RE: RHIZOME_RARE: New Steps - at NY Digital Salon

Olia Lialina wrote:
> I wrote a message to salon and curators asking how it could
> happen that online works are represented without any link to
> them.
<snip>
> Screenshots are easy and unpretentious. They can't destroy a
> curatorial concept. They won't bring technical complications.


Interesting thoughts in your email, Olia. It does seem pretty bizarre
that the Digital Salon curators explicity chose to NOT have links to
internet artworks. Your speculations on reasons were pretty right on,
and the curators' own reasons weren't entirely unreasonable either. I
can, however, think of two other reasons why they might have chosen to
use screenshots instead of links (I don't really agree with these
reasons, either):

1) Many of the artists in the exhibition don't have work on the
internet at all, and having links for some and not others runs the risk,
however unfair, of making the "unwired" artists look behind the times.

2) Sites often end up disappearring over time and they didn't want to
have broken links on their site during the exhibition (you spoke about
this a bit, too).

Reason (1) is a bit cynical on my part, but it might be at least a small
factor in the decision.

With regards to (2), I always thought it was cool that Rhizome took the
plunge and chose to include in their Artbase "linked art objects"
(web-based work where Rhizome has no control over the perpetual hosting
of the work). Other digital art curators do this all the time. It seems
to me that any curator who wishes to include web-based work in an
exhibition should assume the same risk that the person who created the
work did: to learn to live with and accept the potential ephemerality of
the work, and even to take some responsibility to keep the work alive
(assuming the work is not intentionally temporary). In the same way that
traditional-media artists and curators take a certain responsibility for
the handling and archiving of actual physical artworks, so should we
internet artists and curators be conscious of (and responsible for) the
fragility and availability of internet-based artworks. And what about
when links fail? As we say on the internet, c'est la vie.


> Step Two: "When Exhibition is over links will be reactivated"
<snip>
> That is why the meaning of deactivating links is not identical
> to bringing an art object to a storage room.

I agree again. It seems to me that if one wants to be a digital art
curator, one has to either (a) offer to set up a permanent hosting
environment for the work and take on the job of maintaining the work in
perpetuity, or (b) accept the fact that many online artworks are
ephemeral objects (somewhat analogous to old-school performances or
site-specific works) and that if you want to include it in an exhibition
you have to accept all the potential for technical and logistical
failures inherent in linking to someone else's web site.

IMHO, (a) is better, although as an artist who works on the web, I am
willing to take responsibility for (b), too. Plenty of art institutions
do both (a) and (b) today. Not many curators just have screenshots.


The flip side of this coin is that we internet artists have to accept
the fact that real-world gallery exhibitions of our work, such as the
Digital Salon, are almost always going to compromise the nature of the
work… and that we are very likely to be disappointed by the effort.
The Digital Salon curators clearly, and somewhat understandably, see the
online component to the show as secondary to the real-world component,
in much the same way that any curator of painting or sculpture would
(this is ironic, of course, since much of the work is *meant* to be
displayed online and not in gallery spaces). But that's the price we
artists must pay if we want to be shown in more-exclusive, more
glamorous, and better-promoted real-world gallery spaces instead of in
the free-for-all world of the internet where all you have to do to
curate a show is put a bunch of cool links up on a web page (the
now-defunct http://www.whitneybiennial.org).

Part of me thinks, however, that The Digital Salon can be forgiven for
failing at (a) and (b) because, unlike Rhizome.org or the (real) Whitney
or the Walker, etc, they are not (as far as I know) a brick-and-mortar
institution with "collections" and a budget for maintaining collections.

Boy this stuff is complicated.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com