From "Eyestorm", 4 Feb 2000

Teenage Kicks

by Jon Thomson

Internet Art isn't the newbie that you might think it is; it's just that everyone is doing it now. Net artist Jon Thomson suggests that this rapid expansion has lead to peculiar growing pains.

 

It seems inevitable that the 90s will be tagged as the decade in which Internet Art was born, and because this will probably be at the expense of earlier endeavor, it is worth remembering that some artists were exploring electronic networks before version 1.0 web browsers became available. List servers and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) - such as alt.artcom, or Ruud Janssen's Mail-Art BBS based in Amsterdam - were active in the mid and late 80s, while even earlier forays into telematics and satellite relays can be traced to artists like Roy Ascot or even Nam June Paik. Nevertheless, it is (or was) the 90s that bore witness to an explosion in global networking, and it was the 90s that saw a massive growth in artists' use and exploration of the internet's electronic spaces.

However, after ten years of such earnest activity, the novelty of the net has begun to wear off and Internet Art is starting to mature. Some net artists are now described as 'established', while certain institutions and museums finally seem to be taking the medium seriously. As the 'blockbuster' exhibition 'net conditions' at ZKM in Germany comes to an end, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis has announced the February launch of the Art Entertainment Network as part of their gallery exhibition 'Let's Entertain'. Even the Whitney Museum of Modern Art has plans to include internet-based works in its next biennial survey of American art and, over the next year or so, curated web spaces run the risk of becoming a virtual epidemic. Yet as the whole phenomenon of Internet Art is absorbed into the relative mainstream, we are beginning to see some signs of inevitable growing pains: Internet Art (along with the internet itself) is no longer a child; it is an adolescent.

Following the release of his FuckU/Fuckme cybersex toy website at fufme.com, Alexei Shulgin's most recent offering (at easylife.org) is a simple web-based message-board called Inspiration. On it Shulgin states, 'I am bored of everything. Desperately needing new inspirations', and he invites comments and suggestions from the site's visitors. Any suggestions are then posted on the site and constitute the entire content of the work. Regardless of whether this is an ironic gesture or not, Inspiration comes across as a rather lazy attempt on Shulgin's part to propagate the cult of his personality, and consequently to raise his profile as a net.artist.

This has also been the driving force behind the output of the Italian artist group, 0100101110101101.org. Over the last year, 0100101110101101.org have made it their business to clone existing artsites (most notably www.hell.com), and upload these copies onto their own domain. Each act of cloning is accompanied by a flurry of email and message-board postings that self-publicize their latest theft in an impressive bid for some sort of notoriety. In such postings, they have described their activity as an attempt to erode the notion of individual authorship while making established art sites less commodifiable to the art market. A simple point fairly well made, but by continuing to do the same thing repeatedly, 0100101110101101.org have turned a pertinent critical intervention into a marketing exercise, where each new site copy acts as a rather oblique advertisement for both perpetrator and victim.

American artist Amy Alexander seems to have picked up on this, and on Christmas Day she decided to benefit by uploading a duplicate of 0100101110101101.org's duplicates at www.plagiarist.org. This provoked 0100101110101101.org to incorporate links to Alexander's site, which inspired Alexander to update plagiarist.org so that it now contains someone else's clone of her own site.

Although such onanistic behavior can be rather insular and self-referential, it does highlight a very real anxiety felt by many artists as they look to the future. As the dawning age of e-commerce gathers pace, how will artists be able to effectively compete with the Time Warner/AOLs of this world? As these multinationals attempt to develop a closed commercial network environment, will Internet Art be doomed to lurk in some little-visited electronic backwater, or on a dusty terminal in the corner of a museum cafe?

 

Ruud Janssen's Mail-Art BBS: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/4947
Alexei Shulgin: http://www.easylife.org & http://www.fufme.com
0100101110101101.ORG: HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG
Amy Alexander: http://www.plagarist.org