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Christiane Paul on the Interactive Art Jury

You are the Whitney Museum of American Art's new-media curator. How did it come that a museum did set up a "portal to net art"?

Christiane Paul: I suggested that the Whitney should create an additional website exclusively devoted to net art since this art form had become increasingly prominent, and I felt it would be important for museums to chronicle it on a continuous basis. Since net art that has been created to be seen by anyone, anywhere, anytime (provided one has access to the Net) and doesn’t necessarily rely on a physical museum space to be presented to the public, it seems to make sense to create a website that can present exhibitions and commissions and feature programming independently of the brick-and-mortar space. The Whitney's 'artport' site was originally created by students of mine, and I'm responsible for its curation and maintenance.

How do you see the role of museums and other art institutions in the development of net art?

Christiane Paul: Obviously, net art doesn’t need a museum to be introduced to the public, it has its own presentation space by nature. Some net artists have strong reservations about having their work shown within a museum context and have chosen their medium in order to circumvent the traditional system of the art world and its process of validation and commodification. However, I believe that museums can play an important role in supporting this art form, through commissioning work, contextualizing it and broadening its audience—be it through a website or exhibitions in the museum space. If one presents this type of art within the physical museum space, it is always recontextualized, and I think it is important to establish a connection between the public space of the Net and the public space of a gallery.

You curated "CODeDOC ". What was the idea behind it?

Christiane Paul: The idea behind CODeDOC was to take a closer look at software art as a form of artistic practice. One of the distinguishing characteristics of digital art is the fact that beneath the experiential level—be it a visual result or a communication process - there always is a conceptual layer of data and code. Any digital image has ultimately been produced by the instructions of the software that was used to create or manipulate it. Unlike any other form of visual art, software art requires artists to write a purely verbal description of their work. However, the results derived from the language of code are what the audience experiences first, there seems to be a reversal of process in the creation vs. experience of the work. One might assume that the aesthetics of artists who write their own source code manifest themselves both in the code itself and its results. Artist John F. Simon, Jr., has repeatedly talked about code as a form of creative writing, where everything from the choice of the story to the way in which it is told becomes an important part of the artistic process.

CODeDOC invited a dozen artists to code a simple assignment (connect and move three points in space) and exhibited the code and its results side by side—in fact, the audience encounters the code first and only then can 'launch' the project. I did not assume that most of the audience would understand the code but I felt that it would be important to expose the artistic process and raise questions about it, or even to demystify a part of artistic practice.


In a paper you have written: "Digital media offer us models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems." Can you explain this idea?

Christiane Paul: Digital media constitute a shift from the artwork as an 'object' to the artwork as a time-based process. The digital medium is inherently interactive, dynamic, participatory, and customizable—to name just a few key characteristics. I believe that these features broaden the context for an understanding of art. Of course, an audience's experience of any piece of art is always a negotiation with the work itself, the creator, society, and self; it is always context-dependent, and context is hardly a stable construct. If the artwork itself becomes a constantly changing process that is open to audience input and negotiation, context becomes a moving target. We become increasingly aware of the way the artwork is constructed, of the layers and systems of signs and meanings that are created—by the work and its audience. I think this process is comparable to the way we perceive and try to understand the world surrounding us, as an 'open system.'

You are the first time member of the Prix Ars Electronica Jury, in the category of Interactive Art. What are your expectations? What criteria must a work fulfil so that it is worth a Golden Nica?

Christiane Paul: First of all, I'm very excited to see a lot of work from around the world during the process of 'jury deliberations.' It is a great opportunity, comparable to 'virtual studio visits.' I don't think that interactive art requires any 'special' criteria that are radically different from those of more traditional media. What you ultimately want to see is good art and that is always a highly subjective affair. However, every work of art also is about its 'materiality'—a product of an interplay between form and content—and interactive art certainly has formal characteristics that are important to consider. Ideally, I'd like to see art that offers a unique 'view' of a topic in an aesthetically sophisticated way; that pushes the limits when it comes to an understanding of what interactivity is and can be; that doesn't only use technology as a ‘tool’ but forces the medium to reveal its mechanisms as well as its social and aesthetic agenda; that explores the cultural and sociological effects of technology.



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