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Human Factors 

by Michael Nicolella

The hype of the digital age has met its match in the hype-mongering over the coming of the year 2000, with all of those zeroes opening great drains within crucial software systems, when their internal clocks go blank after the transition from '99 to '00. Television's recent Y2K The Movie featured the world on the dawn of 1 January 2000. There is panic in Times Square when the lights go out, during a wave of nuclear meltdown searing the face of the earth. The film became difficult to watch: when a Swedish reactor had melted down, a monitor in a bunker actually flashed "Scandanavia." Sic.

My own internal clock going blank due to human error, I turned on my PC and went to http://www.diacenter.org/rooftop/webproj/index.html , the Dia Center's online art project. Several of its features are noteworthy. Francis Alys's The Thief is a thoughtful screen-saver with a few implicit suggestions. It is downloadable for free. While many online art projects originate with material from other media, twenty years from now operating systems and equipment may be so different that stored media from our era could be unusable or intractable, like the software for a Commodore 64 . The description for Arturo Herrera's Almost Home says that his work "is known for its exploration of our psychological relationship to narrative." The viewer/participant can choose which facing panels of a diptych to rotate through. His images are Technicolor-style collages in the style of Warner Brother and Disney cartoons - for many young people over the past fifty years, their first art about American life. The money, infrastructure, and thought that went into those celluloid productions made them powerful mirrors of American life in the age of black-and-white television. It is not surprising that a digital artist finds their styles and subjects meaningful when faced with the pluralistic economics and means of digital media productions.

http://adaweb.walkerart.org/home.shtml is ada'web, a space designed to provide contemporary artists with "a station from which they can engage in a dialogue with users of the internet." A variety of projects can be reached in the "Jackpot" area on the left side. Several are worth some time but access is capricious so it is difficult to know where to go. http://adaweb.walkerart.org/project/holzer/cgi/pcb.cgi is Jenny Holzer's online project, evidently called Please Change Beliefs. It encourages participants to interact with the truisms Holzer provides. Visitors are polled and results are instantly tallied, statements appear and disappear in various ways, and visitors contribute reactions and bits of wisdom or fallacy about declarations like "All things are interconnected." This was a different sort of project than Herrera's, taking Holzer's proto-Conceptual approach to art and placing it in an environment of digital media exchange; in the context of her body of work, this new approach succeeds to great effect.

Assuming substantial and meaningful circumstances for the end users, and a sensibility that is vaguely conscious of many other people involved, settles some of my unease about the disposability, mutability, and ubiquity of binary data. In the Singular section of http://art-slab.ucsd.edu/HTML/slab.html I found Pipe Art which I liked very much, in the same way I used to like it in cartoons when characters would chase each other down into the basement near the furnace. Artslab reminds me of time spent puttering, collect odd materials, collaging failed photographs, writing on the walls. The site lists many links, and the number of people finding diverse uses of a common medium is heartening. http://www.artnetweb.com/artnetweb/projects/projects.html shows various online art projects that may be of interest. When I can understand what he is talking about, Carl Skelton's Wild Things is an engaging rant through Canada and art via his practice of Cultural Obstetrics.

After the coming turnover, a question will probably remain: what is the archival legacy of digital communications? These online art works seem so real and important, yet the most "real" element is the hardware one uses to gain access. What will be left of projects such as these when new sorts of digital communications systems are in place? Many of these projects seem to be impatient, as though preservation is not as important as the experiential nature of an art that is so dependent on specially coordinated equipment.

Walking through lower Manhattan recently, I stumbled onto the permanent exhibition, The Broken Kilometer (1979) by Walter De Maria. Another Dia project (see above) the work is an array of 500 cylindrical, highly polished solid brass rods of equal length - in total, a kilometer in length. It is a companion piece to the artist's Vertical Earth Kilometer, a kilometer-long solid brass rod of the same diameter and total weight inserted into the earth in Germany. The official standards of measurement are becoming less physical: a physicist friend pointed out that in 1983 the French government replaced their Standard Bars with a measurement calculated by the speed of light - an example of the effect on science of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. This artwork is also contingent on a number of systems, factors, and influences. The effect of this piece is, more than its creation of a physical standard, the creation of ideas about process, material, meaning and situation, and their relationships to this piece of brass. Online art can produce beautiful imagery and sounds for one's computer, but more significant are the circumstances of each appliance user - artist, participant or viewer. You may see The Broken Kilometer here: http://www.dia center.org/ltproj/bk/bk.html

About the Author:

Michael Nicolella is a fan of Azusa, trout, and the mud of rural Pennsylvania.