Interview with Alex Galloway by Peter Schauer
(p.schauer@theartnewspaper.com) of The Art Newspaper
(http://www.theartnewspaper.com)

Peter Schauer: Why Rhizome? What's the agenda? What is Rhizome's purpose
and what is important about it? What volume of submissions are you
currently dealing with?

Alex Galloway: Rhizome is a do-it-yourself art venue for digital artists
and others who are interested in using the Internet in new creative
ways. Our mission is to present new media art to the public, to foster
communication and critical dialogue about new media art, and to preserve
new media art for the future. The volume on Rhizome is pretty high–ten
to twenty emails per day on our lists, and several art submissions per
day to the Rhizome ArtBase, our online archive of Internet art. Last
December we had over four million hits on our website. We've been around
since 1996 and have the largest, oldest collection of documents and
artworks in the field of new media art.

PS: What do you see as the most important trends of the moment in net
art? Name a few sites that you think illustrate this. What's next?

AG: The most general trend I see is toward software. The stakes are
higher now. Artists are feeling the need to do something more
sophisticated than simple HTML. So they are making (or simply using)
more sophisticated software in their work. This trend started with
"Webstalker" which is an artist-made Internet browser, but is also
evident in current work such as Ade Ward's "Auto-Illustrator," a
generative software application based on the Photoshop interface
(http://www.auto-illustrator.com/), or even Entropy8zuper's new work
"Eden.Garden 1.0" (http://eden.garden1.0.projects.sfmoma.org/) which
uses a 3D virtual reality engine to render an imaginary space filled
with plants, animals and other objects.

PS: Who's making this stuff? Do you find it's artists from
"traditional" art backgrounds or is it designers or something in
between? Where do they pick up their skills (which in many cases seem
quite advanced) A lot of people I've talked to reject the label of art
for themselves and their work. So what is it and why are they doing it?

AG: The new media art community has always been sceptical of the
traditional art world. A lot of [traditional artists] don't seem to
"get" it. When they do, great things happen, but when they don't it's a
disaster. If any of the artists come from traditional art backgrounds
you can't tell–they have had to transform themselves into programmers,
graphic designers, etc. New media artists are much more like producers
than artists-as-genius. I like that.

PS: To go beyond net.art into areas like virtual reality, will require
access by artists to some pretty advanced technology(Heath Bunting of
Irational.org thinks the next big thing will be bio-engineering), how
are artists going to get their hands on this stuff and what will they be
able to do with it without the specialist knowledge, training, and money
to do something with it?

AG: Biotech has become a new battle ground for art making. Artists like
Eduardo Kac and Natalie Jeremijenko are working in this area. But I
don't think it will ever be as important to artists as computer
technologies are simply due to the accessibility factor. Today, anyone
with half a brain and a buck or two can make interesting web art. Bio-
engineering living tissue is another story. So, I still put my money on
the opensource/Linux revolution because it brings formerly prohibitively
expensive technologies into the hands of the public.

PS: From my perspective Rhizome looks like a hub to facilitate
communication between artists and users–wasn't this always the sacred
role of the museum? What should museums and the public sector be doing
to nurture and promote this new expression? Who's leading the field in
this?

AG: Exactly. Rhizome is a communication machine–nothing more, nothing
less. Traditionally museums have been the opposite of this. They have
been machines for the elimination of communication. They facilitate the
curator's voice, yes, and the so-called artist's voice, yes, and the
"monumental" voice that all large institutions have. But not the voice
of real inter-personal communication. Real communication is horizontal,
or peer-to-peer. It's Rhizome's role to help with this.

PS: Buying and selling. Can New Media (especially web based) work be
sold? Do you know of cases where this has happened? If so, how much was
paid and what did the collector physically get? Are commissions and
prizes (Ars Futura, etc.) the best way or can this new work be bought
and sold like other art?

AG: Anything can be sold. That much is clear. There are many examples
already of new media art being bought and sold. For example, John Simon
sells personalized editions of this java applet "Every Icon." (see
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?1722) Major museums such as the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art have commissioned Internet artwork. I
think this is mostly a personal choice that each artist makes. What's
nice about new media is that the cost of producing art is so much lower
that it becomes increasing possible for artists to avoid the commercial
world as much as possible (if they choose to do so). For example,
Jodi.org, perhaps the most well known and respected internet artists in
the world, are rabidly anti-commercial. I can't think of another
artistic medium where this is the case.

PS: Following on from this, how should this work be stored and
preserved? Jodi.org (for example) changes all the time -who's saving the
changes? Should the changes be saved at all? Can websites (which live in
a network environment) be preserved disconnected from the network
environment? If we look at net art as performance (as Peter Lunenfeld
suggests in Snap to Grid), can the performance be endlessly repeated?
Aaron Betsky of SFMOMA has been criticised for his "butterfly pinning"
technique of downloading and burning onto CDs art websites, but is there
a better way?

AG: The Internet is very much like life itself. Art has always been much
more like an inanimate object. Hence the problem with Internet art.
Internet art is incredibly dynamic. The question is "how should we
preserve net art for the future?" I think the answer lies in what Jon
Ippolito calls "variable media." Variable media is an archival technique
that allows artwork to be translated into future contexts. The artist's
intent is catalogued in detail so that his/her intentions are known for
posterity. Then, future curators or collectors know how the work should
be maintained or preserved. The variable media initiative is in place in
the Rhizome ArtBase (rhizome.org/artbase), our online archive of
Internet art. We have a detailed questionnaire that each artist fills
out, stating if they want their work to be displayed on emulators in the
future, or if they grant us permission to make derivative documentation
of the work, or if they grant us permission to migrate their work out of
obsolete formats, and so on.

PS: How should net art be exhibited? Is there a place for it physically
within the museum? The "internet cafe" type of display where you have a
cluster of machines in the gallery space is particularly unsatisfying,
but not every curator can afford plasma screens, is there a better way?

AG: Internet art should be viewed on the Internet. It's that simple. If
museums want to give the public access to computers and couches and a T1
connection, then great (this was the case in what I consider to be a
very successful exhibition, "net_condition" at the ZKM in Germany). But
at the end of the day, Internet art is about surfing the web, at the
office, at home, at the cybercafe, wherever. The reason why museum
exhibitions are unsatisfying is because the Internet is *supposed* to
exist in that private, personal space that is your computer. I don't
read my email in a museum, I don't look at porn in a museum, and I would
prefer not to view my net art there either. On the other hand, museums
can be excellent spaces for other types of new media art. For example,
Char Davies's work with virtual reality or Nam Jun Paik's sculptures and
installations translate very well to the museum context.

PS: Computer games are so different now that we can play each other
instead of the machine, and they're a lot more challenging now that
processor speeds are up. They certainly look better than most new media
art…are games the new arena for cultural expression and interaction?

AG: Games are an exciting format for artmaking. Several artists have
started working in this area. Jodi created an art game called "SOD" that
uses the Castle Wolfenstein virtual reality engine. But my all time
favorite is the role-playing game "Toywar" (http://www.toywar.com/)
created in the winter of 1999 by the infamous pseudo-corporate art group
Etoy. This game allowed hundreds of players from around the world to
interact in a web-based virtual space.

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This interview will appear in full in the April 2001 print issue of The
Art Newspaper http://www.theartnewspaper.com subscriptions available at
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/subscribe/subs_centre.asp

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