bold nerdiness

Avoiding the other thread but this caught my eye.

Comment by Guthrie Lonergan
August 24, 2010 4:53 pm
Re: "turning MySpace Intro Playlist into video-art":

To get this out of the way – I think putting a computer with a mouse in the gallery/museum is rarely a good solution to exhibiting Net Art physically. The experience of going up to a monitor and clicking around in a gallery looks and feels silly – it becomes a little like "interactive media art", or using an ATM… Not that I don't appreciate the bold nerdiness of a computer in a gallery, but it would fall so flat next to non-Internet work (sometimes a whole mini-computer-lab in the context of a specifically Internet art show seems to look okay http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsqDvomS8QM#t=00m31s.) You can never bring that private computer viewing experience into a gallery/museum, anyway, and attempting to do so would mislead viewers into thinking that they have experienced the online version. So, I think it's always going to be a problem of translation for Internet Artists when we go into the gallery – sometimes its more like documentation of an online performance.

I agree with this. They never look good and it's one of the things in exhibition design that is always problematic for me. It's right up there with black curtains and headphone.

But… I sometimes use kiosks (computer + mouse + structure) in installations. I'm about to do so again for two exhibitions this fall. Yes, internet art when shown exhibition space often works better as translated documentation. If I can burn it on DVD, yeah, that’s it. This hard rule does narrows the type of online work exhibited in physical spaces.

For the kiosk work, I’m not trying to replicate a private at home computer experience. I’m tying to bring a live and active experience into an exhibition space. The works involve live voting. People vote in the space and people can vote online as well. The result of the votes determines activity in the exhibition space. In this work, it is important for me that the two spaces are joined. It is important in this type of work that viewer is active not passive. So, it’s a computer and mouse. People seem to get it.

Then again, bold nerdiness sounds like a better justification.