Art and Money Online

In comparison to Net_Condition at ZKM and the current blockbusters
Bitstreams at the Whitney and 010101 at SFMOMA, the Tate Gallerys first
foray into new media art looks decidedly feeble. Two rooms at the very
end of Tate Britains cavernous entrance hall, which have to be entered
alongside the building works for the next real show, do not a decisive
statement for the validation of new media art make. This timidity is
surprising coming from the Tate, which was relatively early to add
net.art to its website (Tate Mongrel by Harwood launched early last year
and is far more prominent than the web art at the end of most museums
directories), and which has ample resources available to its curators
and is currently running the most popular art museum in the UK, Tate
Modern, where this show should have been.

It is a shame as well that curator Julian Stallabrass of the Courtauld
Institute was not given the resources to fully explore the issues he
describes in his essay which accompanies the exhibition. The impact of
commercialisation on the internet is theme at once so vast and obvious
it would take more than the three works (thats right, the whole show is
just three works in two rooms) on display here to even begin to explore
it.

Thomson & Craigheads work CNN Interactive just got more interactive of
1999 is a work that gives users the opportunity to choose music to
accompany CNNs news as a way of highlighting the blurred boundary
between information and entertainment found on such corporate websites.
This is an excellent work but to turn a website, which functions and
exists in the context of the rest of the web, into a stand alone
projection piece, cut off from the rest of the web is to somewhat sap it
of its power as a piece of commentary.

Redundant Technology Initiative is a Sheffield based collective which
uses the cast offs of corporate computing and open source software to
create art. In their exhibited piece Free Agent, they present a wall of
low resolution fourteen inch computer monitors which seem to date from
the mid nineties that display patterns of characters generated from
images and text. The continuous hum of the computers (in competition
with the music from Thomson & Craigheads CNN piece) combined with the
achromatic effect of the thumbprint stained monitors (each of which
represented the centre of some office workers visual world for the few
years of its corporate life cycle) is chilling and gives the sense that
everything new now will be history soon. As corporations push technology
along, RTI will be waiting to clear up whats left in the gutters and
feed it back to us as art.

Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portways work Black Shoals Stock Market
Planetarium is an ambitious work which visualises live stock market data
from Reuters as stars in the night sky, which is presented both as a
model on a flat screen display and as a hemispherical dome in a darkened
room. Within the data artificial life creatures swim and react to the
trading that goes on around them. Unfortunately, due to time and budget
constraints, the dome is too small to convey the overwhelming sense of
awe even the most perfunctory planetarium is able to convey by
enveloping the viewers in the dark and then dazzling them with stars.
The stock market itself though, as a starting point, is rich territory.
John Klimas Ecosystem currently on at the Whitney in Bitstreams is
notable not only for its use of live stock market data to create
artificial life creatures which the viewer interacts with through a
Playstation style control, but also for being the only piece of art in
the entire Bitstreams exhibition which is connected to the internet.
Once one accepts that any raw data, regardless of whether it is the
stock market or the rings of trees, can be reduced to numbers and then
associated with any display, whether stars or artificial life, the
possibilities for interpretation become vast, and artists should soon
begin working with data sets more abstract than the stock market. Black
Shoals Stock Market Planetarium visualises corporate data as true
Nueromancer-style abstract beauty and is a good starting place for
further data associations. Furthermore, this is one piece of
installation connected to the net that actually does need to be viewed
in a real space, but it deserves to be done again, in better
circumstances, at an actual planetarium.

Criticism of corporate culture by new media artists is somewhat a tricky
issue, as the very tools used in its execution and display are corporate
by products, meant to make money. The whole anti-corporate stance that
many net artists take is puzzling as the very infrastructure used to
carry their web pages is corporate made and corporate maintained. Could
any anti-economy collective take its place? It is hard to believe that
the thousands of servers and millions of miles of phone cable could be
built or maintained by anything less than the largest and most ruthless
of corporate conglomerates. It is this issue which requires examination,
more than the commercialisation of the internet as this exhibition
professes to examine, which itself seems a foregone conclusion.

Art and Money Online is a well-curated, ambitious show hampered by what
appears to be a lack of support on the part of the Tate to take net.art
as seriously as their counterparts across the channel and across the
ocean. At a time when the Guggenheim is already discussing standards for
preservation of net.art, it is hard to believe that the Tate could not
do better.

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[This article will appear in the May issue of The Art Newspaper.]