ARTISTS
BEGAN EXPERIMENTING with the Internet in 1994, shortly after the
first Web browser was released. For those of us who were making it,
Net art meant that art was finally freed from the world of physical
objects that can be bought, sold, and resold. It also meant that
traditional notions of authenticity and authorship were finally
dead, not just in theory but in practice. Most important, it meant
instant and direct access to a global audience without the
intervention of museums, galleries, or other established
institutions.
Seven years later, everybody seems to want a
piece of the action. With new-media exhibitions popping up in major
museums from New York to San Francisco, this may be our last chance
to reflect on Net art's golden age of innocence.
The Body of Michael Daines
members.home.net/mdaines/ebay.html
 One of my favorite things about Net art is that it's truly
democratic. You don't have to land a gallery for your work to get
noticed. Case in point: Last year, Michael Daines, a Canadian
high-school student in Calgary, put his body up for sale on eBay
under Antiques & Art > Art > Fine > Sculptures. His
description read, "The body of a 16 year old male. Overall good
condition with minor imperfections." Minimum bid: $5.00. A prosaic
black-and-white photograph of a T-shirt-clad torso completed the
offering. Daines's easy blend of body art and Net art was a shot
heard round the Web. Chris Burden, eat your heart out!
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
http://www.yhchang.com/
 Young-hae Chang, a translator who lives in Seoul, uses
Flash, a popular Web animation format, to create fast-moving text
movies set to jazz sound tracks. Of the dozen works included on this
site, my favorite is Rain on the Sea (now accessible at www.totalmuseum.org/ webproject8/
rain_on_the_sea.html). Most Net art employs various modes
of interactivity—from clicking to typing—to engage you as a
collaborator in the making of the work. Chang eschews interactivity,
but the result is hardly a passive experience. By accelerating the
pace at which the text appears on screen to a rate just within the
threshold of human cognition, Chang coaxes you into a state of rapt
concentration. Her work offers a glimpse of what Net art might be
like in the coming era of broadband Internet
connections.
Think the Same
www.totalmuseum.org/webproject8/candyfactory
 Exploring notions of utopian architecture through
the vernacular of homepage design, Takuji Kogo of Candy Factory in
Yokohama, Japan, takes the Web for granted as a medium, using it
with ease and fluency. As you explore the site's loosely structured
pages, animation and sound samples combine in a multimedia collage.
At one point, the words "Are you playing at not playing with me?"
trail the cursor like the tail of a kite. Think the Same has
a casual sophistication that's instantly appealing. The highlight: a
song by G.H. Hovagimyan at www.
totalmuseum.org/webproject8/candyfactory/t1.htm that
sounds like what computers would sing if they were walking through
Lenny Kravitz's "Fields of Joy."
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Restless Culture
www.restlessculture.net/peppermint
 New-media performance
artist Cary Peppermint's Net-art actions—over-the-top gestures such
as a mock e-vite to "a party that never ends," presented in venues
from The Kitchen to eBay—feel like twenty-first-century takes on
Warhol's Factory. The pseudonymous Luther Blissett caught up with
Peppermint in a recent interview published on Rhizome.org.
"Someone the other day
said to me,'Oh yea, I understand this "Restless Culture" . . . It's
sort of like you change so fast that [the] market can't keep up with
you.' And I thought, maybe . . . but where is one ever located? . .
. Then I thought restlessness is a real dissatisfaction with the way
things are, a sort of hyper-consciousness; an understanding where an
artist breaks the seemingly continuous surface of beings by
producing intermittent exposures."
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Stream
Weaver
Net art's
institutional apotheosis just wouldn't be complete without the
stamp of New York's Museum of Modern Art, which launched its
first series of independent, commissioned artworks February 15
at http://www.moma.org/. At
first, it might seem antithetical that the museum's inaugural
online project is by video artist Tony Oursler rather than by
an established
Net-art star. But, as Oursler says, "Working
online merely is a continuation of a drive I've always had—to
look for new art spaces to work with."
Indeed,
TimeStream is pure Oursler, just transposed to the Web.
Last year, the master of projection's Influence Machine
turned Manhattan's Madison Square Park into an eerie landscape
of giant visages floating over trees and clouds of smoke. Now,
with the technical support of Web designer Eric Rosevear,
Oursler transforms a website into a dark, not-so-
obviously
navigable environment, where ghostly images of faces flicker
as elements of the homepage's user interface. Loosely based on
a didactic timeline chronicling the history of media,
Oursler's site allows visitors to explore such varied topics
as ancient Egyptian modes of communication, the camera
obscura, cathode-ray tubes, and X-ray devices in a
cross-disciplinary—and highly
aestheticized—manner.
"Tony's piece is very 'Web,' but
also fits into the continuum of modern art," says associate
curator Barbara London, who is spearheading MoMA's series of
Net-art commissions, to include Net and non-Net artists alike.
"What we'll show will clearly reflect who we are as an
institution. Plus the series is very practical," London
acknowledges. "As MoMA's building expands and our galleries
are temporarily reduced, what better place to show art than on
the Internet?"
—REENA JANA
Above: Tony Oursler,
TimeStream, 2001, screen capture from
timestream.moma.org.
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