Ad Space Becomes Art Space

Who says internet art has a small audience or a limited number of venues? Through the end of March, a group of artists culled by curator Daniele Balit will bring messages to the masses via the medium of banner ads on popular websites. The project, called Neterotopia, will also be presented in physical stations at Paris' Palais de Tokyo, Antwerp's NICC, and Milan's Careof. Some of the artists featured use the digital ad platform to continue existing projects, like Ghazel's search for a passport-enabling husband or Stephen Vitiello's translation of his originally book-based Sounds Found project (which collected newspaper descriptions of sound) into a net art piece via presentation of the text on the Village Voice's website. Still others have jumped on the opportunity to create new site-specific works, like Peter Lemmens and Eva Cardon's The Weather Project in which they float common, if poetic ponderings about the atmosphere in cloud-like banners on a weather report page. The Romanian collective, Version, meditates on the process of waiting for sites to load, in 'Loading_an_infinite_of_Kbytes.' They argue that there is 'a paradoxical relationship between the accelerated progress of technology which is set to move the limits and the ever still notion of waiting.' All of the artists involved in Neterotopia bring a self-reflexive jolt to this otherwise static waiting game. - Marisa Olson