Where could and should net art be exhibited: in a museum or just on the
Net? What are the problems? Should it be collected and saved for
posterity? Can there be any criteria set up for these problems? At this
moment I am writing a thesis on this subject.

An interview with Tilman Baumgaertel by E-mail dated 10-12-1999. He
writes about netart and netculture in, among other magazines, Telepolis
(www.heise.de/tp). He is also the author of the book net.art Materialien
zur Netzkunst, which was published in 1999 (see: http://www.moderne-
kunst.org/publikationen/neuheiten/04.html).

+ + +

Petra Heck: How would you define Internet art?

Tilman Baumgaertel: Net art deals with the specific properties of the
internet. It might be on the web, but it might also use other net
protocols as well. And the main aspect of it might not be visible online
at all (for example performances that use the internet).

PH: Do you think that institutions should exhibit Internet art? Why
(not)?

TB: Of course. Net art is not some underground movement, even though
some net artists would like to make you believe that. Opposed to popular
belief, a lot of net art pieces that required some work were funded by
some institution or another. I guess if you are an artist right now,
you should not have such a hard time to get funding for an internet
project. At least it should be easier than getting funding for putting
paint on a canvas. A materialist study of how the most interesting net
art projects were supported would show that most of them received some
sort of institutional backing, which might be a grant or a teaching
position or an invitation to a festival or what ever. "Exhibiting" of a
lot of these pieces in a physical space is, of course, connected with a
lot of problems. I think that institutions that want to support net art
should set up some sort of financial support for artists to do net
projects - without expecting to have much to show in their galleries,
museums, Kunstvereine or whatever they are. But they could put the
results on their homepage, which would finally make them interesting.
Some institutions are doing this: the DIA art foundation for example or
the Walker Center of the Arts, even the Museum of Modern Art in New York
to a limited extend.

PH: Where is the best place to exhibit Internet art? (in a virtual
institution, just on the Net, on the site of a museum, or inside the
real museum space, etc.) Does it matter at all?

TB: It does matter. How should you show it? It really depends on the
piece. Internet Art comes in all shapes and sizes, and it depends on the
piece, where and how you want to show it. The web pieces should stay on
the web, because that's what they were made for. I guess it would be
good if there would be a curator somewhere who is in touch with the
scene well enough to see, if some web site is about to be abandoned or
lost, and acquire it for preservation, before the whole site goes off-
line, like in the case of Akke Wagenaars "Hiroshima Project". I don't
see anybody anywhere right now who is doing this, the Walker Center of
the Arts being one notable exception. If you are a curator, you don't
make your fame by faithfully preserving interesting or important net art
pieces from bit rot. You make it by doing your own projects and shows.

PH: In which way do you think Internet art can be presented best? What
are the criteria, the necessities (theoretically and practically, what
kind of space, optical conditions, etc)?

TB: As I said, it depends on the piece. But I have one more general
remark to make. Almost all your questions just address this tiresome
subject of museums and institutions on the one side and net art on the
other side, and that's usually not where it happens. I said that a lot
of interesting net projects where made with the support of some sort of
institution, but normally not by museums. Actually that's OK, because
the job of museums is by definition not to commission work in the first
place, but to keep what is worth keeping. The funding for most of these
pieces came from some *official* source, but usually it was taking
advantage of some sort of vacuum. Maybe some money from a festival, or
the local city administration or some state scholar ship or whatever. If
you are smart you try to use the available means in a parasitically way
for your own purposes.

PH: Do more 'traditional' art museums approach Internet art in a
different way compared to the new institutions like the ZKM, or the
virtual institutions like Artnetweb, for instance?

TB: Yes. The best pieces were not commissioned by museums. It is
actually not such a good idea to have some big-time institution
supporting you, but rather getting the smaller funds and fellowships
that are available most everywhere, if you look for them, at least in
most western countries. The worst thing would actually be if there was
some state institution that systematically supports internet art,
because it is the latest thing. I can imagine the kind of art that would
be the result of this. The internet is a distributed medium, so
*something* will remain *somewhere*. Not even Internet2 will wipe that
away. That doesn't mean that the state should stay out of this, on the
contrary. At one point the state should start to preserve digital
culture, but in a distributed fashion, not at some Institute for Applied
Net Art Preservation. Anyway, if I were to work in a museum, I would
start an action plan right now. The first issue would be to do a video
collection of artist's TV and satellite projects, because the tapes that
these things were recorded on are hard to get and deteriorating fast.
And unlike video art, to my knowledge there has not been any attempt so
far to keep these things. The second issue would be a collection of
artist's software, browsers, screen savers etc. There is a lot of this
stuff, to be sure, that I wouldn't want to be taken away by digital
decay.

PH: Do you think Internet art should be collected or saved for
posterity?

TB: They should preserve it, of course. It is culture, so every cultural
institution should have an obligation to keep net *culture* - not just
art. The first site of Time Warner or CNN by now is also of historical
interest, but you will not find it anywhere anymore. It is not just art
that is disappearing, actually it isn't even that bad there, because in
the art world there is some sort of understanding that it is important
to keep and preserve cultural production. At the big media companies,
the only reason why they could be interested in this issue is to make
money out of licenses etc. But there is not a lot of money in old
websites. There has to be an institution that keeps digital culture, but
not some national, central library. I don't think it can be done
centrally, but I still think that it is enormously important that it is
been done. Otherwise a lot of our computer culture and thereby the most
important developments and innovations in the late 20th century will
disappear completely. And of course I would like to run this
institution. ;-)

PH: What are the criteria for acquiring and/or preserving Internet art,
and are they different from other (more traditional) art forms?

TB: As I said, net art is tied to the medium it was created for, and in
this self-referentially, it is in the tradition of modernism. The
problem is just that other forms of modernism where tied to media that
might end up lasting longer that websites - to oil paint for example. I
have a plan in my desk for an show, which will show media art from oil
painting to video art to net art, to address the issue of how the
dependency of modernist art on its medium is affected by the fact that
these media deteriorate. And that the newer they are, the faster they
deteriorate. But so far I have not found a museum to let me organize
this show. ;-)

PH: Does the sale or exhibiting of a piece of Internet art necessarily
alter the work in and or itself? Is this different from other (more
traditional) art forms?

TB: I guess that all media are in the process of converging, but I am
not prepared to make any prediction what this mega medium will look
like. It might be that the specifics of the medium internet will be
lost, and than many of the net art projects won't work or make sense
anymore.

PH: Do you have any idea how Internet art could be well preserved?

TB: Yes. But that is a life time's work. It doesn't only include web art
things, but also operating systems, computer makes, software, plug-ins
etc., because they are all tied to each other. And this kind of
collecting shouldn't only involve net art, but every aspect of digital
culture. I can think of ways and means to keep these things, but that
would exceed this kind of questionnaire…. My book on net art is one
attempt to do this preservation, not by putting files on hard drives,
but by having artists speak about their work. It is preservation that
uses the method of oral history to keep some aspects of net art
accessible in the future - without computer! ;-)

PH: How do you think institutions (should) deal with Internet art in the
future?

TB: What will happen to net art in terms of the art market is pretty
clear: art institutions and collectors will become more interested in
net art, artist will become more accommodating to institutions and
collectors, and net art will become a genre like video art was in the
70s: weird, but not to be neglected by the art world. Then everybody
will forget about it. Then it will become part of the artistic tool set,
like video is now. By then it will not be interesting anymore. This
process will take less than 10 years, while in the case of video art it
took 30 years. Hopefully the most innovative artists who started net art
will live to see this, because in the case of video art pretty much only
Nam June Paik managed to outlive the art world technophobia to finally
get his due. Most of the other artists who did the most advanced things,
when video was new, didn't manage to see the day, when they were finally
taken serious. And the Bill Violas collect the fame. But to my thinking
the first pieces from both net art and video art are the best. And they
are somehow preserved. In many cases just in print format, though…