Web Biennial 2003

Web Biennial 2003: International Bi-annual Contemporary Art Exhibition for the World Wide Web.

Abstract:
Web Biennial 2003 is the first international bi-annual contemporary art exhibition that will be located exclusively on the World Wide Web (W.W.W). The Web Biennial has been anounced, produced, exhibited and then will be documented on the Web. This approach is unique among other exhitions and Biennials as the consept is built upon this de-centralisation. Technically the navigation is based on a simple portal and a custom search engine. In this structure the participants not only host their own contents in their own servers but they also voluntarily change the source code of their index pages for navigation through the web. Hence the Web Biennial not only aims to offer an alternative approach for exhibiting online art but also an alternative approach for exhibiting art online.

Key Words: Web-art; net-art; World Wide Web; contemporary art; online exhibition; community formation; Biennial.

Web Biennial is a contemporary art exhibition which will be realised exclusively on the World Wide Web (W.W.W.) in every two years. The previews of the Web Biennial 2003 started in March 2003, the exhibition starts in June 2003 and the exhibition will be online till the end of the year 2003. Currently 60 artists from 15 countries confirmed their participation to the Web Biennial 2003. The access to these artworks will be from the portals www.istanbulmuseum.org/webbiennial.html and www.webbiennial.org/.

This project is the result of a seven year research on the exhibition methods and represantation problem on the WWW. Most of the galleries or museums present representations of the artworks, such as scanned images of paintings or digital photos of sculptures, as online exhibitions. Moreover these images and information are mostly hosted on a single main server. In contrast Web Biennial deals mainly with artworks that are created for the networked environment or virtual artworks. More over the projeckt also uses the relations of the virtual environment.

For example the Biennial has been anounced and will be realised, produced, exhibited and than documented exclusively on the W.W.W. Several hundereds of e-mails have been exchanged. We made many new virtual friends. Still the project not only aims to offer an alternative approach for exhibiting online art but also an alternative approach for exhibiting art online.

In the exhibition all the projects are presented as diverse as possible. There were no limitations on media or size. We wanted to artists to create as unlimited as possible. Hence we created an alternative