A Tangled Web

When Peter Weibel became the new head of the ZKM centre for art and media technology in Karlsruhe, he stated in Texte zur Kunst that, among other things, he wants to redefine art. He is not known for his modesty. In the catalogue text to his recent exhibition 'net_condition' - but strangely only in the German version - he explains: 'The world is going on-line. [...] "net_condition" will, with all its forms of expression, be understood as a trial, an offer to articulate this new world - on-line presence and participation - inside a museum space'.

Indeed, some young boys bought a permanent ticket to the exhibition. They came in every afternoon and knew exactly where to go, skipping the rest of the show in order to play Quake III, Unreal or Grand Theft Auto 2 on high-spec machines they could never afford. This 13 computer installation was a project called esc to begin (www.zkm.de/~bernd/etb-os). Sometimes groups of older visitors entered the gallery. For most of them, the computer has probably never been more than a word processor. Here they encountered a hundred word processors in a museum. The guide did his best to explain. They gathered around a screen on which they saw a red ball and a blue ball (www.zkm.de/~fujihata/nuzzle.html). The red one could be moved with the mouse. The guide successfully managed to touch the blue ball with the red one. Nothing happened. So he explained what could have happened: if somebody were sitting behind another computer, where the blue ball is located, they could establish a form of communication in 3-D space. Some of his pupils nodded thoughtfully as if they understood.

Indeed, their journey through the exhibition would no doubt have been a perplexing one. Some pieces display a humorous sense of critique - for example the fuckU-fuckme page of Moscow-based artist Alexej Shulgin (www.fufme.com), which offers hardware to transform the computer into a cybersex-machine. Some are the gateway to micro-universes: like the HUMBOT, documentation of travels to South America (www.humbot.org); or Mikro e.V. (www.mikro.org), an ongoing Berlin-based project on media culture. Unfortunately, many artists tended to lose themselves in overwhelmingly complex projects without offering much insight, while a lot of installations and sites followed the old tradition of Media Art and just connected, more or less mindlessly, to whatever was available - Steven Greenwood's sewing machine driven by search results on the word 'war' (members.tripod.com/sgwood), or 'the world's first collaborative sentence' by Douglas Davis (math240.lehman.cuny.edu). Dull. More disturbingly, many projects eagerly attempted to 'belong' in a museum context by offering clear connections to the art world - victims of an institutional short-circuit. In Markus Huemer's work (www.khm.de/~huemer), for example, one can walk over a floor designed like a Pollock painting and trigger projections of various phrases.

Despite the huge collection of material the exhibition not only fails to articulate the 'world going on-line', but unwillingly demonstrates how far art in the museum avoids the cultural impact of the Net. Weibel and the show's main curator Walter van der Cruijsen are not to blame for this. Weibel simply did what an art professional in his position is required to do: discover the latest trends in art. He has done this before - with the 'Kontext Kunst' project in Graz, for example - but this time he has arrived too late. Documenta X saw a huge hall with on-line projects in 1997; the nettime mailing list has discussed art on the Net since it was founded at the Venice Biennale in 1995; and numerous books about Net Art have appeared. Only a real blockbuster would allow him to claim leadership in this newest branch of institutional art. So, Weibel gathered together 66 artists, linked the show to spaces in Tokyo, Barcelona and Graz, where another dozen others were involved, and co-ordinated 29 events to take place during the 109 days of the exhibition. Seen within an art context, the exhibition is probably the most extensive overview of art on the Net. In fact, it works so well that it accomplishes rather more than curator Hans-Peter Schwarz' pretentious desire to gather the supposed 'first avant garde of the 21st century'. By delivering this avant garde to the halls of the museum, the hype is born and buried the same time.

Another unintentional result of the exhibition is to prove that the rules of the museum are not really compatible with those of the Net. The Net is a cultural arena in which various forms of comparison and competition, strategies of difference and rules of redundancy have evolved through interaction with an on-line public. The museum and the art world are merely external frames of reference. Any site that succeeds on the Net does not need to function as art. (Likewise, something called 'art' may appear ridiculous on the Net.) But projects which have developed in the cultural sphere of the Net - such as Paul Garrin's name.space, which questions the way domain names are distributed and traded - tell us much more about the conditions of the Net than those which try to claim importance in an art context.

There are two basic strategies present in Net Art. One is when a designer is interested in the cultural flow of the Net and tries to become part of it, and here the question whether it is art or not becomes secondary. A good example is jodi.org, designed by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. Their work is usually considered 'art', but success in the art world is of no concern to them. The second approach involves those who wish to adapt to the rules of the art world. They are concerned with intellectual frameworks, historical context and institutional affiliation. They enter a closed circuit in which a small collection of sites is designated as the home of Net Art, supported by institutions and tucked away in the museum. This tends to isolate such projects from rest of the Net. They may attempt to gain a position of cultural priority by commenting on or criticising what happens outside, but this 'avant garde' is really a retro-garde sneaking in behind developments driven by forces outside the art world. If you really want to know about the on-line world, watch the kids playing games; if you keep looking at Net Art, you risk wasting your time in a communications dead end.

The situation faced by the museum in respect to digital culture is not as desperate as it may seem, however. The museum has a very important task: the web lacks memory. The content of the Net is subject to a constant flow, and a museum of media could rise to the challenge and preserve data for future research, for comparison, and for cultural memory. As the media-archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst and Pit Schultz - co-founder of the nettime mailing list - keep reminding us, this is an urgent task with immense consequences for the future. It is obvious that the web is changing rapidly, and change is part of its culture, but we risk falling into the circles of repetition which lead to stasis, as Paul Virilio foresaw, if we do not have the possibility of being able to look back and compare.