Art Now–Art and Money Online
Tate Britain
6 March - 3 June 2001
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnwnet.htm

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"Art and Money Online" comprises three specially commissioned works of
art, each in different ways concerned with the impact of
commercialisation on the Internet. The rapid growth in the use of the
Net has given artists a large potential audience for their work, but has
also profoundly changed the character of the online community. It is now
more diverse and less cohesive, and (some would argue) more passive,
less engaged in talking than in gazing and shopping.

While the Net is often thought of as a public space, most of it consists
of private systems over which financial and business giants trade and
communicate. Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway bring part of this private
world into public view with their work, "Black Shoals/ Stock Market
Planetarium." In an animated night sky that is a live representation of
the London Stock Market, each star represents a traded company, the
largest being the brightest. Stars cluster together or drift apart, glow
strongly or faintly depending on the movements of the stocks. Digital
creatures navigate the complex star field, feeding off the trading, much
as stockbrokers do.

The commercialisation of the Net has produced a weird mix of
participatory and corporate culture which Jon Thomson and Alison
Craighead have long been mining for their work. Here they show "CNN
Interactive," which allows users to select emotive, if tawdry,
soundtracks to accompany the news of the day. This simple but effective
intervention presses on the worry that it is increasingly difficult to
pick apart the two halves of "infotainment," especially on the Web where
another distraction is only ever a click or a frame away.

Alongside high-speed commercialisation, other models of exchange have
developed online in which expertise, reputation and collaboration are
more important than money. Redundant Technology Initiative, a group
based in Sheffield are, as their name suggests, concerned with the
extraordinary waste of the computer industry in which machines are
junked after few years' use. Using donated "old" machines and free
software, they come close to achieving their goal of "no-cost
technology." Here reclaimed hardware and free software are directed at
sites desperately, if dubiously, offering the user something for
nothing.