The Trouble With Net Art by David Hudson

10:15 a.m. 4.Nov.98.PST BERLIN -- There's one nagging problem when it comes to displaying Internet art in its original form -- that is, on a Web server out on the Internet. Gallery patrons tend to use the exhibit to check their email or catch up on news. Cultural historian Andreas Broeckmann cited this example as one of the many challenges and frustrations faced by artists and museums as galleries continue to acquire and exhibit online art.

The issue brought European Internet artists and curators together here this past weekend for the Net, Art and the Public: Mediation Strategies of Net Art symposium. The hope of the meeting was to find, among the conflicting views of the artists, common ground about the nature of the digital curation problem. Andreas Broeckmann said displaying Net art is a challenge -- even for museums such as the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. He said that unless the work is contained on a CD-ROM, the Net can prove more of a lure than the art itself.

But Nettime co-moderator Pit Schultz said this is precisely the context in which much valuable Net art has been created. "Without all the data trash around it," he pointed out, "sites like Jodi [a collection of artistic explorations of how the Web works] make no sense."

Russian artist Olia Lialina, who once found her work competing for attention with the iMac it was being displayed on, said that established art institutions often make mistakes even when putting together exhibitions online. Lialina recently discovered that the Museum of Modern Art site did not direct users to her site, but simply mirrored the art on its own Web server. Thus, rather than see her work in its own environment, viewers saw it the way the museum chose to display it -- alongside another artist's work.

Lialina said that her work was crowded out by Barbara London's travel log, Internyet, and says artists should object to such recontextualization as fervently as any commercial content provider would. But consensus is notoriously difficult to come by whenever artists convene. British artist Heath Bunting said he felt Net art was originally about subverting the hierarchies of the art world. Artists like the former photographer Alexei Shulgin had fled the art world in order to be able to present their work directly to the public. Bunting suggested that if Net artists were to act collectively, they should refuse to cooperate with the commercial art world altogether.

"[We should] build our own infrastructure and economy -- or get specialists, get marketers, and get on with it." Meanwhile, Alex Galloway and Rachel Greene of Rhizome, and the only symposium participants from the US, said museums will only grow hungrier for new media art. "Museums in America depend on funding from the private sector more than museums in Europe," Greene explained, "and software companies make great, great sponsors."