Memo from the World
In the Driver's Seat: Internet Art

by Michael Geisert

I did not know what to expect when I went to the Whitney Biennial Internet Art Show. I arrived to find a large screen on the wall in a dark room with flat wood benches. The computer with the Internet connection was to the left of the door with a mouse, keyboard, and a flat LCD panel that mirrored the large screen on the far wall. First, a young woman took control of the system. She had to reboot the Windows system to get Netscape to run properly, and then she found her way to the site she had helped work on, to show her friends.

It felt awkward transferring a solitary endeavor into a spectator sport. She drove for a while, and whispered to her friends about the site. After a short time she left with her friends. I took the controls next and played with the Fakeshop site that she had left up. I enjoyed Fakeshop - it looks as though it's taking over your computer - all these windows pop up, and droning sounds begin to play. You gradually realize you do have some control over it - you can close the windows, for example.

Digital still from Fakeshop, 1997 - present
(www.fakeshop.com). Website.
Core members: Jeff Gompertz, Prema Murthy, Eugene Thacker. Image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art,
2000 Biennial Exhibition 23 March - 4 June 2000.

Then I moved on to the Ouija board site, but I was stalled here at a window asking me to sign in before going any further - not something I felt my captive audience wanted to wait for - so I moved on to another site. Having to sign in really put me off when I revisited the site later. The site appears to be like a Ouija board; as you hold or move your mouse, the pointer moves around the board.

I began to look at Grammatron, but it was such an involved site I didn't feel I could make just a casual visit, so I left. Superbad was wild - a graphics freakout. Darcy Steinke's Blindspot, a short story for the web, was very well designed and attractive.

Digital still from Superbad, 1995-present.
(www.superbad.com) Website.
Image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art,
2000 Biennial Exhibition, 23 March - 4 June 2000.

The artmark site is designed to replicate a commercial site, though subvertingthe corporate consumer culture. (It was also cross-linked to www.revbilly.com and the church of stopshopping.)

I felt strange and self-conscious having people watch as I made choices on which sites to see. I left soon, deciding I would rather do the site-viewing from the comfort of my own home. I then wound my way downstairs and found, bolted to a counter, some laptop machines running the Whitney site. I had to reboot a machine to get out of a system security lock, just to get into Windows and Netscape. For such a great service of the 21st Century, there are still hardware interface problems that non-technical people find intimidating. A person sat down next to me and proceeded to log on to her German e-mail account. She did not look at any other sites, all the while trying to figure out the trackpad on the laptop.

Should museums provide free access to web art? Yes. Computer banks at the museum can take visitors directly to the Internet art, locking out those just looking for their e-mail - there are plenty of places to do that these days. The cost of access could vary by museum, as it does now: some are free, some suggest a donation, and some are fee-based. People might subscribe to a particular institution because of its authority in a particular style of art, just as they do now: People might go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a certain period of art or to a downtown museum for contemporary art. Or, making an analogy to art galleries, access to some of the art would be free, but you'd need permission to see the rest of the work the dealer keeps in the back room, including special pieces the artist may have done on commission. There would be some Internet art accessible to anyone on the web, with additional, deeper layers provided only to those who have paid for the privilege of visiting the inner sanctum.

About the Author:

Michael Geisert is an art and technology buff who works on cemeteries as a sideline. His favorite color is linneus, brilliant blue.

Resources:

The Whitney's introductory page for the Biennial's online art can be found at: http://www.whitney.or g/exhibition/2kb/internet.html

The individual works are:

Mark Amerika, Grammatron, 1997 -
http://www.grammatron.com

Lew Baldwin, Redsmoke, 1995 -
http://www.redsmoke.com

Ben Benjamin, Superbad, 1995 -
http://www.superbad.com

Fakeshop (core members Jeff Gompertz, Prema Murthy, Eugene Thacker), Fakeshop, 1997-99
http://www.fakeshop.com

Ken Goldberg, Ouija 2000, 2000
http://ouija.berkeley.edu

(r)(tm)ark ("artmark"), (r)(tm)ark, 1997 -
http://www.rtmark.com

John F.Simon, Jr., Every Icon, 1997
http://www.numeral.com/everyicon.ht ml

Darcy Steinke, Blindspot, 1999
http://adaweb.walkerart.org /project/blindspot

Annette Weintraub, Sampling Broadway, 1999
http://www.turbulence .org/Works/broadway/index.html

Therese Schwartz writes in this Newsletter about the moving pieces included in the Biennial. Her look at painting and sculpture at the Whitney Biennial appeared in the April Newsletter.

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For a QuickTime movie of a discussion on Internet art with Maxwell Anderson, the Whitney's Director, and Lawrence Rinder, one of the Biennial curators; or to play a movie of the Biennial Curators' Symposium, held at the Whitney on 19 March 2000; or to hear from some of the Internet artists, go to

http://www.voila.com/features/whit ney/