Quick Links:
>> Introduction
>> The Terms:
>> I. Playful Subversion
>> II. Interactivity
>> III. Narrative
>> Viewing Internet Art
>> Conclusion
>> License
>> Endnotes
>> Bibliography
Introduction
How do we know the meaningful questions that need to be asked of a new art practice? The objective of hypertemporality is to address this question from the perspective of the artists who seek to use the Internet as an art-making tool, the audiences who view Internet art, and the curators, critics, and art historians who seek to define and contextualize Internet art. Because we are dealing with a new art practice, the central question to ask is: what are the aesthetic criteria used to evaluate Internet art and are they contrary or sympathetic to the inherent nature of the medium?
By titling this exhibition ‘hypertemporality’, we begin by highlighting two salient features of Internet art. First, as it is dependent upon technology and continual change, Internet art must adapt to a particular progressive trajectory. Artists who use the Internet (or any other technological media) to create their work do so according to the logic of technology. Hardware, software, programming languages, and even cultural interfaces are subject to obsolescence.
The second feature is the increasing speed with which obsolescence now occurs. By its nature, the Internet is ephemeral; websites are regularly updated, revised, and deleted, computer hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful, and technological tools develop or become obsolete. The Internet in its familiar form is barely over a decade old, yet its structure, appearance, and technological sophistication have changed significantly during that time. So-called ‘web standards’ that govern the way that websites are interpreted and displayed advance at a quickening pace. The top-tier websites of 1994 and 2004 are very different, both visually and programmatically.
Hypertemporality, or rapid obsolescence, is an issue that all Internet artists must address, whether consciously or not, and we can use it as a thematic thread to pull together many disparate types of work. However, the ubiquity of obsolescence also prevents us from using it as a singular criterion for evaluating Internet art. Instead, we can think of the theme of obsolescence as a launching point for a broader interrogation of the aesthetics of Internet art.
At this point, we have already assumed that ‘Internet art’ is a valid conjunction of terms. Yet for many viewers, both expert and casual, this distinction is not always self-evident. Exactly what is Internet art? How is it distinguished from similar Internet practices, such as graphic design? How will we know it when we encounter it? How do we determine what is good or bad? Are these questions even necessary or useful?
In the broader scope of art history, Internet art is very new, and although it has already undergone various permutations, it is perhaps still in its infancy. When a new art-making practice develops, there are initially no markers in place to guide our description, appreciation, or definition of it. There is a period of transition when this new practice destabilizes the norms and conventions of previous art forms without there being a new ‘language’ adequate to describe it. Often, contradictory means of description appear, or more emphasis is placed upon function than defining characteristics.
This is precisely the transition that is occurring with Internet art, a practice that has not quite settled into its own proper vocabulary. Internet art often occupies contradictory borders; between art and commerce, collaboration and individualism, radical pluralism and homogeneity, activism and corporate control. In each case, to use a phrase from software artist Matthew Fuller, Internet art is ‘not-just-art’, but a multiplicity of practices.1 Yet the language used to describe these practices is often outdated, inadequate, or ill-defined. Internet art shares many similarities with Dada, conceptual art, and Happenings, but none of the prevailing aesthetic systems used to describe these art-making practices are equipped to reckon with Internet art in its myriad forms.
Despite these challenges, Internet art continues to gain a greater foothold in institutional settings (e.g. museums, galleries, university classrooms) that initially ignored such works, often because they did not know how to classify or integrate them into established genres. Nevertheless, Internet works are currently commissioned and selected for exhibition, and thus are increasingly subjected to evaluative aesthetic criteria by curators, collectors, and art historians.
There are numerous difficulties associated with this kind of institutional filtering. First, the ownership and exhibition of Internet works is frequently more difficult to define than that of more object-oriented artwork. Much like conceptual and performance works of the latter half of the twentieth century, Internet art is ephemeral and often difficult to document. Coupled with this quality is the theme at the heart of this exhibition, that Internet art is technologically contingent; it is dependent upon, and sometimes destroyed by, advances in computer and design technology. Second, much of this filtering is done either according to criteria based upon older, established art forms or according to various misconceptions about the nature of new media.
The aim of this essay is to propose a set of initial terms for evaluation that better speak to the nature of Internet art. They are: playful subversion, interactivity, and narrative. Each of the works in hypertemporality highlights one or more of the terms in relation to the theme of rapid obsolescence. Joel Holmberg uses the fleeting popularity of online friendship networks as a means for subversive play; Lisa Jevbratt tracks the gradual shifting of the Internet through alternate means of web interface; Alexander Stewart uses obsolete video games to question the role of interactivity on the Internet; Erik Loyer explores the balance between narrative and database through his own mediated version of childhood memory; and Peter Baldes explores the physical limitations of computer time and memory through dynamic web animations. Through these works, we can highlight and explore many of the misconceptions or problems with each term in an attempt to better establish an aesthetic vocabulary for Internet art.
The Terms
I. Playful Subversion
Internet art began in a spirit of playful subversion. This tendency is one of Internet art’s most prominent features, and it manifests itself in several ways: parody, social activism, appropriation, juxtaposition, blending art genres, blurring the edges between art and life, institutional critique, etc. In each case, artists utilize some of the unique features of the Internet; for instance, the fluidity of digital information (i.e., the ability to copy information infinitely or copy between two different types of media), its rapid dissemination, and the ability to reach a broad audience of viewers. In terms of art practice, the latter two features are typically controlled by institutions such as museums or galleries. By circumventing their traditional roles, Internet art has the ability to subvert and critique these venues.
To better understand the strong influence of playful subversion, it is necessary to briefly plot both the history and geography of early Internet art. In other words, it is not only the sequence of technological innovations and art historical precedents that define Internet art but also its location of origin within specific countries.
The Internet as a networked structure of computers traces its roots back to the late 1960s and ARPANET, a Department of Defense-funded network meant to provide a resilient, non-hierarchical communication system capable of withstanding a large-scale nuclear assault. This early prototype of the Internet remained primarily within the realm of military and academic research until the late 1980s, when a new, global communication protocol was proposed. This ‘World Wide Web’, linguistically standardized under the new Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, became a powerful tool for rapid communication and the dissemination of academic research.2
Although the Internet at that time was used primarily within academic and military settings, there was a concurrent growth of interest within a group of more casual users and hobbyists. Communicative technologies such as Usenet and BBSs fostered the emergence of many early Internet communities. However, it was not until the early 1990s, with the introduction of more user-friendly web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, that the Internet began to take its familiar form. At this point, the combination of inexpensive personal computers and early Internet service providers (ISPs), such as AOL and Prodigy, allowed a larger population of users, including artists, to go online.
Equally important was the concurrent arrival of corporate and commercial interests to cyberspace. Julian Stallabrass, author of Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, explains:
The time of the flowering of Internet art is precisely the time of the commodification of the Internet, for both were set in process by the wide adoption of browsers and the rise of service providers. Browsers at once established a potential public for art along with ‘eyeballs’ for advertising and consumers for shopping.3
However, as Stallabrass also notes, the commercialization of the Internet was not an instantaneous occurrence. Most corporate interests, unsure about the commercial potential of an online market, were slow to adapt to its novel terrain. This period of uncertainty was a fertile ground for the birth of Internet art (and, for many artists, its creative heyday).
The possibilities of the Internet as a radical, pluralistic means of communication appealed to many early net artists, especially those who lived in regions of the world where those ideals were banned, specifically those countries of the former Eastern Bloc. The collapse of several Soviet regimes from 1989 onward and the subsequent incursion of capitalism into these European nations brought about a new emphasis on their rapid entrance into the global marketplace. Part of this shift included the introduction of computer communication technologies which, coupled with the strong educational tradition of the Eastern bloc and its funding of the arts, led to a flowering of Internet art practices in Russia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Germany. The early net artists found an outlet of communication that was formerly unavailable and that conjoined nicely with their previous artistic experience:
[S]ome Eastern European artists had long been used to making underground art that had no ready market, that subverted dominant ideological images, that had to be distributed outside mainstream channels, and for which the character of the audience could only be guessed at. This gave them a considerable head-start in the mind-set required for Internet art.4
In other words, many early net artists—among them, Vuk Cosic, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin—were already practicing tactics of subversion through other means. This unique blend of political and social activism, coupled with a technology that offered the potential to reach a vast audience, shaped the aesthetic and social concerns of early Internet art.
Likewise, this prototypical ‘mind-set’ for Internet art already bore several close resemblances to other twentieth-century artistic practices, most notably Dada and conceptual art. Dada originated officially in Zurich in 1916, but soon became an international art practice. Stressing irreverence, subversion, and cultural critique, Dada sought to undermine the sensibilities of mainstream art, culture, and society, often as a response to the chaos and horror of World War I. As a forerunner to conceptual art, Dada made significant use of linguistic and textual play and questioned the notion of the traditional art object, especially within the museum institution. For instance, Marcel Duchamp, one of Dada’s best representatives, submitted Fountain, an inverted urinal stripped of its utilitarian purpose and ordinary name, to an art exhibition in order to question the conventions and definitions of art. This and other of Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ blurred the distinctions between art and life and introduced the concepts of appropriation, displacement, and recontextualization. Each of these concepts came into play in early Internet artworks, prompting Vuk Cosic to label early net artists as ‘Duchamp’s ideal children.’5
Another key art historical precedent to Internet art is conceptual art, which originated in the 1960s. Conceptual art stressed the importance of the idea, or concept, as the artwork, rather than the primacy of a final object or its visual manifestation. Consequently, many conceptual artworks were not objects at all but simple sets of instructions (codes) or texts. Sol LeWitt, for instance, produced various sets of instructions for his series of wall drawings and sculptures. These instructions (which did not necessarily have to be executed) became a closed system from which an object or image could be produced, like an automated machine freed from the intervention of the artist’s hand. The close congruence of these works with computer technology is evident, since the computer is itself a machine meant to work from basic instructions, entered as code.
The technological constraints of the early Internet also meant that web browsers were text-only (or capable of only rudimentary graphics). As a result of these limitations, many early Internet artworks were solely text-based. A prime example of an early, text-based Internet work is Heath Bunting’s King’s X Phone-In (1994). The website includes a set of instructions for installing a ‘temporary cybercafe’ at a British rail station. A set of phone numbers corresponding to the rail station’s grid of public payphones is provided for participants to call at a designated time and ‘play as you will’. Taking the form of a press release, the website provides participants with a list of suitable activities, including calling the numbers, visiting the actual site at the time of the phone-in, or doing something completely different. Playful in tone and essentially harmless, the phone-in demonstrates the Internet’s potential to tap into an unprecedented international audience, while simultaneously hijacking everyday means of communication for artistic purposes.
Similarly, Joel Holmberg’s hypertemporality piece, A Brief History of my Friends and their Friends and their Friends’ Friends, encapsulates several media practices in a spirit of playful subversion. Using the popular online community services friendster.com and myspace.com as a starting point, Holmberg plays with the shifting popularity of ‘friend networks’ and their implications in the offline world.6 These sites allow users to post a customized profile, including such statistical data as ‘Age’ and ‘Gender’ alongside more personal data such as ‘Favorite Music’ or uploaded photos, and link them to their friends’ profiles (presumably those with whom they are friends offline). Growing the number of nodes in your network, along with the continual revision of your personal profile, becomes an obsession for some users, often trumping the actual validity of these virtual linkages—friends are added to boost your networked status, not to reaffirm an actual friendship bond.
In A Brief History…, Holmberg provides the viewer with an image map of friendster profile pictures, along with two accompanying videos. In February 2004, Holmberg printed the profiles of all of his friendster friends, effectively freezing them in time. He then arranged these profiles alphabetically, packaged them in plastic baggies, and draped them across various telephone wires throughout Richmond. Although any friendster profile is publicly viewable online, whether you are a registered member or not, Holmberg very literally made these profiles public within his own community, linked by lines of communication, yet inaccessible to everyone. Many of Holmberg’s friends expressed their concern that these profiles might be found and read, despite the fact that they are readily available on the Internet.
In October 2004, Holmberg retrieved the sole remaining pack of friendster profiles and scanned them. He then juxtaposed the obsolete profiles with more recent printed profiles of the same friends who had now migrated to a new, more popular service, myspace.com. A Brief History… shows us several layers of obsolescence working in tandem: the friendster accounts that still remain on friendster.com (many of which are now abandoned in favor of myspace.com), Holmberg’s printed versions, the existing myspace.com accounts, their printed versions, and video records of Holmberg’s public transmission and retrieval of these documents. Each of these communities exists simultaneously, in a single visual space.
Although Internet art uses many of the tactics and practices of earlier art forms, it is not classifiable solely in terms of its art historical precedents due to its nature as a networked communicative tool. Clearly, Holmberg’s piece could not operate as effectively without the existence of online communities. Likewise, it is often challenging, if not impossible, to incorporate such works into traditional viewing contexts.
Internet art, as a publicly-accessible, globally-networked art practice, still faces difficulties within the museum structure, both physically and conceptually. For instance, a website can theoretically be displayed on any computer, so long as it has Internet access and the basic system requirements to run a web browser. Or, in a few simple clicks, someone can copy an entire website to their own hard drive. Consequently, artworld institutions are not necessary for a website’s display and often undermine the freedom of visitors to explore and interact as the artist might have intended (e.g., some Internet art exhibitions include self-contained versions of works that are browser-independent, displayed on free-standing kiosks, or have prohibited connectivity to the Internet). Also, we commonly encounter websites amidst a flurry of other activities or distractions: emails, spreadsheets, documents, online chatting, gaming, and so on. This is a sharp contrast to the demure and discrete museum experience, as Stallabrass explains:
It is true that galleries can provide free browsing and point users towards art sites they might otherwise never see, but generally Internet art is better seen in private or informal spaces.7
The museum’s emphasis on structured, contemplative viewing is frequently contrary to the practice of Internet art, which stresses communication, play (both in a subversive and physical sense), and interactivity.
The term interactivity is another key feature of Internet art that distinguishes it from past art practices, but is also one of its most problematic. It is true that interactivity (or at least interaction) is a component of conceptual or performance art, in the sense that the viewer is often needed to complete or fulfill the work (e.g., executing LeWitt’s instructions for a wall drawing).
A simple definition of ‘interactive’, borrowed from computer science, denotes a program (or set of instructions) that responds to user input. In this sense, almost all Internet art fulfills the claim of interactivity since the navigation of a website demands user input through a keyboard, mouse, or similar device. Also, in most cases, user input prompts a response from the computer—you click on a link, a new website loads.
The more pertinent problem with ‘interactivity’ is that it is regularly used to argue a radically new means of communicative flow. In other words, interactivity becomes part of a utopian politics or ideology that touts the Internet as a democratized, public space where information flows freely from user to computer, and vice-versa. Stallabrass explains how this ideological hope manifests itself in online art practice:
In principle, interaction holds out great cultural and social benefits. It should empower users, encourage cultural activity, rather than mere spectating, and make art more responsive to its audience, opening art’s exclusive and (for many) intimidating spaces and discourse to the breezes of inclusiveness and democracy.8
In practice, however, this ideal of interactivity is rarely fulfilled.9 There are two important causes of this problem, one social/technological and the other psychological. First, the Internet as a geography is not an unmediated territory. There are systems of control, standardization, and homogenization in place that sculpt, direct, and filter the flow of information. In addition to the corporate, academic, and military influences mentioned earlier, the very logic of presentation, selection, and navigation built into web browsers is itself a form of filtering. The display of websites in Safari, Netscape, Internet Explorer, or Firefox are fairly uniform, but this is not due to an inherent quality of data on the Internet. Instead, these are standards agreed upon by a consortium called the W3C. This consortium, headed in part by Tim Berners-Lee, original creator of HTTP, HTML, and URL, issues recommendations for web standards that go through several steps of revision before they are officially released. Though these recommendations are optional for any web vendor (explaining the slight differences between various browsers), they serve as the guiding display principles behind any website.
Numerous artists, most notably the groups jodi.org and I/O/D, have created works that directly challenge the homogenized nature of web browsing. I/O/D’s Web Stalker software (1997), for instance, displays the underlying structure of websites as a geometrical array of links and nodes. Other works such as jodi.org’s Wrong Browser defies the passive, predictable nature of web browsing by fragmenting the screen into disjointed windows, texts, and colors. Speaking on their particular strategy of unconventional interface experiences, jodi.org says:
[T]here are many other ways to present things visually inside the computer, with a website, on the desktop, or with a browser, with disrespect to the norm.10
Likewise, Lisa Jevbratt’s Migration 1:1 (3) offers a new interface for web browsing. Her work consists of the transmission of several automated web crawlers that systematically search for every IP address that is connected to a website, whether they are publicly accessible or not. This database is then presented visually, with each pixel representing 255 IP addresses. Though she has created several different interfaces, Migration represents two different IP searches, one from 1999 and the other from 2001. Green pixels represent connected websites in 1999, pink represents those connected in 2001, and darker clusters represented websites present in both years. The size of the blobs indicates the number of websites they represent. In essence, we see a visual representation of the growth and shift of the Internet as a whole.
Interestingly, the crawlers do not search available IP addresses from start to finish. Instead, they take a sampling of possible IP addresses, meaning that any point of the crawl can statistically represent the web as a whole. However, due to the nature of the web and its continual growth, any snapshot of the web quickly becomes obsolete. Yet Migration allows us to see this shift in the form of an interface that is itself the web. It is simultaneously landscape, map, and historical document.
A few clicks zoom in to a listing of mapped IP addresses, which you can then click on to visit the website. However, most of the sites are closed to public access. As Jevbratt says:
When navigating the Web through the databases, via the five interfaces, one experiences a very different Web than when navigating it with the "road maps" provided by search engines and portals. Instead of advertisements, pornography, and pictures of people's pets, this Web is an abundance of inaccessible information, undeveloped sites and cryptic messages intended for someone else.11
The second cause of the problem of interactivity is the assumption that its operation on the Internet involves a free range of choices, as if users had their pick of selections from an infinite database of information. However, in most cases, selection actually occurs within a controlled, confined range of possibilities. Lev Manovich, author of The Language of New Media, considers this assumption part of the ‘myth of interactivity,’ wherein we conflate a physical process (e.g., clicking a mouse to follow a hyperlink) with a psychological process:
The psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis formation, recall, and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all, are mistakenly identified with an objectively existing structure of interactive links.12
Simply choosing to follow a set of links provided by a website’s author does not fulfill the promise of interactivity. Whereas now we are asked to follow a pre-determined (or pre-programmed) line of thought, in books we might read a sentence that leads mentally to a myriad of other associations. In essence, we follow paths that are already plotted, instead of creating our own.
Alexander Stewart’s Obsolete confronts many of the problems of interactivity through the medium of video games. The proliferation of interactive online games is widespread, ranging from virtual casinos to complex, Flash-based multiplayer games. Due to the early limitations of bandwidth, many of the games that first appeared were those that had become dated or obsolete by home console standards. Games such as Tetris, Pong, Space Invaders, et al, with their low resolution graphics and simple gameplay, worked well online, where data costs were at a premium. Obsolete uses these technologically familiar video games as its centerpiece. Set against a disorienting backdrop of what looks like shards of pixellated game graphics, these games offer the viewer a simple interactive experience. As Alexander Stewart comments, most young people are familiar with the controls of these games and could easily begin interacting with them:
An interesting component to this project is that its primary viewers will be college students born over a four-year period from 1983-1986. Thus, these video games are older than the students; they never knew a moment in time when these games did not exist. Unlike people a few years older (read: us) to whom video games were not a given element in the world the day they were born, these students formed their concept of the world having already digested the ubiquitous simulacra of in-home video entertainment.13
Part of this concept of the world involves interactivity as a given. However, Obsolete stymies this assumption—the games on the screen are video clips and not playable at all. In fact, they play themselves. Any attempt to click on the video stops the game. The quote below the game, taken from 1980s cult classic War Games, in which a young gamer/hacker mistakes a military computer system for an interactive game, not only echoes the futility of the user’s attempt to play, but also hints at the possible dangers of interactivity taken to its extreme.
Many of the challenges of interactivity are most evident in the narrative strategies employed by Internet artists, specifically through the use of hypertext. As a networked, communicative structure, the Internet is characterized by its ability to create and maintain connections. These connections are commonly called hyperlinks, or references within a document that point to other documents (meaning any text, image, video, website, or similar resource). Although the concept of hyperlinking is not unique to the Internet (since a text citation in a book adheres to the same definition), the existence of a data network allows the resources referenced to be retrieved and/or displayed.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous in our everyday lives, the concept of hyperlinking has become more familiar. Many Internet artists incorporate hypertext narrative into their work in order to open up new possibilities of experience for their viewers. Properly conceived and executed, hypertext can provide the reader with multiple branches of narrative possibility. In other words, a reader may never get the same story twice.
However, many of the problems of interactivity also affect hypertext narrative. Simply increasing the number of paths that a viewer may follow does not increase a work’s interactivity. There may be more physical clicks to make, but they are still identifying these choices within someone else’s mental structure. The database of possible paths are still planned in advance by the hypertext’s author. More importantly, simply because multiple paths of a narrative are available for selection by the user does not mean that every set of chosen paths will construct a coherent narrative. What results instead is a collection of seemingly random elements.
This point creates an important distinction between narrative and the Internet’s more pervasive organizing logic, the database. A database is defined as any structured collection of items wherein each individual item has the same significance as any other item—e.g., credit card records, digital film footage, a shoebox full of photographs, or a website. The Internet, as a vast repository of linked text, images, and other media, has become an example of the database form par excellence. Yet its inherent logic as a database is directly antithetical to traditional narrative form. Manovich draws out this distinction:
As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies.14
Furthermore, narrative becomes a subset of the database, since the reader follows a predetermined path along linked elements in a database. Thus a hypertext narrative would comprise the sum of all the possible trajectories available in a given database. A traditional, linear narrative is simply one among many of those available paths.
The logic of the database is an important aspect of Internet art because it opens up the possibilities for experience beyond both narrative and hypertext, as it subsumes both of these forms. Other viable alternatives may stem from the selection, coordination, and manipulation of data elements in ways that do not form a coherent narrative. This does not invalidate narrative as a useful strategy for Internet art. Instead, it creates the necessity to understand this strategy as one among many.
Erik Loyer’s Persistence of Hyperbole, for example, effectively straddles the line between both narrative structure and database logic. Drawing upon the artist’s childhood love of videogames, the work employs a variety of intercutting media—text, music, advertising, manipulable web graphics, magazine articles, and audio—to construct a partial narrative of childhood nostalgia and media hyperbole. This narrative stretches across several years and incorporates them into a single, navigable space. Users can click on various elements in that space to unravel the narrative, but the unpredictable nature of those elements’ appearance often stymies any effort to move forward coherently. The narrative folds back upon itself and creates new juxtapositions as former sections of narrative appear alongside new ones. In effect, Loyer creates a database out of the media components of his life. The viewer’s selections and coordination within the database fuel the operation of a kind of nostalgia machine that produces fragments of childhood memory.
Through the examples of interactivity, narrative strategy, the database, and even the filtering that takes place within web browsers, we have seen how various models of interface and interaction are not given, but embedded in the hardware and software we create. Technology becomes so familiar that it begins to recontextualize our cultural experience as well. The language of computerization becomes the language of human experience. This is why Manovich calls the database a cultural form, rather than merely a technological form, because it extends beyond our interaction with computers, through a process he calls ‘transcoding’:
That is, cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics.15
This process has already taken place with the database, wherein it usurps a previous cultural form—the linear narrative—and becomes a new metaphor for understanding various other cultural phenomena. In the case of Loyer’s Persistence of Hyperbole, the database governs the organization of his own personal memories, that are themselves represented through media artifacts. A computer term becomes a metaphor for human experience.
Internet art, as it is tied to the general process of transcoding, is more than just art—it is tied to how we think. As such, it becomes necessary for the viewer to understand how these transitions take place and the effect they have on our experience of the Internet. Any technological system of organization, whether it is a database or a web browser, cannot be taken for granted, but must be understood in terms of its greater cultural relevance. This is why many Internet artists work against the infiltration of corporate, commercial, or institutional interests, because each brings along an accompanying organizing principle that becomes the assumed and exclusive means of cultural communication.
This puts unique demands on the audience of Internet art. Not only must they be attentive to various presupposed structures of interaction, browsing, or consumption, they must also possess an adequate level of technical knowledge. Though it is not necessary for viewers of Internet art to also be programmers, they must have at least some familiarity with hardware, software, various forms of interface, and the basic characteristics of the Internet as a networked, communicative tool. Like conceptual art, the visual aspect of Internet art is not always its most important feature. Since the final object is as much about code as it is about its final manifestation, the visual no longer takes precedence. There is an underlying technical language—that of software and networks—that many viewers of Internet art do not understand, often contributing to their difficulties appreciating or even recognizing Internet art. Although impressive visuals may be the initial draw to an Internet work, especially as technology progresses, one can not evaluate that work based solely upon a system of visual aesthetics. In the case of websites like King’s X, one has little or no visual means of evaluation.
Equally problematic is the myriad of variables that can influence the viewing of an Internet work: connection speed, computer hardware, browser compatibility, operating system, screen size and resolution, proper plug-ins, site maintenance, design, and legibility. Still, the hypertemporality of computer and web technology, with its constant revisions and the threat of continual obsolescence, challenges any attempt at a uniform viewing experience.
Peter Baldes’ work, hypertemps, addresses several of these issues directly. In purely visual terms, hypertemps is a set of simple, animated shapes and colors—e.g., a circle, intersecting lines, alternating patterns of blue, yellow, or red. These forms may be compositionally pleasing, but they are not visually complex in relation to the wide array of images available on websites.
Each base image is an animated .gif—one of the Internet’s earliest innovations in web animation—which is then sliced into several hundred smaller animations. Baldes exploits a typical browser behavior, the sequential loading of a series of images, to produce a dynamic image contingent upon several factors: hardware memory, processor speed, available bandwidth, and network traffic. For instance, the animation of a yellow bar traversing a pale yellow background, when viewed on a university T1/T3 connection, moves quite quickly. When viewed on a home broadband connection, it moves much slower. Likewise, any viewer on a dial-up connection will experience a much different image than the previous two.
Manipulating several technical variables can produce new images: refreshing your browser can cause the bar to segment irregularly and crawl at different intervals; particularly slow connections may reveal tiny image placeholders that fill in one by one; halting the page load before it is complete can produce dead areas in the animation; after each image component is stored in your browser’s cache, the total image then loads much quicker on subsequent viewing. Very literally, the work depends upon the memory of each individual computer coupled with the speed of data transmission. Both of these variable fluctuations are made visible.
Internet art such as Baldes’ requires some familiarity with the nature of networks and the language of software, as well as a commitment of time on the part of the viewer. Customary Internet habits of rapid, impatient browsing and distracted viewing are not adequate. Baldes offers some suggestions for his work, most notably that ‘hypertemps require patience.’ Stallabrass, among other writers, critics, and historians of Internet art, echoes this sentiment:
Regular viewers of Internet art need dedication and patience, as well as knowledge.16
Though information on the Internet is capable of reaching international audiences, most of us still view websites in a restricted environment, i.e., in relative isolation and on a small screen. This is not only atypical of our traditional art viewing habits, but it once again stresses the cerebral aspect of Internet consumption. Equally problematic is the fact that the Internet is still a technology of limited access. Though many of Internet art’s early adopters originated in Eastern Europe, control has gradually shifted to the United States in terms of access, users, and ownership. Though it is often heralded as such, the Internet is not yet a phenomenon of radical global access, nor is it an open terrain free from interest or control. Even at the level of the individual user, interactivity is most often present in a limited physical sense, reduced to a few simple mouse clicks.
In the jump from the simplicity of a work like Kings X to the technological sophistication of works like Persistence or Migration 1:1, we already see a dramatic shift in the visual presentation of Internet art. This leap is characteristic of much new Internet art, which has made a turn from its more conceptual and subversive roots to a form that relies more upon sophisticated programming and visual awe. Internet art is beginning to resemble graphic design, especially since many artists support their craft with careers in design or programming. Stallabrass addresses this trend:
[Advanced] software tools, particularly Flash, do less to develop the interactive character of the Web than to increase its allure as spectacle. As their use developed, the window of opportunity in which dedicated amateurs could produce websites that could be directly compared to those made for large corporations, at least in looks, was lost.17
This is not an attempt to make a claim that impressive design is antithetical to thoughtful Internet art. Works such as Jevbratt’s and Loyer’s illustrate how the visual and conceptual can be successfully wed. However, much of the most potent art on the Internet was and continues to be used to subvert online forms of control and conformity—the commercialization of art, museum elitism, and even Internet elitism, both as a corporate structure and as an ever-developing set of tools and standards that threaten to push ‘amateurs’ out of the design game. The merging of art and commercial web design not only creates difficulties for the viewer in distinguishing between corporate and artistic, but also creates complicity between sides that originally opposed one another.
Despite the trend toward visual sophistication in Internet art, the spirit of subversion is still at play, seeking to undermine the dominant structures that work to homogenize the Internet. Works such as Holmberg’s A Brief History… address issues of web identity and privacy, subverting the typical usage of online friendship networks. Likewise, Stewart’s Obsolete questions our familiar relationship with technology and our expectations of interactivity on the web. Their strategies are not contingent upon using the most advanced Internet tools and in this respect, they follow the lead of early net artists, who often used primitive web browsers that were capable of only simple texts and graphics. Yet these and earlier Internet works are often more effective in their critique of art and commercial institutions.
The careful balance of conflicting influences and interests, from militaristic to commercial, is a position that Internet artists must frequently occupy. These challenges, coupled with the rapid pace of technological obsolescence inherent in any digital medium, presently creates an unclear context for understanding Internet art. However, it is clear from the examples cited above that the beginnings of an Internet aesthetic is starting to emerge. While indebted to its art historical precedents in Dada, conceptual, and performance art, there are new terms that must be proposed in relation to Internet art, terms that are relevant to its makers and its viewers: playful subversion; the question of interactivity, including interface and technical literacy; and narrative. Though this essay offers nothing like a complete vocabulary of Internet art (if such a thing is possible), with a clear understanding of these basic terms in place, we are better equipped to discern, describe, and evaluate this new practice of Internet art.
Nathan Altice
MLA ’05
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Endnotes:
1 Fuller, Matthew, “A Means of Mutation”, March 1998, http://www.backspace.org/iod/mutation.html
2 For a more thorough summary of the Internet’s history and pre-history, see Greene, Rachel, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson: London, 2004, pp. 14-19.
3 Stallabrass, Julian, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing: London, 2003, pp. 23.
5 Baumgaertel, Tilman, “The Materiality Test,” http://www.rewired.com/97/1222.html
6 View the exhibition's myspace account at http://profiles.myspace.com/users/14661543
9 This problem is neither new, nor solely related to Internet art. Theorists such as Baudrillard and Enzenberger argued against the radical rhetoric of interactivity present in earlier media practices. While Enzenberger’s pro-Marxist position claimed that the true power of media—in the hands of the working-class—was not yet fulfilled, Baudrillard claimed that any media involves power structures that control information flow. For instance, see Enzensberger, Hans, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” and Baudrillard, Jean, “Requiem for the Media”, both reprinted in The New Media Reader, MIT Press: Cambridge, 2003, pp. 261-288.
10 Baumgaertel, Tilman, “Interview with Jodi,” posted at rhizome.org, http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=1770&text=2550#2550
11 Artist website, http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/1_to_1/description.html
12 Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media, MIT Press: Cambridge, 2001, pp. 57.
13 Personal correspondence with the artist, November 2004. Stewart refers to the exhibition’s temporary ‘installation’ on student-accessible public computers across the University of Richmond campus during the spring 2005 semester. As such, the exhibition’s primary audience will be undergraduate college students.
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