Sarah Borruso (sborruso@sirius.com) is a former producer and art writer
for HotWired (www.hotwired.com). She is currently Editorial/Web
Coordinator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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RHIZOME: how did you get started with hotwired? i guess those were the
'renaissance' days, right?

Sarah Borruso: Yes, I started at HotWired in June, 1995 - a stint that
would last a little over two years. At the time, Renaissance 2.0, as it
was known, was HotWired's original arts and entertainment section. The
site - or channel, as we began to call it - was run by a handful of
people: an editor, a production person and one or two designers. I was
hired on as the editorial assistant.

This was a really exciting time, not only for the medium at large but
for HotWired and specifically, Renaissance. Back then, our a&e section
was a quirky, not-so-little site made up of features, web site reviews,
serial comics and literature, original fiction, and artist's work. The
site was a truly malleable sort of thing - defined each week by our
content (often avant-garde or underground) and by how we chose to
exploit the medium. For example, our treatment of a short film by artist
Laurence Arcadias: the film was broken into a number of QuickTime
segments, which we posted in serial format (10-15 second installments)
on a weekly basis. Clearly, this was an early experiment (at a time
before RealVideo) which played with the new possibilities of showing
video online but indeed, must have tested the duration of our readers'
attention spans.

RHIZOME: who decided to have an online art platform and why?

Borruso: When I began working on Renaissance, there was already a
section in place called "Retina". This was essentially a holding tank
for all of our art-related content. Within this was a tiny feature
called Gallery; a showcase simply for artists' images. It wasn't until
December of 95, when we changed the name of the site from Renaissance to
Pop, that we decided to expand the gallery section. I took over as
editor of this new section (www.hotwired.com/gallery/archive), and
expanded it to feature new art every two weeks. In addition to
thumbnails and enlargements of artists' work, this new gallery included
interview-based artist profiles, written artist statements, and often
audio clips from the interviews.

Why the online art platform? It seemed only natural - there was
incredibly worthy work out there to publish and write about - so we were
eager to take advantage of the medium for the cause.

RHIZOME: how did you get acquainted with artists working with
technology?

Borruso: This really came later - with my most recent work on the
current HotWired Gallery called RGB (which features exclusively
Web-specific artist's projects). Back in the Ren/Pop days, ironically
enough, most of the artists I worked with knew nothing about the Web;
they were simply thrilled to have their worked published for public eyes
- on a much broader scale, I might add, than they were often used to.
So, really, back when I was featuring artists for Pop, I wasn't
necessarily looking for the most technologically adept artists - I was
looking for the most interesting, challenging work out there.

RHIZOME: who was the first artist you profiled?

Borruso: Well, among the first artists whose work I simply "showed"
were: Harvey Bennett Stafford (a San Francisco painter whose work is,
well, downright macabre) and Robert Heckes (another Bay Area artist who
makes large-scale collage-paintings entirely from playing cards). The
first artist I actually "profiled" was Michael Brian Foley, a San
Francisco photographer who makes black and white photomontages.

Another exciting "first" - and this gets back to artists working with
technology - was showing the work of Tony Labat. He was the first artist
to deliberately take a conceptual approach to the medium; his piece,
designed specifically for our site, consisted of faux internet ad
banners linked to black-and-white QuickTime video. This "show" was kind
of a milestone for the HotWired Gallery - it was the first time an
artist really seized the opportunity to not only show work, but to
_make_ work, for the online environment. It was important for Labat to
make something appropriate - conceptually coherent - for the context in
which it would be viewed. That's commendable. I was sorry more artists -
especially those working in more traditional media like painting and
sculpture - didn't branch out and try this.

RHIZOME: who designed and produced the site? what were design
considerations?

Borruso: Throughout the various renditions of the HotWired gallery, a
variety of designers worked on the site. Over its evolution, Sabine
Messner, Three, and Mary Spicer all did a great job, within what often
seemed a rigid set of limitations. It's challenging - and, as it turns
out, rather controversial to many viewers - to reproduce an artist's
work online. Generally speaking, we settled on one approach: we provided
thumbnails of the work, which linked to enlargements for those who had
the interest or modem where-with-all. (Some viewers were appalled by
this tactic, complaining that it was offensive to show "postage-stamp
size" images of art work - apparently not realizing the thumbnails were
linked to enlargments!)

Issues of design and reproduction always led to a question we
continually asked ourselves: were we creating an actual "gallery," or
was this just an art magazine on the Web? (This question was also a
subject that cropped up periodically in our threaded public discussion
area.) Without settling on an answer to this quandary, we accepted that
the beauty of the Pop gallery was distribution. We were able to quickly
and easily deliver new and important art to many thousands of viewers,
who otherwise may not have had the opportunity to venture into a
physical gallery to see it.

The matter of true gallery vs. art magazine was put to rest, however,
with the most recent rendition of the HotWired gallery. RGB
(www.hotwired.com/rgb), which features exclusively site-specific work,
_is_ a true gallery - a venue for a new scene that exists only online.
It's an incredible thing to witness - artists growing and working with
this new medium. (To be honest, it may not have even been possible - or
would have been extremely difficult - to feature this kind of work back
in '95. Both browser technology and the technical sophistication of
artists have advanced significantly in the last few years.) The medium
is just developing so quickly - we really are witnessing the creation of
a whole new genre.