Net art has always been a problem in space, failing to fit exhibition traditions. It became a problem for time, disappearing along with the sites it linked to, the servers that hosted it, and the technologies that sustained the work.
The history of net art is recent but full of setbacks. Forever media art’s poor cousin, because networks’ intrinsic accessibility never sat well with collectors’ exclusive standards, it enjoyed a brief hype between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. During that short period, it entered the biennial circuit, including São Paulo in 2002, and reached Documenta in Kassel, whose tenth edition in 1997 seemed to promise online art a critically successful trajectory that never materialized.
Documenta X commissioned ten “web-site-specific” projects selected by Swiss critic Simon Lamunière, invited by the exhibition’s chief curator, Catherine David. Revolutionary for its time, that edition’s online interface departed from the portal model to present itself as a platform for artistic experiences linked to Documenta’s themes and program.
With a menu based exclusively on icons, the site distributed the commissioned projects across four main axes: Surfaces and Territories, Inside and Outside, Groups and Interpretations, and Cities and Networks. It also included a guide to online art links and a discussion forum between artists and curators, published in Le Monde.
At Documenta itself, the site was made available locally in the café, transformed into the net.room. The office-style setting and offline presentation displeased the artists. Replying to an email in which Catherine David explained her expectations for the exhibition website, the web-artist duo JODI summed up the general dissatisfaction on the Documenta X Internet projects mailing list:
Documenta X ended, but the underlying question—how to exhibit net art—persisted, ultimately producing more frustration than solutions. Above all, online art depends on the Internet in every sense, which goes far beyond a computer screen. It is contextual art, dealing not only with data traffic on the network but also with the particular situation of those accessing it: from their computer model to their browser and Internet service provider, to the countless open windows and tabs.
An aesthetics of transmission
An art of ubiquity and transit par excellence, net art takes as its paradigm an aesthetics of transmission that is difficult to adapt to antagonistic situations, such as offline environments or simple large-scale projection.
Projects of this kind generally feed on information generated in real time on the Internet and therefore cannot be presented without a connection. Most are also conceived for individual consumption of information, so ideally they should remain at the scale of monitors and portable screens. This drama seems to have ended in the total ostracism of online art practices from critical discussion and the art circuit. But another has emerged: the difficult task of preserving online artworks.
From a museum perspective, preservation is particularly challenging because the works depend on digital technologies that, as we know, rapidly become obsolete on the Internet. In other words, if net art was always a problem in space because it did not fit exhibition traditions, it became a problem for time, disappearing with the sites it linked to, the servers that hosted it, and the technological resources that made it possible. A series of studies and discussions is underway to address the question of archiving net art.
Netescópio, Gustavo Romano’s project with the Spanish museum MEIAC; Archive 2020, by the Netherlands’ Annet Dekker; Variable Media Initiative, coordinated by John Ippolito in the United States; ArtPort, curated by Christiane Paul at New York’s Whitney Museum; Net Art Pioneers, by Dieter Daniels in Austria; Taxonomedia, by Vanina Hofman in Argentina; and VideoBrasil and FILE Archive in Brazil are among them. The proliferation of research and studies corresponds to the recognition of memory’s ambivalences today.
Architectures of forgetting
Few words have become as commonplace in the twenty-first century as “memory.” Until quite recently confined to historiographical, neurological, and psychoanalytic reflection, memory has become an elementary aspect of daily life. It has become a quantifiable datum, a measure, even an indicator of someone’s social status. There is a fetish for “memory” as a “thing”: how much memory does your computer have? And your camera? And your phone? That much? Only that?…
We buy memory, transfer memory, erase and lose memory. Curiously, this inflation of discourse corresponds to a methodological void in dealing with cultural products created using the media to which these memories refer: digital media.
Questions without answers multiply: how can we preserve the memory of cultural goods that resist objectification and often exist only contextually, as net art does? How can we deal with such unstable memories, which expire along with the equipment and whose typologies do not correspond to the cataloging models of museum and archive collections?
How can we avoid recognizing that cultural memory today is also an economic matter and a service that should require some form of ethical code? After all, memories are increasingly mediated by corporations that open vast repositories and discontinue them as soon as they cease to be convenient marketing niches. Consider the recent case of GeoCities, the free website-hosting service shut down by Yahoo!, taking much of Web 1.0’s history with it. What if Google decides to do the same with YouTube?
Perhaps this imminence of disappearance justifies the apocalyptic tone suggested by the most elementary commands in digital editing programs, which constantly invite us to “save” files rather than simply store them.
To avoid surrendering to a catastrophic hypothesis and to move beyond market pressures toward disposability and the economy of planned obsolescence, we would do better to reflect on the new meanings of memory and technologies of memorization. This means discussing methods for preserving ephemeral and digital works, particularly those that involve and expose the materiality of networks: their entanglement with bandwidth, the types of servers storing data, the contextuality of links, the validity of programming scripts and their relationships with browsers, among other variables.
The irreversible digitalization of culture demands a critical, specialized repertoire with appropriate terminology and methods to address works produced and conceived for digital media. It must also address the incalculable mass of data and memories slipping away between memory cards and USB devices, accumulated and lost in collective and personal archives on the Internet, some related to the history of net art. So, is net art dead? Then… long live net art!
Originally published in seLecT, no. 7, August/September 2012, pp. 68–71