[nettime-lat] fwd net art y museos?

["pedro lopez casuso" <pedropez@cantv.net>]

> Museum Tries Mounting Its Latest Show in Cyberspace
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/08/arts/08ARTS.html
>
> January 8, 2001
> ARTS ONLINE
> By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
>
> Museums know how to deal with the past. Lob a pre-Columbian artifact
> into the curatorial department's "in" box, and the staff will have
> a pretty good idea what to do next. Like everybody else, though,
> museums sometimes struggle with the future. Ask a museum how the
> Internet will figure in its mission, and you may become an artifact
> before you get the answer.
>
>  If they reply, most museums will direct you to their Web sites,
> which typically serve as a visitor's center, study guide and
> gift-shop annex. But a few museums have started to look to the
> future, based on the realization that the Internet can be an
> aesthetic medium as well as an information resource.
>
>  David A. Ross, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
> was among the first to recognize that the Internet will play a
> central role in the artistic activities of the 21st-century museum.
> To advance that notion further, Mr. Ross last week opened the
> museum's exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times."
>
>  The museum was closed for the opening, certainly a deviation from
> standard museum practice. That did not prevent anyone who had
> access to the Internet from viewing the exhibition's five freshly
> commissioned works when "010101" went online one minute after
> midnight (Pacific time) on Jan. 1.
>
>  As its name suggests, "010101" consists of digital artworks that
> were created to be shown on the Internet. The interactive pieces
> are displayed in a virtual gallery that exists solely online
> (www.sfmoma.org/010101/).
>
>  Mr. Ross had planned to attend the premiere during his New Year's
> Eve dinner, only to discover, he said, that "the Internet has yet
> to penetrate the hallowed walls" of Chez Panisse, the landmark
> restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. Instead, after arriving home, he
> fired up his computer and toured the Web site.
>
>  Online content that can be accessed anywhere is not new. But
> "010101" was probably the first museum opening of 2001. Mr. Ross
> said he hoped this Internet-only event would help demolish the
> boundaries between the art-cluttered halls of museums and the
> virtual walls of cyberspace.
>
>  "At the beginning of the New Year," Mr. Ross said, "we do allow
> ourselves to think in certain ways that we don't in other parts of
> the year. So we specifically chose this time to begin a rumination
> about the moment, and about the future we think museums should be
> engaged in. There is symbolic value to the idea that the first
> exhibition to open in the new millennium will be one whose material
> is completely invisible."
>
>  For museums, which are collections of objects, the intangibility
> of digits raises some interesting questions. How do you register a
> work when it has no physical presence? How do you preserve an
> online piece that the artist continues to update?
>
>  Benjamin Weil, the San Francisco museum's curator of media arts,
> said that for the first time the elements of an artwork   in this
> case, the programming code, a network connection, computers,
> software   had been completely separated from the experience of the
> art itself. As a result, he said, "Intelligent museums are going to
> have to start reassessing their knowledge about what art is."
>
>  No one expects digital art to replace painting and sculpture or
> online exhibitions to supplant museum visiting. But as Glenn D.
> Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, noted,
> "The digital reproduction of works of art on the Internet is just
> that, but the experience of works of art uniquely created for the
> Net is a fundamentally different category." In short, a Rembrandt
> on the Internet is a reproduction; something created digitally is
> original art.
>
>  Mr. Weil, the curator, said: "We should quit categorizing art by
> medium. All of it is art." Yet even he acknowledged that `it's
> definitely weird." He added: "We have a long way to go before
> everybody's comfortable with the computer screen as an environment
> in which you have not only your work of the day, but your art,
> too."
>
>  Artists have been using the Internet as a creative medium almost
> since its inception, spawning an international subculture that
> exists outside the gallery system because the works' intangibility
> obviously limits its marketability.
>
>  Now that museums are starting to augment the Matisses on their Web
> sites with Internet-only pieces, they are validating the genre
> while giving work, and income, to artists who were mainly producing
> labors of love. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Dia
> Center for the Arts in Chelsea routinely present online projects.
>
>  Last year's Biennial survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art
> included nine Web-based works, and the museum will offer its own
> exhibition of Internet art, "Data Dynamics," in March. The
> Guggenheim Museum also has some initiatives under way.
>
>  The Modern in Manhattan, which has presented digital works as
> adjuncts to several recent exhibitions, is planning to commission
> four or five online art works this year."TimeStream,"a history of
> the moving image by the noted multimedia artist Tony Oursler, will
> be the first.
>
>  With the Modern's midtown building about to undergo a major
> expansion, there are practical as well as aesthetic considerations
> for sponsoring online art. Mr. Lowry said, "As our exhibition space
> is compressed because of our construction program, the Internet
> provides us with the opportunity to continue presenting major
> shows."
>
>  Most of the digital artworks in the "010101" exhibition are as
> visually appealing as they are conceptually intriguing. But be
> prepared: a fast Internet connection will help reduce the time it
> takes to view the works, and visitors must learn to navigate the
> exhibition site's complicated user interface. (Hint: the box in the
> upper left-hand corner of the black grid leads to the art.)
>
>  "Feed," a work by Mark Napier of New York, is perhaps his most
> accomplished work to date. It asks visitors to submit a Web-page
> address, then takes that site's underlying data and processes it in
> a variety of graphically arresting ways. With its emphasis on raw
> materials, "Feed" is a latter- day action painting, albeit one with
> actual action. There is interaction, too: visitors can resize and
> reposition the displays to their liking.
>
>  Among the other works, "Eden.Garden 1.0," by Michael Samyn and
> Auriea Harvey, recasts the biblical setting as a 3-D computer-game
> environment. The artists portray themselves as an animated Adam and
> Eve, complete with fig leaves. Again, viewers are asked to submit a
> Web address, and code from the site determines the characters'
> movements and other elements of the scene.
>
>  On March 3, "010101" will expand into the San Francisco museum's
> real-world galleries, where two dozen works in more traditional
> media will be keyed to the exhibition's overall theme: how artists
> are responding to a world that increasingly revolves around
> technology.
>
>  Mr. Weil and Mr. Ross are still debating whether computers should
> be installed in the galleries so visitors can view the online works
> in a public space, not only from their homes or offices.
>
>  In the spring, the museum will hold seminars on how museums
> themselves are responding to a world that increasingly revolves
> around technology, and Mr. Ross is undeterred by the prospect that
> some of the discussions will become heated.
>
>  "We're all frogs in the slowly boiling pot," Mr. Ross said. "You
> know, in that old saw, you dropped the frogs in and they were smart
> enough to jump out? Well, we're all smart enough to know where we
> are, and we're not jumping out."
>
>
>
> The New York Times on the Web
> http://www.nytimes.com
>

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