[Steve Dietz is director of new media initiatives at the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 'The Walker', as it is often called in
short, apparently is unique for its depth of commitment to
multidisciplinary (not interdisciplinary) programming: visual arts,
film/video, performing arts (largest museum-based program in U.S.) and
new media. It bought and 'hosts' ada'web. It is one of the 10 most
visited art centers/museums in U.S, and among the activities this year
are Olia Lialina and Vuk Cosic doing presentations this spring, plus
commissioning a new work by Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin.]

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Interview with Steve Dietz

Josephine Bosma: Have you focussed on art in networks from the
beginning? If not, can you tell me when and why you decided to explore
net.art?

Steve Dietz: I came to the Walker in 1996 to found a "new media
initiatives" department. From the very beginning, the net as a medium
for creative expression was central to what I wanted to do and to
explore, along with engaging audiences and providing access to
"information."

In his <a href="http://tec.uno.edu/george/thesis/news/virtualcommunity.html" target="_window">book on virtual communities</a>, Howard Rheingold refers to a not
uncommon "conversion experience" of early innovators of interactive
media. In my experience, lots of people drawn to networked,
interactive media don't quite "fit" where they started out, whether
photography or painting or the library or whatever and do feel a
compelling fit with this hybrid, fluid medium, whatever we call it. On a
personal level, reading to my young son was a very interactive,
profoundly communicative experience, and it remains an ideal of what
interactive, networked media can be. On a professional level, one aspect
of the Walker's mission is to be a catalyst for artistic expression. The
two mesh.

JB: Would you say you have to deal with specific difficulties in getting
your work accepted, because you work in the United States (compared to
curators and critics of net.art in Europe)?

SD: It has been more of a struggle to have net art accepted as a
critical arena of activity for the museum than networked information
resources or education-oriented inter-activities. The examples of artist-
oriented programs in Europe as well as virtual organizations in the US
such as artnetweb, The Thing, and ada'web have all been inspirational
and instructive. I suspect, however, we can all be competitive in terms
of the difficulties we feel we face regardless of where we are based.

JB: I have no wish to start any competition there, I am merely asking
about the differences between the States and Europe when it comes to the
reception and perception of net.art, because many people keep
emphasizing there is this difference. I am curious what they mean. Are
you saying it is a minor difference, or there is not really any
difference, or the differences are unimportant?

SD: I would say that there is a much more active and stimulating network
for net art in Europe. Certainly, many artists feel both greater support
and greater appreciation for what they do in Europe –and perhaps
Australia. Whether this is a timing or a structural issue is not yet
clear.

JB: What kind or style of net.art is your personal favorite? How do you
think this specific kind of net.art is best supported, or how could it
be explored more and deeper?

SD: At the moment, I am greedily catholic in my interests. I guess I
tend to end up less involved in work that seems too easily an extension
of other media. In terms of support, I would say what I am working with
most actively right now are commissioning and context, both of which, I
think, are valuable, although contextualization can be tricky. "More and
deeper" seem somewhat self-explanatory. They require commitment.

JB: Could you after three years of being involved in creating a context
for net.art maybe say something about the aspect of time in the
reception of net.art? Commitment does not just mean dedication, but also
long term investment, right?

SD: A deep commitment to contemporary art is important and can only be
manifested over time. Regarding net art, you're right; what does long
term mean in a real-time world? I think almost more important is a
rigorous openness to and support of experimentation–as opposed to rigor
mortis of aesthetic categories.

JB: In relation to this I wonder whether the influence of the internet
on our perception of time (and therefore the world) creates a faster but
ultimately less powerful, less dominant way in how art enters "art
history."

SD: While acknowledging all the issues around historicizing contemporary
work, if I have one generic "beef" about the net art world in general,
it is a kind of obsession with what's new, today, this minute, right
now. It's not <I>all</i> about newness. While it may be "old" as a
strategy, for instance, I still find Alexei Shulgin's <a href="http://www.c3.hu/collection/form/" target="_window">Form Art</a>
fascinating. Just one example. In one sense this work from 1997 is
"classic," already part of the <a href="http://www.calarts.edu/~line/history.html" target="_window">power of the line</a>, but in another
sense, we still haven't digested it. Maybe this is exactly what you
mean?

JB: Err, I am not sure myself. Both the aspect of "time, memory and
present" and the aspect of "space," "architecture," "visibility,"
"accessability" were on my mind when trying to formulate this question.
This limited memory span is a problem, but I think also the fact that
even though a lot of net.art is text and image based, the medium
internet because of its narrow view or landscape (the path we click) and
its speed of communication exchanges (even if it's only relative) really
is much more fleeting then even we assumed until now. What do you think?

SD: Speed is a popular perception of contemporary life, and as a prime
"culprit," the Internet has replaced the fax machine, which replaced the
telephone which replaced the telegraph, which … But does this mean
that our ideas, our art, our connectedness are more fleeting? I think it
is Kittler, among others, who has pointed out that digital media
displace the temporal sequence of events into spatial arrangement of 1s
and 0s–which are then retranslated on demand. In other words, I would
argue that what is most significant or perhaps fruitful is the dialectic
between transmission (speed) and memory (storage), not either one
itself. Nevertheless, the thrill of speed and the siren song of a
universal Library of Babel are hard to ignore.

JB: So, speed might not be the right word for the experience of a
relatively sudden abundance of choice, communication and platforms.
Maybe the appearant real time existence or evolution of these things
gives just an illusion of speed. You did not go into the space aspect
though. To me this very simple fact that one cannot see anything of the
network beyond the lines one follows while clicking away is an important
factor. It could become even more important when certain commercial
blockbuster sites from for instance large existing media networks start
dominating the traffic routes. But already from the beginning this
aspect of obscurity, of darkness beyond the path of links, has created a
splintered online culture, when one compares it to how offline culture
has developed.

I agree that I do not give memory, or storage, or databases, or
archives, the attention they need. You are right to correct me there.
The flow and the real time presence is more attractive to me to explore,
a bad habit. What do you mean with siren song? The attraction or the
death of memory?

SD: I don't think it's a bad habit. Speed is seductive. And so is not
the death of memory but the idea of an infallible, whatever-you-want-to-know
just-in-time-knowledge-delivery-system. Victoria Vesna has talked
about a wonderful project-connundrum, Data Mining Bodies, which is about
a community of people that have no time (to be a community). Is there a
way to balance real-time with time-shifting, both of which are augmented
by technology?

For me, this "narrow path," as you describe it is one of the really
fascinating things about the network. Even if you never visit a certain
room in a building, it's still there in the floor plans, but in a very
real sense, the network is constructed through one's navigation. One is
continually building the floorplan, so to speak. I think Maurice
Benayoun's Is God Flat and Is the Devil Curved are wonderful examples of
this, and it is also why I am interested in <a href="http://www.c5corp.com" target="_window">work like C5's</a>, which is
looking at ways of mapping the Internet without assuming we know what a
map is or would look like.

Whether online culture is more or less splintered than offline culture
seems debatable. This may not make sense outside the U.S., but there is
a joke that goes "All of <I>my</i> friends voted for McGovern" (who was
defeated for president in a landslide). Does the narrowcasting of the
Internet create splintering or does its broad reach allow for
individuals to create company?

As for the dominance of commercial interests, etoy is only the most
recent example. It is important to maintain an infrastructure that is
many-to-many, that protects privacy, that promotes the Internet as a
commons, but it might also turn out that a sizeable number of people
still prefer a tv-model of interactivity–or a gameboy level of content.
What to do?

JB: I heard you are currently thinking and speaking about archiving. Are
you working on a net.art archive yourself? And then a philosophical
question: what do you think would be reasons to save certain
net.artworks?

SD: I started a "Digital Arts Study Collection" at the Walker, initially
to host ada'web. In a way, it is a two-edged activity. It is both a face-
value recognition of the significance of net art and a museological
device so that, in a sense, the Walker has the opportunity to
collectively think about net art.

I also have what I consider a more personal project,
"memory_archive_database" which is an ongoing effort to think about some
of these issues. The latest version is just published in Cadre's
"<A href="http://switch.sjsu.edu" target="_window">Switch</a>."

JB: What do you mean with the Walker thinking collectively about
something?

SD: I don't think this is a Walker-specific issue. What I mean is that
individuals animate a program, but that exposing that program to the
discussion of multiple points of view can both strengthen the program
and, in the best situations, change what had heretofore been the
consensual norm.

I have said and would still argue that for society <I>not</i> to be
concerned with preserving cultural activity as significant as net art is
akin to burning books. Passive ignorance becomes active repression. At
the same time, some artists may not want their work "archived" and I
certainly would not argue that I understand the best way to go about it
right now. But I think it is important to think about, and one of the
best ways to "think" about something can be to experiment.

Collecting, of course, is a whole different matter than archiving –
although there are interesting and confusing parallels, since an archive
of digital originals may be differ only in intentionality from a
collection.

JB: Would you call ada'web a collection or an archive then? How does
ada'web function within the Walker Art Center?

SD: Good question! And not only is it a collection or an archive, but
what is the relation of the part to the whole? For me, ada'web as a
whole is a work of art–although it may also ultimately call into
question whether that's the most interesting designation. So, I don't
consider ada'web itself a collection of disparate projects, even though
you can certainly distinguish between Vivian Selbo's Vertical Blanking
Interval and Group Z's I Confess.

In this sense, ada'web-at-the-Walker is not an archive. It is not
documenation of some other original. It is an original, an object, to
use the traditional museological terminology, although it doesn't
completely fit. At the same time, ada'web as a living, growing organism
has stopped growing. Benjamin and co. are no longer curating and
producing new projects; we're not actively adding links to new works,
etc. But I also don't think it's "dead." It still has life, although
this is more a testament to how it's put together than anything we've
done, beyond continuing to host it and not locking it up in the vaults.

The irony, at least in the States, is that there is increasing
discussion of archiving/collecting net art/digital media, but still not
significant support for its creation and production, so I think it is
natural that artists would look at these efforts with some skepticism if
not mistrust.

My interest in the archive is certainly an issue of preservation, but it
is also one of transformation, both in terms of transforming the static
archive into an active platform for support and in the possibility of it
stretching the notion of the museum itself.

JB: In which direction?

SD: As both an event-platform (speed, transmission, production), and a
kind of cabinet of curiosities (museum, archive, library), where
acculturated distinctions between original and about-original; unique
object and copyable object; delimited object/event and un-delimited
object/event; ownership and accessibility become less paramount.

JB: would that still be a museum though?

SD: Sure. I don't know. No. Why not? What's at stake?

JB: I am reading and thinking a lot about the shift from the museum into
the media of the definition and reception of what is 'Art'. Does it
change the function of art, or does it create less 'monumental' art? Can
we trace an exact intrinsic value of art? The function of the museum has
completely changed throughout the last century. The question (in
general) is whether the important function of art as reference point for
our culture will get somehow lost in this splintered focus art can only
get when it has no clear boundaries anymore. My questions are old, but
more prominent with the emergence of net.art I think. What is a bit
problematic to me is that I do not trust the politics I sense behind a
lot of writings concerning this issue.

SD: I would only add two comments. I agree that the function of the
museum "has completely changed throughout the last century," which is
why I don't see the changes I suggested as invalidating the idea of the
museum.

At the same time, the museum and Art are not the same thing. You seem to
be suggesting that one important function of the museum is as a kind of
focus/filter for (net) art rather than just saying to someone "look at
the Internet." I agree that this is, when done well, a valuable role,
although I think there are deep pitfalls when that "focus" becomes
confused and conflated with what Art is. I'm sure this is unbearably
naive, but I do believe that "Art" is closer to what artists do than to
what museums pay attention to (exhibit, collect)–which is <i>not</i> to
say that museums should not exhibit and collect and espouse what "they"
think art is.

BTW, I have written at greater length about my sense of how digital
culture intersects and affects the traditional role of the museum in a
project for the Museo de Monterrey called "<a href="http://www.museodemonterrey.org.mx/english/mediateca/tours/index2.html" target="_window">Cybermuseology</a>."

JB: Would you say that art has always been supported for arts' sake
instead of the general view that the art market is one of objects
exchanged for money? I am just wondering whether this whole discussion
of how to reward net.artists is not one that is already long fought in
the artworld, and whether the "banal" emphasis on art as stock object is
a rather recent one which is only one part of the whole art situation.

SD: Support of artists is important. Certainly, if the culture industry
in the United States supported contemporary art in general in the manner
that it currently supports net art, it would be an obvious sham. That
said, much of contemporary art for quite a while has raised issues for
the prevailing paradigms of support/collecting, and they've generally,
however imperfectly, been solved. So for me, the important issues aren't
around whether it's necessary to create the networked equivalent of
editioning–pay-per-view?–but whether there is a level of engagement
commeasurate with the level of activity. Right now there is not.