This year the Venice
Biennale is for the first time hosting a display of net.art (meme).
The Slovenian pavillion – curated by Aurora Fonda – is presenting
my work and that of my most distinguished Italian friends 0100101110101101.org.
The present volume is intended to be the lasting document of that presentation
and part of my project for the Biennale.
I have chosen the expression Net.art per me as the title of this book
and of the whole project in reference to a conference held in Trieste
in 1996 that was entitled Net.art per se. That was practically the first
time that our small but uninfluential European circle of online art
pioneers came together to discuss our activities. Subsequently that
little meeting gained some notoriety, so much so that last year the
venerable Walker Art Center hosted a panel named Net.art per se II.
Touché.
Inclusion
While it would be
truly polite to congratulate ourselves for the inclusion in the Biennale,
it is nevertheless important to offer a fair account of how it actually
happened. The fact that net.art has become part of the official history
of the Biennale is a consequence of the art-political vacuum in Slovenia.
The previous selection of artists for this show have raised so much
bad blood (mauvais sang) that the key institutions have de facto boycotted
the selection process staged by the culture ministry.
I am mentioning this in order for the historians of net.art not to fall
into unjustifyed glorification of Slovenia or Eastern Europe as a natural
basin for net.art to establish itself as mainstream (as the recent issue
of CIAC magazine from Montréal is suggesting).
The relationship between net.art and the art system remains silly, and
possibly the expression net.art.system expresses its impossibility.
Slovenian Pavillion
The display that
I have decided to stage in the Slovenian pavillion is meant to express
a couple of small points. The works that I have chosen were both completed
in 1997 and are to be considered ancient, especially in the compressed
nostalgia field of online arts. I thought the Biennale the place to
show old and stable values.
Documenta Done is possibly my best known single work and the Biennale
being such a show I have decided that it makes sense to stress the slightly
disruptive potential of the medium. The installation itself –
even though it does contain a computer – is meant to be a bit
broader and to extend the conceptual point(s) of the piece. I hope that
this installation will offer a possible answer to the eternal question
of the gallery display of net.art.
History of Art for Airports asks questions about the historization of
our time-based art form. Again, I have tried to display the work in
such a way that the surfer that is familiar with it will nevertheless
find something new, and in the same way I intend the unsuspecting gallery
goer not to be intimidated by screaming claims about online creativity.
The show in the Slovenian Pavillion is thus intended as the maximum
compromise that I could think of between the online environment and
the utterly problematic gallery context that is proving itself the wrongest
locality to place net.art.
Temporary Autonomous Pavillion
The very important stratum of the project Net.art Per Me is this exhibition
that deliberatly has no name. The subtitle above is a multidirectional
insult that we are using for the venue. One asks himself which profanization
is worse.
I have invited several artists that have shared the net.art adventure
since the early days or that have offered incisive propositions that
made me remain active as an artist for so long. This volume contains
a modest catalogue of that show. What needs to be said is that I insist
on the fact that regardless of the sometimes impressive ways in which
some of the net.art careers side-multi-tracked, we all have remained
the closest of friends and often collaborators. I regard this show as
a hymn to the definitively existing very human dimension of these creative
individuals.
As for the show and the way the works were selected I can only mention
a concept that is floating around my head for a while now – New
Low Tech Media. With this slogan I am trying to identify artists that
are reacting to the dumb way in which the art system and the society
at large are non-reacting to technological development. Some of them
don’t even know I have a label for them, and the last thing I
would want to see is that label appearing on any of their young bodies.
Museology of Net.art
I have exhibited
my net.art pieces in a variety of venues, and in very many different
settings. Sometimes the display was reminiscent of the office, sometimes
the work was shown offline, and sometimes technologically complex and
expensive setups were created to host net.art. And rarely did it work.
Possibly the problematic detail is that whatever you do in a gallery
in order to show net.art pieces (already this expression is thoroughly
wrong) you will de contextualize it, and lose the spontaneity of free
browsing.
In order to stress the importance of this dilemma (did you notice that
I am avoiding the Microspeak word issue?) I have humbly asked my dear
friend Sarah Cook to present a cross-section of more intriguing essays
and contributions from CRUMB, a mailing list and international community
dedicated to questions of the museification of net.art among other topics.
I expect that the selection presented in this volume will mark a good
start.
Nettime reader
It is really hard
to find precise words to describe Nettime. Let’s just say that
somewhere in New York there is a machine that is routing all mail sent
to one e.mail address to very many others, approximately a thousand
and a half of them.
It started six years ago in a Biennale just like this one where Nills
Roehler, Pit Shultz and Geert Lovink had the right combination of guts
and cash to invite a group of very different people to discuss net.theory,
net.critique and art. Out of that meeting a mailing list came arose,
and a series of six books of its postings was printed with several reprints.
I have decided to present one more collection of Nettime postings because
of this Venice spiral, and also because of the historically non-negotiable
fact that net.art owes its communications spine to it.
I sincerely hope that the series of clever and humorous writings in
this book will seriously stimulate the curious reader in the way nettime
has stimulated net.art.
Conclusion
The sentimentality
of this short introduction lead me to using the picture of the emouse
developed by IBM. The emphasis should be on the affective computing
and not on the super-interesting story of IBM and Holocaust that I think
is one of the most important milestones in understanding technology
and its place in history.