"BitStreams" and "Data Dynamics"
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York)
March 22 - June 10, 2001

"010101–Art in Technological Times"
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
January 1 - July 8, 2001

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Net art is about *conversions*. Why conversions? Perhaps because net art
needs data like paintings need pigment, and converting data from one
form to another gives net artists the basic materials they need for
artmaking. The conversions stem also from our fascination with
transformation, a type of digital alchemy where the use of an
intermediary substrate (ones and zeros) lets artists convert IP
addresses to colors, video to ASCII text, HTML to animation, and so on.
In recent months net art has become more and more focused on this "phase
shift" process whereby one data mode is translated into another. Let's
have a look.

A member of the ASCII Art Ensemble, Vuk Cosic has focused on converting
various media formats into the dots and slashes of the ASCII character
set (http://mail.ljudmila.org/~vuk/). His "ASCII History of Moving
Images" is a video-to-ASCII converter which transforms clips from films
such as Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Antonioni's "Blow Up" into full motion
green-tinted text. In "Instant ASCII Camera," which premiered at the
Dutch "Next 5 Minutes 3" festival in 1999, the ASCII Art Ensemble
created a small machine to take passport-style photographs of passers-
by. But instead of printing a photo, the machine returned a small scrap
of paper imprinted with the user's ASCII portrait. In a more absurd
piece titled "ASCII Art For the Blind," Cosic uses a text-to-speech
converter to read aloud the text characters in ASCII images, with the
ostensible goal of making ASCII images audible to blind art-goers. The
result is a monotone recitation of garbled punctuation marks as a
computerized voice phonetically reads ASCII images left to right, as if
the images were words. The focus here is precisely the concept of
conversion itself–there is little narrative, form, or other
traditionally aesthetic qualities.

A variety of current projects also rely on data conversion. The new
Rhizome logo, designed by Markus Weisbeck and Frank Hausschild
(http://www.surface.de), is a conversion piece that translates IP
addresses into a dynamic visual icon. A very literal conversion happens
in "Time As Color," an elegant net art piece from Christopher Otto
(http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2144) that converts seconds, minutes and
hours into RGB color values. Andy Deck's "Bardcode"
(http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2230) does something similar. It
translates works of literature into visual symbols. Vinyl Video
(http://www.vinylvideo.com/) makes art out of the conversion between the
video format and vinyl record format.

The art of conversion figures also in the curatorial philosophy behind
the Whitney museum's new exhibition "BitStreams"
(http://www.whitney.org/bitstreams). For, the story goes, since much new
art practice hinges on the intervention of digital technologies at
crucial steps in the production process (such as when a photograph is
touched-up using Photoshop), the digital world as a whole has infected
artmaking through a forced conversion to ones and zeros, at some basic
if invisible level.

"BitStreams" is not strictly a new media art show. There is video, there
is photography, there is sculpture and painting and installation. A few
computers are tolerated here-and-there for variety's sake. In particular
work from Leah Gilliam, John Klima and John Simon stands out. The
Whitney should be applauded for showcasing digital art, but this
exhibition proves once and for all that Photoshop does not new media art
make. "BitStreams" falls short in that respect. It's too hesitant, too
technophobic. Consider for example Warren Neidich's banal photograph
"Remapping 2" (where's the bit stream?), Sally Elesby's silly doodles
(where's the bit stream?), or Robert Lazzarini's sculptures of skulls
(where's the bit stream?).

To be sure, several "old" media artworks stand out in this show. Jason
Salavon's "The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1" is captivating. The
piece takes the entire film reel from the top grossing film of all time
(whatever that may be) and resamples it such that each frame from the
film becomes a single pixel on the canvass. Stripes of color appear left
to right as the film's scenes play themselves out in miniature.

Another sleeper is Jim Campbell. In two fascinating artworks, Campbell
uses low resolution LED screens to explore the thresholds of our
sensory perception. Instead of trying to make technology invisible
(which ultimately may be "BitStreams"'s biggest crime), Campbell looks
to the liminal point between clarity and confusion–that point of
"flicker fusion" where our eyes grab legible images out of pure static.
Writer Marina Grzinic has identified this phenomenon in a recent essay
where she notes that "delays in transmission-time, busy signals from
service providers, [and] crashing web browsers" are not simply the
undesirable side-effects of technology, but are in fact the very
aesthetic of that technology. Campbell understands this, while many
others in the exhibition do not.

Running in parallel at the Whitney is a much smaller exhibition called
"Data Dynamics" (http://www.whitney.org/datadynamics). While not all the
pieces in this show require the web to function, this is essentially a
net art show, and an exciting one indeed. Curator Christiane Paul
(formerly of the pioneering but now defunct tech art magazine
"Intelligent Agent") met an interesting challenge: how to stage a net
art show using Americans when net art has historically been very *non*
American. Thus, the art stars of Europe are decidedly not in this show–
people like Jodi, Knowbotic Research or Etoy–such is the personality of
the Whitney. Instead Paul picked from the New York net art scene,
hanging recent work from Mark Napier, Maciej Wisniewski and others.

Perhaps the most successful piece in "Data Dynamics" is "The Apartment,"
an artwork by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg that hinges on a
conversion between words and spaces
(http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/). First, the user types
sentences on the keyboard. Next, each word is converted into a room in
an imaginary apartment building. An invisible dictionary performs the
translations. Words like "you" and "love" become the bedroom, while
"book," or "sentence," become the library. The semantic connections
between words and spaces was arrived at by the artists themselves, who
created a mini-dictionary of the couple hundred most common terms they
were likely to encounter. Finally, the artwork renders the imaginary
apartment in 3D, creating a warped domestic space wallpapered with a
collage of images.

3000 miles away, in the SFMoMA's exhibition "010101"
(http://010101.sfmoma.org), a new work from Entropy8zuper! titled
"Eden.Garden 1.0" (http://eden.garden1.0.projects.sfmoma.org/) is also
based on a fundamental conversion. In this piece, a three-dimensional
landscape appears on the screen. At the same moment an HTML page is
fetched and parsed word by word for its component mark-up tags. Using a
special reference chart created by the artists the HTML tags are
converted into animals, plants and other objects within the virtual
landscape. For example, line and paragraph breaks appear as bushes and
flowers, while images become butterflies, and fonts become small
bunnies. Using the Eden.Garden, the user can quite literally "visit" a
webpage–walk around inside of it and seeing what it might *look* like
converted into a virtual space.

Mark Napier's "Feed" (http://feed.projects.sfmoma.org/) does something
similar. Webpages are fetched via the Internet and converted into
various charts and graphs. As the artist writes, "FEED reads HTML and
images, reducing web pages to a stream of text and pixels. That stream
is fed to nine displays that chart, graph, and plot the data." Where
Entropy8zuper's conversion is lush and organic, Napier's is statistical
and analytic. The qualities of pure data are brought to the fore,
unbuffered and indifferent in this cold interface.