M. Tribe

related links:

Rhizome.org
Rhizome.Artbase
Starry Night

Mark Tribe: Nominating Expert Net Vision / Net Excellence

You are one of the founder of Rhizome.org, one of the first sites dealing with net.art. Net.art started in 1994, with the first browsers. Where is net.art now?

Tribe: Back in 1994, the net was a very different place: it was a small world inhabited by a few pioneers, it had yet to be commercialized and it was almost totally ignored by the art world. As media for art making, the web and other net platforms were even less well understood than they are today. For artists, the net was a very exciting place to be, a kind of frontier space of seemingly endless possibilities. Although some of the excitement of those early, utopian years has worn off, it's been interesting to see how net art has been adopted by artists and assimilated by established art institutions.

Initially, there was a rapid mapping of the territory, an exploration of the basic properties of the net as a space and the possibilities of net technologies as media: we saw formalist experiments (jodi.org), performative actions (Heath Bunting's @kings x), narrative works (Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War), conceptual gestures (Alexei Shulgin's WWWArt Award), identity pranks ( Keiko Suzuki) and tactical interventions (Electronic Disturbance Theater) in quick succession.

Net art thrived in the glow of the dot com boom. The Internet gold rush not only meant high-paying day jobs for artists, it also caught the attention of curators and funders who were tranfixed by the promises of the new economy. Compared to video art, net art was exhibited, collected and supported much more quickly by museums, funders and other established art world institutions. More significantly, the commercialization of the net provided a force to resist, an evil parent against which artists could rebel. During this time, we saw a number of art groups take on corporate identities (Etoy , MTAA, RTMark, Airworld) in a kind of critique-through-emulation. The net leveled the playing field, enabling artists to go head-to-head with publicly-traded firms. This culminated in late 1999 when Etoy (the art group) was sued by eToys.com (the online toy retailer) over trademark infringement. Etoy responded by waging a Toywar against eToys.com in an apparently successful effort to drive down their enemy's stock price. It was, in Etoy's words, 'the most expensive performance in art history: $4.5 billion dollars.

Today, as access spreads to less affluent populations and less developed parts of the world, the audience for net art continues to grow larger and more diverse. The dot com bubble has burst, but interest in net art on the part of educators, exhibitors and funders does not seem to be waning. If anything, it is increasing as net art work becomes richer and more complex. The early days of experimentation are over, and artists are making work that is more compelling than ever - compelling on its own terms. Artists like Takuji Kogo and Eryk Salvaggio display an ease and fluency with the medium that enables them to make work that is both idiosyncratic and accessible. We are seeing projects that are more ambitious in scope, such as Yael Kanarek's World of Awe, than anything that was done in the Nineties. There is a new level of technical sophistication in web-based applications like Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg's Apartment and original software applications such as Mark Dagget's Browser Gestures and Ade Ward's Auto-Illustrator. Artists are also starting to explore new wireless platforms. James Buckhouse and Holly Brubach's Tap is a good example. It's an interesting time to be a net artist.

One aspect of your work is the preservation of online art. The 'ArtBase' of Rhizome.org provides an environment where significant Internet artworks are preserved for the future. What are difficulties in preserving net.art?

Tribe: The main difficulty is technological obsolescence: net art depends on combinations of hardware, software and in many cases the network itself. These elements are interdependent and constantly changing.

In order to preserve a work of net art, we have to preserve not only the work itself, but also the technologies on which the art work depends. Preserving the art work itself is relatively easy. Since net art is made, at its most fundamental level, of code, all you have to do is store the code in an organized way on a stable medium. Then you have to migrate from one stable medium to the next as storage technologies evolve.

Preserving the technological environment is more of a challenge. In fact, it is essentially impossible: the net is simply to big and complex a place. So we resort to compromises: documentation (screen shots, animated click-throughs), migration (from one version or standard to the next), emulation (e.g. emulating an obsolete CPU on a newer one, then installing an old operating system, browser, and plug-ins), and recreation (re-building an old art work using new technologies).

At this point in the process, the most important thing is to gather information about the work in a thorough and consistent manner. This information must include, in addition to indexical data (such as names, dates, titles and keywords), guidance from the artist regarding intent and long-term goals. We must thus encourage artists to think now about preservation and obsolescence so they can tell us what's most important about the work (the way it looks, the way it moves, or the concepts it articulates) and what kinds of preservation measures we may take in the future.

How is net art being assimilated by museums and other mainstream art institutions?

Tribe: Net art's assimilation by museums has been relatively rapid (compared to video art, for example). A quick timeline: in 1995, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence; in 1996 the Dia Center for the Arts launched its Artists' Projects for the Web commissioning series ; in 1997 net art was included in Dokumenta X (www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/dx); in 1998 the Guggenheim Museum commissioned Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon; in 1999 the ZKM had the first major independent retrospective exhibition of net art, net_condition; in 2000 the Whitney Museum included net art it its Biennial for the first time. In 2001, net art really took off, with exhibitions and/or commissions at MoMA, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Tate Britain, SFMoMA, the Walker Art Center and the Whitney.

Despite this rapid embrace, net art poses significant challenges to museums. Initially, museums had to figure out how to exhibit in physical galleries art work that was made to be experienced online. These problems have been solved in several ways, from media lounges to commissioned net installations, with varying degrees of success. The more difficult challenge for museums, which are for the most part inherently conservative and slow-moving, is how to keep up with the pace of change and remain relevant to both artists and audiences. Art museums have traditionally been about the exhibition and preservation of old objects made by recognized creative geniuses. Net art, and new media art more generally, is new, ephemeral and constantly changing. It's more about processes of interaction, participation and collaboration than about products of creative genius. In order to remain relevant, museums must reinvent themselves as sites of production and distribution in addition to exhibition, preservation and education.

You have been very disappointed with some choices made by Prix Ars Electronica in the .net category. Last year there was a complete redesign of the category and you have been one of the nominating experts. Are you happier with the choices made last year?

Tribe: I am somewhat happier, yes.

Did the redesign work?

Tribe: I think the process is better, but still needs improvement.




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