Internet-based Art in the Real Space

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TRANS.FORM.WORK | THREE CASE STUDIES OF INTERNET-BASED ART IN THE REAL SPACE
By Sabine Hochrieser, carlos katastrofsky (Michael Kargl), Franz Thalmair

http://cont3xt.net/blog/?p=1270

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"Translation is a mode." (Walter Benjamin) - Why is it still easier to get an entire museum collection on the Internet than to get a single work of Internet-based Art in a museum space? As with the nature of this question, both aspects have to be taken into account: the field of Internet-based Art with its media-specifics, as well as the mechanisms which allow institutions to continue to filter what the public at large understands to be art. Within this balancing act between independent/anti-institutional and institutional/commercial work, a transfer of artworks created in and for the Internet into a setting which is normally dedicated to the presentation of highly valued forms of art, can only be developed from case to case and according to what the typology of the actual artwork requires. Internet-based Art is in a constant shift between the daily news and its own history, between commercial/political interests and the activism against it, between technological innovation and the cultural context, technology is embedded in and finally it oscillates between an expanded field of artistic practices and its well defined precursors - many reasons why it is stuck in a home-made ghetto between "the two cultures". In this regard, the essay TRANS.FORM.WORK reflects upon strategies of how artistic creation on the Internet and the translational processes of its re-formulation in the real space can be combined to develop appropriate presentational modes, suitable for both sides and finally dissolving the still existing dichotomies in favour of interdisciplinary discourse.

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The essay was presented at the 3RD INCLUSIVA-NET MEETING: "NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH). The Evolution of Artistic Creation in the Net-system.", organised by Medialab-Prado Madrid and Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires. All presentations will be available online (English/Spanish) soon.

http://medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net

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