the approach to the question of the dissolution of the autonomy of the art object (Lippard 1973). This approach has then, by extension, had to address a critique of the institutions that present art and that thus precondition its autonomy. The striving toward autonomy is, some argue, ever more prevalent, perhaps even a prerequisite, for works of new media, which exist in a technological context shared by other media and entertainment that have educational and other commercial objectives. In this, it would seem that no matter the form of the artwork, the medium never matters as much as the context. However, the more interconnected the work to its context, the greater the change in the way the work of art might be curated or approached by a curator.

A consideration of conceptual, virtual, sonic, and ambient art suggests that no matter the work’s material, the possibilities of its place of presentation, in terms of distribution, have changed with the advent of new communication technologies. The work itself is now distributed across space and time (transmission and participation at a distance is addressed in chapter 5). What happens when the curator attempts to adopt a methodology in line with the work? It is not physically possible for a curator to be in many locations at the same time, and thus more collaboration with local partners (or what Iliyana Nedkova and others have called “guides on the side” or “guides onsite”) is needed. Curators who are truly interested in the decentralized, dematerialized activity of network-based arts have tried to change their curatorial tactics to be more in line with the artists, even if that means being increasingly misaligned with the traditional institutions for the presentation of art.

13. Paul outlines models of online curating, from online exhibitions (organized by museums, artists, curators) to systems or platforms of presentation “in which the public or software system assumes a curatorial function” (2003, 89). We discuss this topic further in chapter 10. ↩
14. The so-called browser wars occurred between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer in the early 1990s in their attempts to gain the greatest market share; the wars included not only races to add new features, but also a number of antitrust legal debates. ↩
15. Beyond Interface was curated for the 1998 “Museums and the Web” conference (which subsequently has not invited explicit curatorial projects for its annual meetings). See Dietz 1998 and Packer 2006. ↩
16. Data Dynamics was seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 22 March to 10 June 2001. For information about the exhibition, see http://whitney.org/datadynamics/, Mirapaul 2001, and Paul 2007. ↩
17. Net_condition (1999) was curated by Peter Weibel and others and shown at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Media Centre d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona, and at NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo. See http://www.zkm.de/netcondition. ↩
18. Matt Mirapaul wrote in the New York Times: “A defining characteristic of online art is that it can be seen anywhere by anyone with an Internet—connected computer. But even though cyberspace is a vast, all-access gallery, the artworks that are ‘hung’ there are usually experienced by alone viewer sitting in front of a single monitor. Now that museums are commissioning Internet-based art projects, they are confronting a digital dilemma: how to present virtual, small-screen art in a real-world, public space. One solution is to recreate the one-on-one environment with a bank of computers, but this risks turning the museum into an expensively decorated cybercafe. An alternative is to project a virtual artwork on a wall, and while one visitor points and clicks, others can view the interactions. This is rather like watching your spouse change television channels with the remote control” (2001). ↩
19. The Web site design was made in collaboration with artist Vivian Selbo and could be customized by the visitor in terms of color, layout, and audio soundtrack: http://aen.walkerart.org. ↩
20. Interestingly, the same was the case with the Raqs Media Collective and Atelier Bow-Wow’s project Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai (TAS), commissioned by Steve Dietz for the Walker Art Center exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms (2003) to show the online work of Raqs and other artists. This exhibition toured to other museum venues also, but without TAS as part of the checklist. ↩
21. The exhibition Use nor Ornament was cocurated by Sarah Cook and took place at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland, United Kingdom. Further information about the exhibition is online at http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/usenor/unohome.html. Information about MTAA’s work can be found on its Web site at http://www.mteww.com. ↩
22. Lisa Jevbratt and C5’s work 1:1 (1999) consists of an IP database containing the IP addresses to all hosts on the World Wide Web. The project uses the database to create five interfaces for navigating the Web and to generate a new topography of the Web. The project was included in the online component of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Further information about the project is available on the Web site at http://www.c5corp.com/projects/1to1/. As noted on the Web site, the five interfaces are (1) hierarchical: the Web as directory structure; (2) every: a complete mapping of all Web servers in the database; (3) petri: clusters of networks and navigational traces; (4) random: randomly generated IP addresses from the database; and (5) excursion: access to the Web’s unsearched places. ↩
23. irational is a loose collective of artists based mostly in the United Kingdom who have documented their work on a shared server since 1996 (http://www.irational.org). They describe themselves as “an international system for deploying ‘irational’ information, services and products for the displaced and roaming” (from the Web site). ↩
24. See http://www.rhizome.org and http://www.low-fi.org.uk. ↩