For American museums working with digital and new media art, spring 2001 was a breakout moment. The year kicked off with the Jan. 1 online launch of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “010101: Art in Technological Verdana,Arial,” with a museum-based component opening two months later. In February, Tony Oursler’s TimeStream debuted on the Museum of Modern Art’s Web site, while March saw the exhibitions “BitStreams” and “Data Dynamics” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Up the coast, the Boston Cyberarts Festival featured digital art shows at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and other museums. On its Web site, the Smithsonian American Art Museum premiered a trio of online projects that had won the museum’s first New Media/New Century award. Around the country, other museums presented digital and online art as well. It was an exhilarating season.
A year later, much has changed. A stricken nation is still recovering from the attacks on Sept. 11 and struggling to cope with the widening economic consequences. After years of booming attendance and unprecedented support, museums are facing a more uncertain future. This is especially true in New York, where many museums endured staff cuts in the months following the attack, and others have had to slash budgets and revise exhibition schedules. And as travel and tourism decline nationwide, institutions around the country find themselves facing similar challenges.
In this radically different climate, what’s become of digital art? As museums re-evaluate priorities and reposition themselves for leaner times, has this new art been left behind, a relic of the boom years? What place can it claim in museums today?
It’s safe to say that digital art is not disappearing, either from the world at large or from American museums. Nor is it spreading like wildfire. Primarily the province of modern and contemporary art museums, digital art has been pursued by a relatively small number of museums nationwide. But virtually all of these “early adopters” remain actively committed to new media art, and others are finding ways of working with it as well. And as digital art makes itself at home in the exhibition gallery, it’s pushing museums to question not only their exhibition, collection, and conservation practices, but commonly held assumptions about art itself. And not all museums are coming up with the same answers.
A Useless Term?
Since personal computers first reached the general public in the 1980s, artists have been using them to make art. But over the past few years, increasingly sophisticated technologies, plummeting equipment costs, and the Internet boom have led to a dramatic rise in the production of art made with, from, and about digital technology.
So sharp is this upturn, in fact, that the term “digital art” may be almost useless. “There’s a kind of porosity between digital and traditional artmaking,” observes Whitney Director Maxwell Anderson. “The ways photographers and printmakers are using digital tools is seeping into other artmaking practices.” Adds Jill Sterrett, head of conservation at SFMOMA, “It’s all falling under the category of contemporary art. New media art is just the latest in a series of challenging art forms.”
Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator for new media, draws a distinction between art made using digital technology as a tool, and art in which digital technology is the medium. With the first, “what you end up with is still a traditional art object,” she explains, “whether it’s a painting done by digital means, a print, or a sculpture created through rapid prototyping. That’s still art as we know it.” But when artists use technology as the medium, “the art is in constant flux, through a live data feed or whatever. This is true not just of Internet art, but of networked installations. This is a whole different category of art.”
For others, it’s more a question of degree. “The moment you start using a computer, your understanding of production is different,” says Benjamin Weil, curator of media arts at SFMOMA. “It’s not like applying paint on a canvas. It’s a mediated process. You’re using an interface, the keyboard, and the mouse. There’s a degree of awareness, of self-consciousness. The trace of the computer is still there.”
Amid the ongoing debates, one thing is clear: this art must be reckoned with. As Steve Dietz, curator of new media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, explains, “Part of my role as a curator is to follow the artists in what they’re doing. And it’s incumbent on contemporary art institutions to pay attention to this.” Lawrence Rinder, curator of contemporary art at the Whitney, puts it even more succinctly: “Museums dealing with contemporary art don’t have a choice about dealing with this. They have to, because it’s happening, and it’s not going away.”
The Second Wave
Though last year’s major exhibitions catapulted digital art into public view, few big technology-themed shows are currently slated for American museums. That’s not surprising, given how costly and maintenance-intensive such shows can be. “Whenever you’re using real-time technology, things tend to get incredibly complex,” says Christiane Paul, who curated “Data Dynamics” at the Whitney. “Apart from the challenges of live streaming, just think about how often your computer crashes, or you lose your Net connection.”
One exception, currently scheduled for late 2003 or 2004, is the Guggenheim Museum’s “Mind Sets.” Curated by John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts, and Jon Ippolito, assistant curator of media arts, the exhibition will offer “a vision of society driven by information” says Ippolito. Pervading the entire Frank Lloyd Wright spiral rotunda, the exhibition will give museum-goers a chance to “step into a model of networked culture,” he explains, where the display of works largely will be determined by visitors’ choices.
Designed specifically for the uptown New York Guggenheim, “Mind Sets” isn’t currently scheduled to travel. But then, few of last spring’s digital art shows did, either. Chalk it up to high costs, daunting technology requirements, and complicated installations. “In some ways, these shows need to be toured like rock shows are toured,” says Stephen Nowlin, director of the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “Rock groups learned how to work with big light and sound installations 25 years ago. For museums, the learning curve is still high.”
Despite the challenges, museums are interested. “I’m getting calls all the time,” says the Walker’s Steve Dietz, “from university art museums and smaller museums that either want a digital art show, or want to include digital art in a show about the body or some other theme.” Prompted in part by this interest, Dietz curated “Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace,” a touring exhibition focusing on art that combines telecommunications and computing technologies. Organized by Independent Curators International, the show opened last spring at the San Francisco Art Institute, traveled to three other venues, and goes to the newly expanded Oklahoma City Museum of Art this fall. “Situated Realities: Works for the Silicon Elsewhere,” which examines the shifting boundaries between humans and their digital representation, premiered in February at its organizing institution, Baltimore’s Maryland Institute, College of Art, before traveling to the Williamson Gallery.
For university and college art museums, the connection to digital art is a natural one, fostered by student interest and the pioneering development of the Internet at universities around the country. Other museums, though, have had to work at it. “Most of the staff here was thoroughly un-informed about these new media a couple of years ago,” says Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. “But we made it a mandate to educate ourselves in this.” Since late 2000, the museum’s Media Z Lounge has provided an ongoing space devoted to new media, one of the few in American museums. Organized into two areas—a main gallery and an informal “pod space” for individual viewing—the Lounge has presented international exhibitions of digital and online art on such themes as cinematic perception, computer hacking, and surveillance. Given the constraints on museum budgets these days, the Media Z Lounge “is a big statement for us,” says Anne Barlow, director of education and media. “It says that we firmly believe in this new art form, and we’re going to dedicate time and staff and resources to it.”
Beyond curatorial concerns, practical considerations—such as wiring and equipment needs—often mean that digital and online art are grouped in a single gallery. At the Whitney, curators are taking a different approach. “We’re trying to integrate digital art more and more with ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A,’” says Christiane Paul. “It should take its place among other contemporary art forms.” The 2000 Whitney Biennial saw the introduction of digital and Net art into the curatorial selections; this year’s Biennial (which opens March 7 and runs through May 26) continues the trend, with Net art exhibited alongside other works throughout the show.
For many museums, the most effective exhibition space for online artworks is still cyberspace. A pioneer in presenting online art on the Web, the Walker Art Center remains an influential leader in the field. First launched in 1997, the museum’s Gallery 9 Web site (www.walkerart.org/gallery9) has commissioned, displayed, and archived online projects ranging from äda’web, one of the earliest artist-created sites, to Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg’s recent WonderWalker (A Global Online Wunderkammer) (2000). Earlier this year, Gallery 9 launched Radio Free Linux, a Webcasting project by the Australian group Radioqualia. CrossFade, accessible from both the Walker and SFMOMA Web sites, is an online performance space for sound art, created as a collaboration between the two museums and the German-based Goethe-Institut and ZKM Karlsruhe.
Last year, the Whitney launched Artport (http://artport.whitney.org), a Net-art portal that features commissioned projects, artist-designed splash pages, archives of online art, and links to other resources. New projects appear regularly on the Web site of Dia Center for the Arts, another online art pioneer. The Museum of Modern Art is launching an additional online art project this spring, and the SFMOMA Web site continues to feature online works from “010101,” as well as archived Web sites in its e-space section.
An Immaterial Art
Some digital works may be understood as 21st-century updates of the painterly tradition—for example, Jeremy Blake’s five-channel computer animation, Station to Station (2000-2001), which he describes as a “time-based painting,” or John F. Simon, Jr.’s computer-programmed abstraction, Color Panel v.1.5 (1999-2001), inspired in part by the art of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. In such pieces, the “artwork” often includes the complete installation—software, computer, plasma screen, and all.
But other digital art is far less substantial. With online and networked art, the work may be a Web site where visitors’ input shapes the art, or an installation piece that relies on a flow of “live” information from the Web—for instance, John Klima’s ecosystm (2000), which turns individual world currencies into flocks of strange-looking birds, whose welfare is linked to real-time fluctuations in the currency market.
Several curators trace the antecedents of online and networked art to the performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, which “de-materialized” the artwork through audience participation and an emphasis on process rather than the finished product. As with these earlier art forms, with Net art “you’re not dealing with an art object,” says Christiane Paul, “but with what I call ‘conditions of possibilities’—the parameters for the creation of the artwork that have been set by an artist, and the visitors’ interventions that ultimately create it.” Case in point: Mark Napier’s Net.Flag (2001), launched on the Guggenheim’s Web site in February, in which visitors collaborate in designing “a post-nationalist flag for the Internet.” Napier’s work presents design elements plucked from flags around the globe; users do the rest, combining the elements in a continually changing emblem of the Internet’s fluidity. “They’re meant to be communal pieces,” says Napier about his multi-user artworks. “That can change the art in ways I may not expect. Who’s in charge here? Whose aesthetic experience is this, anyway? The answer is, it’s everyone’s. That’s a fundamental aspect of the artwork, and that’s what the Web gives you.”
For museums, the philosophical underpinnings of this new art contradict some long-cherished assumptions. With pieces like Net.Flag, the creative process doesn’t necessarily yield a unique art object. Collaborations between artists and audiences can confound the notion of authorship. Artworks that are infinitely replicable—with new copies cached on viewers’ hard drives each time they look at them—defy the concept of market value. And then, there’s the question of how to display them.
The Small Screen and the Big White Box
In a physical space designed for paintings and other traditional art, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out just how digital art fits in. In the museum, works originally conceived for the Web, for instance, often end up reconfigured into a more substantive format, taking on the look of installation art. And while some pieces are still best appreciated in the one-on-one environment of home computing, others blossom in the social setting of the museum, where the many user interactions display the works to their best advantage, and visitors learn from watching others at the controls.
But installation can be daunting. “A lot of this work isn’t really conceived for large, white-walled, high ceilinged contemporary art spaces,” observes the Williamson Gallery’s Stephen Nowlin. “It needs to have darkened spaces, and it doesn’t necessarily need high ceilings.” As a museum affiliated with a college of design, the Williamson has presented close to a dozen digital art shows since 1995. “Some works that we’ve shown have needed individual rooms that we’ve had to build,” says Nowlin. “It’s a different kind of curatorial and installation challenge.”
By contrast, presenting online art on a museum Web site can be a relatively uncomplicated affair. The works might not even reside on the museum’s server, but on the artist’s, with links from the museum Web site. But if the connection between the art and the audience is the Internet—not the museum—what role can museums play? “Context,” suggests Steve Dietz. “Clarifying and making deeper and broader the relationship between works of art and their contexts—which is not always the case with other organizations presenting Net art.” This past November, the Walker relaunched its Gallery 9 site in an expanded format, offering essays, interviews, and other contextual materials on more than 100 works of digital art.
Many perceive museums as repositories of “cultural memory”—an especially important function with something as evanescent as digital art. “Museums have to think of ways they can conserve and display this work in a way that people 25, 50, or even 100 or more years from now can see it,” says Benjamin Weil of SFMOMA. “This is not something anyone else can carry out.”
A Moving Target
But how do you conserve a work of art when the software that runs it has become obsolete, the plasma screen it’s shown on is no longer manufactured, or the computer can’t be replaced? Do you migrate the work to newer software and equipment, upgrading speed and image resolution as you go? Upgrade, but contrive to keep the original look and feel? Record an online piece on CD-ROM, severing its connection to the Web but at least preserving a document of the work? Behind these questions lies an even more essential question: In the digital arena, what precisely is the artwork? Is it the original appearance of the work in its first configuration—or the concept behind it?
Consensus on these questions is a long way off, but museums recognize that they have to do something, and quickly. “If you collect in this area, you have to appreciate the inherent vulnerability of the media,” says Jill Sterret of SFMOMA. “It’s such a moving target. As recently as eight or nine years ago, we were stymied by video and how best to preserve it. We now think of video as the least of our worries.”
One of most articulate theorists to emerge from the debate is Jon Ippolito of the Guggenheim. Last year Ippolito and his colleague John Hanhardt introduced the Guggenheim’s Variable Media Initiative, which analyzes artworks in terms of their fixed and variable components—in other words, which aspects of the work must remain the same over time, and which could change if necessary. A detailed questionnaire queries artists on everything from installation specifics to storage and duplication, nudging them to define the parameters of their work in both the original version and any subsequent re-creations.
Though the initiative is still a work-in-progress, its central concept resonates with museum professionals grappling with conservation issues. “With digital media, there’s no physical relic for us to interrogate,” explains Sterrett. “For that reason, the notion of fixed and variable components is very important. It gives you leave to migrate forms to different platforms, to restage the work.” While there’s some concern that this approach could give future curators too much leeway in reinterpreting artworks, it can offer invaluable guidance in preserving the essential characteristics of a work. And the principles apply to a spectrum of nontraditional contemporary art practices, from performance to video and installation art.
But the rapid obsolescence of digital technology poses challenges beyond other contemporary art forms. “We’ve had ephemeral materials for a long time,” muses Sterrett, “but this preservation at the moment of conception is a weird one. Because preservation is predicated on a period of reflection, seeing what’s worth saving and what’s not. We’ve merged conception, implementation, and conservation in one move.” She pauses to reflect. “But that’s what we have to do. From one year to the next, so much of it—plug-ins, platforms, software—is no longer sustainable.”
The complex nature of digital art conservation makes collaboration between institutions an appealing option. Many museums recognize that, fiscally and logistically, they simply can’t go it alone. The performative, cross-disciplinary character of much digital art is prompting some museums to turn to institutions such as libraries and archives—which have experience conserving content as well as objects—and archives of music and dance, which have developed systems of notation for documenting performance works. Other museums are partnering with like-minded organizations in oint research projects. The Guggenheim recently entered into a partnership with the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology in Montreal, which is supporting further development of Variable Media Initiative tools, including descriptive standards, databases, and questionnaires. The Foundation also is researching the feasibility of emulation as a conservation practice—in other words, the transfer of a work to successive technological platforms that maintain the look and feel of the original software.
Along similar lines, a consortium of six organizations led by the University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive—and including the Guggenheim and the Walker—is seeking support for “Archiving the Avant-Garde,” a project to further develop and disseminate strategies for conserving variable-media and nontraditional artworks. And late last year, SFMOMA introduced a two-year fellowship in contemporary art conservation, a cross-disciplinary program that teaches conservators, among other things, how to communicate effectively with artists.
Wiring into a Changed Climate
As museum budgets continue to tighten, digital art projects aren’t likely to be spared. Technology companies, long enthusiastic supporters of museums’ digital ventures, have been hard hit by the economic downturn. “There’s not exactly a slowdown in digital art,” observes Steve Dietz. “But there’s no expansion.”
Even that assessment may be a trifle optimistic. While support for digital initiatives remains strong at many museums, projects must conform to decelerating exhibition schedules and fiscal austerity. “We’ve had good reception to proposals we’ve made for funding in this area, and we expect this to continue,” notes Lisa Phillips. Still the New Museum of Contemporary Art—like many others—is fine-tuning its Media Z
Lounge schedule for 2002, extending the run of one exhibition, adding another, and pushing back a third. SFMOMA also continues to support digital projects, though on a more modest scale than “010101.”
As Jon Ippolito points out, Internet projects can be relatively inexpensive to produce. “One reason museums have been criticized for doing them is because they’re sort of a cheap date,” he notes wryly. In the current climate, though, cost-effective online projects are looking more attractive. “I can build a lot of the infrastructure for online Web projects myself, using off-the-shelf tools,” Ippolito says. “Compared to an extremely elaborate, expensive show, Internet projects are still pretty feasible.”
Given the conservation issues involved, however, even museums in the forefront are hesitant to actually put accession numbers on digital and online artworks. “Owning is really challenging,” says SFMOMA’s Sterrett. “I don’t think we do own a live Web site. We’ve hosted and commissioned.” And though the Whitney acquired several works from its “BitStreams” show, “I don’t think we acquired anything that runs off a computer,” says Lawrence Rinder. “So we’re not faced with questions of expiration of software—yet.”
But they probably will be, and not too far in the future. If anything, the impact of digital art is likely to increase, as it becomes richer, more varied, and even more widely practiced. The questions that it raises are among the defining issues of early 21st-century art; and as museums continue to experiment with curating and conserving these works, they become active participants in an ongoing dialogue with artists, digital arts organizations, and the culture at large. Will museums change digital art? Or will this art change museums? Most likely, the answer lies somewhere in between—and a few short years down the road.
Susan Delson is editor-in-chief of Museums New York, Museums Washington, and other Museums magazines. A former museum professional, she writes frequently about museums and new media art.
