Page 148 - The Black Box Book

and the need to be a computer-savvy user. New services like GeoCities
(1995) allowed a wider spectrum of people to use the web as a new site
to share their personal ideas and creativity; marking a new era for com-
municating and publishing. Despite this, the institutional art world still
understood the web hierarchically, and only rarely saw it as a space for
displaying art in its own right. Few were the institutional initiatives, which
were mostly located in the USA, such as: the Dia Art Foundation’s Artists
Web Projects (1995); the digital foundry äda’web (1995-1998) initiated by
Benjamin Weil and John Borthwick, which also included curatorial projects
like STIR-FRY (1996) by Barbara London; and Gallery 9 (1997–2003) at
the Walker Art Centre.
Although these projects were pioneering in their approach to com-
missioning web-based art and also displaying it on bespoke websites (as in
the instance of äda’web), it was mostly artists — especially net.art artists
— who generated awareness of their web-based projects, and created
spaces for showcasing and archiving their art. A well-known instance is
that of Art.Teleportacia (1998–) by Olia Lialina, which presented exhibi-
tions of peer artists while also proposing a critique of the institutional art
world by offering on-demand net.art works over the internet accompanied
by critical texts and certificates of authenticity. In this scenario, there were
also projects that proposed an exploration of spaces connected to ‘being
online’, like the desktop, as in the instance of Desktop Is (1997) by artist
Alexei Shulgin. With this project, the computer desktop became a place
to explore the relationship between the “man and machine”, as well as
“a window into the digital world” (Desktop Is, 1997). Through posting on
a series of internet mailing lists dedicated to art, Shulgin invited artists
to submit images of their desktops over the course of several months,
giving life to a new way of exploring the emerging relationship between
people and digital technology, as well as producing art.
With the increasing platformisation of the web in the first decade
of the 2000s, the gap between the technology and its users dimin-
ished even more, also because of ready-to-use interfaces and services.
This generated a major shift in the production, display and engagement
with art online — an environment increasingly characterised by an entan-
Figure 4: London, B. & äda’web. (1996).
glement between consumption and production, as well as culture and STIR-FRY — Index page. Retrieved from http://adaweb.
entertainment. The new modes of communication and publishing enabled walkerart.org/context/stir-fry/. Screenshot of web page
by services like Wordpress, YouTube, Myspace and Facebook gave life to from 2010.
new exhibition strategies that were often based on responding to the logic
of platforms. For example, the possibility to freely access vast databas-
es of cultural content produced directly by users triggered projects like
CuratingYouTube (2007–). Its curator, Robert Sakrowski, set out to explore
the role YouTube played in the context of contemporary art production by
co-creating with artist Jonas Lund a piece of software, the Gridr, which
allowed for the creation of thematic assemblages of video material from
YouTube. The project played with the way user interaction is orchestrated
by algorithmic and design choices, raising questions about the role of
the curator and the artist in the age of algorithmic suggestions.
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