Something in the Air: Internet Art as Archive and Strategy Beyond the Gates of the Museum

IT IS CURIOUS that discussing internet art in the year 2013 can sound almost antiquated. At a certain juncture coinciding with the ‘dot com’ boom of the 1980s, internet art was routinely touted as the ‘next big thing’. At the same time, many art theorists were announcing the onset of virtual reality in its most literal sense, as though its realisation in the near future were simply preordained. The strange feeling of nostalgia surrounding conversations about internet art is tied to the fact that, although it is increasingly practiced, its impact on the more visible world of large-scale global exhibitions remains peripheral. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that the true venue for internet art is, naturally, the virtualised, ‘placeless’ realm of the world wide web. This in turn makes the notion of internet art’s accessibility to museums and galleries somewhat redundant. Yet this intuition of internet art’s seeming peripherality to the greater art world is doubly uncanny when the internet has so radically altered the ways in which anyone with access to such technology views both art and the world generally. Meanwhile, the ‘virtual reality’ discussed with enthusiasm by certain theorists a decade ago has manifested itself today in virtualised conditions – of capital, labour, art and culture – that are far more pervasive and far less obvious, and therefore arguably far more insidious, than those occasioned by donning a ‘VR’ suit or glove. For some, the internet’s radical questioning of standard demarcations between ‘good’ and ’bad’, and thereby of the arbitrating roles of the critic and connoisseur, represents a new utopia of even exchange, a smooth space of interactivity that, at its most enlightened, challenges the fairly rigid codes of quality imposed by museums and public galleries. For others, though, the internet’s intimate relationship to contemporary art and culture is fundamentally compromised by its corporate ownership, its installment at the very heart of global media. The multiple tensions that underscore internet art as both practised and archived further highlight core aspects of contemporary art in a cultural context dominated by a surveillant Capital.

In a recent article, ‘Art workers: between utopia and the archive’ (1), theorist Boris Groys argues that the internet provides a genuinely alternative context for artists seeking to break the prestige and taste- making deadlock implemented by the normal processes by which art is deemed worthy of museum ownership (2). This is because practically everyone ‘owns’ the spaces of the internet, or has the capacity to participate there socially and culturally, and to an extent that a traditional studio-based artist cannot. Originally, the studio-based artist used their studio as a place or refuge, a context where creative experiments could be carried out in solitude and later revealed to the public. This manner of working meant that the individuality of the artist, working in semi- seclusion in their private domain, was protected from the intrusions that commonly beset those working in situations more overtly administered and open to direct scrutiny. Obviously, this image of the artist as supreme individual has since been severely contested particularly through the various practices comprising what is known as ‘institutional critique’. By a multiplicity of means it was clearly demonstrated by artists and theorists that the artist was not, in fact, a privileged being but one whose labour was always dependent on attendant social, economic, technical and political factors. The private Self, a utopian construct and vestige of romanticism that sought its most representative figure in the artist/genius, was shown to be nothing but a myth. This explains why many contemporary artists practice like elite contractors, working across sites to specific briefs that are realised collaboratively among a variety of specialists. In contradiction to this more or less corporatised scenario, Groys contests that the individualist utopian dimension of the practice of art has been reawakened through the mechanisms of the internet. Thus, the private Self of the artist in their studio has been replaced by the unlimited virtual space of the internet where individuality is secured by the use private passwords known only to their bearers. In this way, the very possibility of a genuinely subjective creativity has been transposed from the artist’s studio into the virtual space of the internet, where that individual is free to realise their greater project in whatever way they see fit and in apparent privacy and seclusion.

This is not to say that such a scenario is devoid of negativity. Everyone knows, and Groys is certainly no exception, that the internet is privately owned and, by its very nature, a space of surveillance. Indeed, while philosophically championing its ostensibly democratic capacities, Groys indicates that the internet is also hell, or as he would put it ‘paradise and hell at the same time’ (3). Paraphrasing Sartre’s famous dictum ‘hell is other people’, Groys indicates that, in the case of the internet, the ‘other people’ who according to Sartre seek to perpetually forestall us in the fixed image they already have of us, are multiplied a thousand-fold. Now the internet user is constantly open to view, even if he or she does not directly experience the gaze of the other. In fact, the absence of the affects of surveillance even while they may be consciously known, only potentially increases the ‘hellish’ aspect of the internet. Indeed, there is probably no other context more prone to surveillance than the internet. Concurrently though, the spaces of the internet are by their very nature prodigiously labyrinthine, meaning that the types of surveillance so presciently analysed by a theorist like Foucault, or the ‘control spaces’ mentioned by Deleuze (4), where the individual is obviously administered by authority, are less open to the immediacy of controlling observation.By the same token, it is impossible to view the internet as a totality: the sheer extent of internet content escapes any attempts to ‘know it all’, a truism that simultaneously makes it a ‘huge garbage can’ (5). This issue of non-selectivity, while it may support an abundance of ‘trash’, alternatively makes it an antidote to the heavily administered, ‘panoptical’ spaces of the museum. Moreover, internet art’s ambiguity in relation to the discourse of art history (6) makes it for some one of the last bastions of a type of avant- garde practice that successfully eludes the conversion of real-time radical culture into ‘official’ knowledge. That is not to say that internet art goes unremarked upon or more or less un-theorised: alongside the growing practice of internet artists are increasing numbers of theorists (7) dedicated to expounding its social, political and cultural ramifications. For Groys, in the end, the internet suggests two things for artists: either a reinvigorated utopian space of virtualised individuation or an archival space that effectively displaces the gate-keeping function of the museum.

The archival dimension of the internet as far as the practices of contemporary artists go is particularly interesting once we consider that it is the primary means by which most artists’ practices are known to a broader public. This is true to such an extent that many of these practices will only be known from within the framing context of the internet. Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that those artworks known via an artist’s individual website may theoretically only need to exist in that form (8). More generally, the work of contemporary artists is habitually reliant on the drafting of detailed proposals, including attendant illustrative imagery, and its subsequent thorough documentation. The latter is then released publicly and circulated online. This ‘re- synchronization of art production and art exposure’ (9) means that for the majority of viewers – users of the internet – there is no longer any gap between art production and consumption: artworks are released online at precisely the same time as they are consumed globally. For some in the ‘culture industry’ this synchronicity has been interpreted in the most literal ways leading to the monetising of the internet as a type of virtual commercial gallery. Taking their lead from the massively successful transformation of consumer habits as a result of online shopping, these entrepreneurs view the internet fundamentally as a marketplace. By extension, physical visits to galleries and museums become a thing of the past, while the audience for art is conceived almost exclusively as an elite, albeit amateur and idiosyncratic, group of collectors.

In a more strictly archival sense, the internet website becomes a means of cataloguing and storing artworks virtually and in total absence of the need to amass works physically in museums and public institutions, the vast majority of whose collections are often publicly unseen. In this way, the archival character of art on the internet presumes a similarly utopian aspect in so far as these archives are projected into a future irrespective of physical location and which, ideally at least, may live forever, while increasing numbers of art institutions worldwide are forced to scale back or close down. Again, the virtualised conditions of the internet secure an open habitat for artworks, as well as for the individual identities of their creators, defining an indefinite haven outside the prosaic vicissitudes of history or basic real estate (10).

The internet’s archival function in relationship to art also assumes pedagogic dimensions. Yet the brand of pedagogy it promotes is frequently maverick and eminently combinatorial, challenging the arbiters of a finalised version of the ‘history of art’. Far from automatically negligible, secondary or suspect, many art sites exist on the internet that have reshaped the way art might be produced and consumed. For example, a site like Ubu Web (www.ubuweb.com) represents a comprehensive, scholarly and entirely independent archive of avant-garde and experimental art, both historical and contemporary. As an online museum, its scope, comprehensiveness and audience reach far surpasses that of most traditional museums. Furthermore, its actual content originates from a host of independently networked contributions. Another evolving internet archive, the East Art Map (www.eastartmap.com), an initiative of the Slovenian art collective IRWIN, redraws the museological archives of modernity and postmodernity that favoured an almost entirely westernised view of these cultural phenomena. It too, is an independent platform that may be altered according to viewer contribution. Yet another internet-based counter-archive, Art Vandals (11) was established by Swedish artist Felix Gmelin in association with the Rosebud Artist Cooperative and the Association for Temporary Art. Art Vandals documents incidents of art vandalism by people who describe themselves as artists. It does so against the recommendations of the actual museums whose boards prefer to keep public knowledge of such incidents secret. Art Vandals exists as an online archive that not only challenges the traditional sanctity of the museum by exhibiting affronts to it, but also by implication by suggesting that artworks in the age of the internet are forever open to re- editing, reinterpretation or annihilation. Purveying manifold archives of art, the internet, unlike the archives represented by permanent museum collections, is endlessly metamorphic and reinterpretable.

As far as its critical capability is concerned, Groys argues that with internet art the institutionally critical reflex has been rendered null (12). replaced by a partial, though predominantly liberatory space of refigured subjectivity. For him, as we have seen, the internet is a space of secrets kept, where the Self keeps its secret in the form of passwords unique to the individual. The critical manoeuvre enacted by the practices of institutional critique was to rid art of its secrets and to expose art’s claims of autonomy to the future of ‘work’ in general (13). Nonetheless, if we trace a trajectory of some of the most acute examples of internet art, it is clear that rather than replacing art’s critical capacities, it opened them to interventionist possibilities of a sort once only dreamed of by artists. Indeed, from the beginnings of what was termed ‘NetArt’ in the 1990s, artists working with the spaces of the internet have interrogated those spaces on a number of sophisticated levels. They have challenged the presuppositions of unsullied transparency on which the myth of the internet’s instantaneity depends and they have used the internet to intervene in real-time and with concrete real-time effects.

An online artist collective like JODI (14), for instance, recognised early on the fallibility of the internet and its susceptibility to hackers and viruses. Evidence of the intrusion of these proved that rather than a smooth, personalised technological environment, the internet was a space particularly open to external corruption. Signs of such corruption would often cause panic in the user once they realised that important information stored on their computer had disappeared or been irrevocably altered, or that the computer’s normal functions suddenly took on a life of their own. Such instances were even more alarming because it was practically impossible to know where these intrusions originated. Keeping such phenomena in mind, JODI developed specialised software that took ‘screen grabs’ from the internet and reorganised them in random and unexpected ways that mimicked the uncontrollability of viruses. In doing so they spoke specifically of the internet as a creative medium, the assumed seamlessness of which was underscored by the fundamental randomness of code that could be endlessly twisted and rearranged for varying conflicting purposes.

Without a doubt, one of the most well known (15) examples of internet intervention was the so-called Toywar mounted in 1999 by the artist collective etoy against the multi-billion dollar eToys corporation. Etoy had been operating as an artistic collective for two years before the eToys corporation brought a lawsuit against it aiming to force the artists to change their name. Instead, in the early days of e-commerce, etoy galvanised a diverse, globally dispersed band of anonymous ‘soldiers’(16) – each one personified in the space of the internet as a Lego-like figure with its own personalised attributes – to trade online against the shares of the eToys corporation. Whenever an online soldier made a ‘hit’ against eToys it was registered as a cartoon explosion on a schematic map of the world that indicated where the hit originated geographically. This strategy was so successful that shares in the eToys corporation plummeted, forcing the company to withdraw its lawsuit. Toywar became an almost mythic example of the way art, operating in an activist manner, could utilise the accessibility of the internet to provoke real-time affects. Here, the artist collective from within the networked domain of the internet simultaneously challenged the assumption that artists know nothing of technology or economics, a prejudice the eToys corporation was certainly relying on in its hopes of scoring an easy victory. At the same time, etoy consciously deployed humour and a strong aesthetic sense in the realisation of this action, identifying the project clearly with art.

A more contemporary version of this type of tactical online activity is evident in projects of Ubermorgen, a Swiss/Austrian-American duo founded in 1995 by the artists lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. Fittingly, both artists were original members of the etoy collective. Since its inception, Ubermorgen has used strategies similar to those of etoy by intervening in the spaces of the internet to highlight its identity as a public and communal space whose discrete parcelisation into protected units (individual internet users) is only ever partially assured. A project like Ubermorgen’s GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself) from 2005–08, as with etoy’s Toywar, deploys the internet as a dominant economic platform, albeit in a parasitic way. GWEI serves Google text advertisements on a network of hidden websites and with the money earned in displaying these ads, redirected participants to buy back Google shares. In this case, the massive multinational Google corporation’s own ads are diverted for profit that is then used to independently take control of the company. However, far from a literal exercise in online activism, the GWEI project, again like etoy’s Toywar, is also partly satiric in its simultaneous indication of the participatory aspect of the internet and the more commonly prevailing massive imbalance between the economic and, by extension, political, clout of individual users and that of global corporations (17). More directly successful was Amazon Noir (2006–07), another of Ubermorgen’s projects, part of its EKMRZ ‘economic trilogy’ that includes GWEI. For this project, a group of Ubermorgen’s ‘agents’ authored a software that was able to steal copyrighted ebooks from the Amazon website and then redistribute them on the internet for free. Provoking another legal battle, Ubermorgen were successful enough in their knowledge of legalese to force Amazon to eventually buy the software they had developed to pirate their books. In this manner, they reversed the expected result that presumes that an independent, unfunded cooperative will always lose out to the interests of a powerful corporation.

Related in its militancy and deployment of the internet to produce real-time affects was the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s (EDT’s) (18) engagement in what they described as ‘electronic civil disobedience’. In 1997 EDT used software they developed called FloodNet to stage a multipart virtual ‘sit-in’ in solidarity with Mexico’s Zapatista rebels’ fight against the Mexican government’s attempted wholescale implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The EDT distributed FloodNet software to a widely dispersed, sympathetic group of artists, activists, theorists and others. Collectively, and as the name suggests, FloodNet was used to swamp the computers of the president of Mexico, Mexican government officials and the US Department of Defense, which were all suddenly inundated with empty browser screens. This virtual intervention temporarily disabled the computer networks and forced the Mexican government into a dialogue with the Zapatistas who championed the basic demands of Mexico’s indigenous population and its underprivileged majority. By no means a simple case of politicised online evangelism, actions of this sort by the EDT further proved that the internet was not merely a passive receptacle for individual consumption where the individual was forever protected within a cocoon of their private browsing habits.

Of course, this type of overt political intervention that uses the internet as tool for art/activism represents but one dimension of the possibilities of internet art. Two further contemporary examples of artists who employ the impure medium (19) of the internet to speak of the abstractly coded language on which it relies include the US practitioner Mark Napier and the Japanese duo Exonemo. Napier exhibits his ‘studio’ online at potatoland.org. A founding member of the NetArt movement, potatoland documents some of Napier’s most influential projects. Two of these, Shredder (1998) and Riot (1999), disassemble in real-time the comparative graphic unity of internet browser platforms. As its title indicates, Shredder was an interactive program that allows users to ‘shred’ browser content – including markups, text, code, images and links – which it then randomly rearranged in the creation of singular temporal compositions. Riot was a response to the almost forgotten Tompkin’s Square Riots that occurred in New York in 1999 in protest at the barely regulated gentrification of the East Village. Directing notions of privatisation towards the comparable use domain names on the internet, Riot was the ‘first and only multi-user browser’ (20) that simultaneously merged the browser’s webpage with those of any other webpage surfed. The result was a disorienting amalgam of deconstructed web content that served to effectively flatten the apparent depth of internet space. At the same time, Riot commented more broadly on the internet as a paradoxically uneven field of vastly disproportionate equivalences. In a somewhat similar vein, the Tokyo based duo Exonomo (21) have developed software such as FragMental Storm from 2000 (updated in 2007), which carries out random web searches and displays the contents in a continual, disjointedly metamorphic pattern. An even more recent version of this software released in 2009 was specifically designed for iPhone users. Another slightly earlier project from 2004, ZZZZZZZZap, is a ‘spam de-tuner’ that processes and broadcasts spam that filters through Exonemo’s web address, recombining it while simultaneously using the raw file data to generate an accompanying ‘soundtrack’. The work of both Napier and Exonemo, while not interventionist in the same directed way as some of the previous examples, emphasises the internet instead as an unfathomable mass of raw data that can be mined and re-appropriated in infinite recombinations. By using the internet in such ways, these artists question the presumed naturalness and ease of its intelligibility.

Recently, there have been increasing attempts to move internet art into contemporary museums. Certainly most of the artists and collectives mentioned in this article have exhibited examples of their projects in public institutions. Undoubtedly one of the initial reasons for internet art’s development was as a possible challenge to the traditional demarcating role of museums. What the ramifications are for the truly interventionist capability of internet art by the museum’s courting of it, however, remains to be seen, although it is unlikely that it cannot in some way be compromised. This was definitely the case with the critical, material and experimental integrity of video art once it became a staple of global biennales and museums of contemporary art (22). In some senses, this transformation of internet art is already evident in particular internet projects that are clearly designed to sell primarily for their novel or plainly amusing manipulations (23). However, the day internet art parallels the ascendant popularity of video art seems a long way off. Similarly, the utopian claims that internet art already represents a serious alternative
to traditional museum-going also seems idealistic beyond measure when contemporary art tourism appears to be at its zenith. Nonetheless, it is true that, for better or worse, as an almost infinite artistic archive, the internet is at the forefront of how the majority of artists, curators, art students and the general public discover the work of particular artists. Theoretically, at least, the mass reliance on the internet as an artistic resource challenges the need for the existence of tradable art objects in favour of the artwork as an evolving series of virtualised conceptual propositions. However, the conjoined resources and influence of global biennales, art fairs, high-profile museums and commercial galleries would still seem to hold almost uncontestable sway over what gets considered ‘worthy’ to be deemed ‘art’ in the first place. The notion that the internet supplants the traditional artist’s studio with an online haven of reinvested creative subjectivity is also contestable. Obviously the degree to which a person’s online identity is corruptible or open to ‘identity theft’ is significant: a personal password targeted for ‘cracking’ if there is someone with the will and motivation to do so will not stay protected for long. The privacy of online subjectivity thus remains forever precarious. Additionally, the idea that internet art spells the end of art as critique is also questionable, as is already attested by the small number of examples offered here. Still, it is true that such critique does not operate along the lines of institutional critique as it is normatively understood in art world parlance: those artists working critically within the spaces of the internet do so in ways that do not automatically aim, unlike much ‘classic’ institutional critique, to expose the ‘lie of images’ (24). That is to say, criticality as far as internet art goes arrives at the same time as it is consumed or intervenes without providing a distance whereby the viewer might passively contemplate the ‘lie’ exposed. On the one hand, it is the sheer labyrinthine, cumulative and metamorphic aspects of the internet as a vast interlinking archive, and, on the other, the internet tactically practised as real-time calculated randomness, that promises an alternative to the habitual fixity of authorising institutions of art.

Alex Gawronski

Originally published in Broadsheet vol. 42 no. 3, Sep, Oct, Nov, 2013, CACSA, Adelaide, Australia.

1. Boris Groys, ‘Art workers: between utopia and the archive’, e-flux journal, #45, 2013, www.e-flux.com.

2. Processes where historically, anyway, Groys writes, ‘nobody could explain why one artwork was more beautiful or original than another.’ ibid.

3.  ibid.

4.  See Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59, winter 1992, pp 3–7.

5.  Groys, 2013, op. cit.

6.  See Julian Stallabrass, ‘Can art history digest net art?’, Courtauld Institute, London, 2011, Courtauld Institute Digest, www.courtauld.ac.uk/people/ stallabrass_julian/2011-additions/Digest.pdf [accessed 9 July 2013].

7. These include Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto, Tilman Baumgärtel, Tom Corby, Ricardo Dominguez, Geert Lovink, Gene Ray, Gregory Sholette and Peter Weibel.

8. Indeed, playing devil’s advocate, and considering the sophistication of contemporary graphic media, we could contest whether an artwork posted on the internet had ever been physically produced. Groys considers the semantics of such ambiguity surrounding the ‘reality’ of art on the internet as confirmation of its fundamentally conceptual orientation. See Groys, 2013, op. cit.

9.  ibid.

10.  Of course, the internet requires basic access to the required technology, including cables, transmitters, modems etc. Access to it is therefore also significantly dependent on physical restrictions.

11. Defunct in its original form, the archive now exists at http://www.temporaryart.org/artvandals/index.html [accessed 9 July 2013].

12.  Groys, 2013, op. cit.

13.  By revealing its underlying dependencies and structures the mythic autonomy on which the traditional image of art depended was subsequently replaced by a much more prosaic, even cynical, attitude to art practice and the role of the artist.

14. Joan Heemskerk of the Netherlands and Dirk Paesmans from Belgium.

15. Certainly for what was largely an artistic exercise, the Toywar was so successful in its real-time intentions that it appeared on the nightly news, a media context habitually devoid of reference to contemporary art.

16. There were 1799 of these online ‘soldiers’, including artists, lawyers, professors, business people, ‘riot kids’ and ‘freaks.’ See www.etoy.com [accessed 9 July 2013].

17. For example, by Ubermorgen’s own estimations, it will take participants at least 200 million years before they can realistically claim to ‘own’ Google.

18. The members of EDT are Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray and Carmin Karasic.

19. Groys argues that the fundamental virtuality of the internet environment means that it can never be properly considered a medium. See Groys, 2013, op. cit.

20. www.marknapier.com/riot [accessed 9 July 2014] 21 www.exonemo.com

22. British art theorist Julian Stallabrass suggests that the rapid historicisation of video art as a result of its overexposure has come ‘at the price of the profound transformation of that art’. See Stallabrass, 2011, op. cit.

23. ‘There are some examples of artists selling versions of online work in limited editions with certificates of authenticity, along the lines of video art, but the gesture appears even more absurd than with video, since the work also appears in its original form for access by anyone with an internet connection.’ ibid.

24. See Jacques Rancière, ‘The misadventures of critical thought’, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, London and New York, 2008.