Heath Bunting¹ claims everywhere that he has retired from net.art. The famous web site jodi.org, which was in a permanent state of change and never saved a project as a dead portfolio, recently returned to the interface that it used five years ago. Vuk Cosic² has also left the net.art scene, and is presently working in a commercial web design company. Alexei Shulgin's³ activities during the last two years have been almost exclusively in the musical field. And all of them think net.art is dead.

However that may be, their successors, or, rather, those presently involved with net.art, suspect that the »gravediggers« are in the process of appropriating the concept, the activities, the strategy, the monumental historical phase, and so on – in other words, of securing the trademark for themselves. The claim connected with this reproach is plain, and has often been stressed: none of the former »net.artists« had made an enviable career involving a high and permanent position within a respected art institution, high pay or access to fat artistic grants. They seem to have simply and discreetly quit the field.

What is the reason for the present coldness surrounding net.art? What disease is affecting – or has perhaps killed – net.art? The answer is fairly obvious: the intrusion into the formerly autonomous zone by art institutions and their authorities. New strategies followed by these artists were implanted in the field of new media art on a large scale. One of the most interesting characteristics, of which the artists themselves were aware, and one of the most exciting struggles they were involved in, was the independent activity that tried to overcome the hierarchies within art, the capitalist order, systems of brand names, western estrangement and solitude, and the absurdity of artistic and almost every other sort of activity, which everyone in the so-called »First World« had long become accustomed to.

The most outstanding of the early works aimed to create alternative spaces of communication that were independent of institutions (like the Nettime-Mailingliste⁴, which was founded by a group of young people in Venice because they were disappointed by what they saw at the Biennale that year); to undermine the culture industry and the capitalistic way of life; to establish direct contact between artists and their audience (non-commercial multi-user-environments were to be created; »GroupWare« was also popular, and many projects of this sort were started by Thomas Kaulmann from Berlin's Internationale Stadt⁵); and finally, to create a vital atmosphere and promote understanding at conferences (for the organization of which a special parasitic strategy was developed: attaching them to the bodies of art institutions). Where has this atmosphere gone? Why can't the younger generation of artists continue with similar activities? After all, it is faced with exactly the same problems, problems which are, of course, insoluble – one reason for the self-undermining and self-ironic motives that characterized net.art from the start.

What remains is activities such as those of the San Francisco MoMA, which recently organized the exhibition »010101 – Art in Technological Times.«⁶ This includes the sort of internet projects which are mostly concerned with illustrating the latest technologies for creating smart and sophisticated environments. Interaction is presented in a safe »click-and-see-it-flashes-back« sort of way. These projects remain exclusively within the field of art and do not raise any political or socio-critical questions; they are, after all, projects created with the friendly support of Intel or Apple. A short glance at the exhibition web site is enough to see what needs this exhibition is catering for. One is recommended to have a Pentium with 500 MHz or more, a cable or a DSL connection, and so on. Here, media art is acting only as a dealer for new technologies. It seems as if the artists who have succeeded in gaining access to high technology produce mostly expensive and complex, but, in the final analysis, useless environments or devices, which then function wonderfully well as signs of artistic power. At the moment when money and institutionalized fame enter the scene on such a massive scale, every openness, communication and meaning goes out the door.

A better example is a group of artists/programmers that has named itself after one of Dostoevesky's characters, Netochka Nezvanova.⁷ They are the new, indubitable stars.

They seem to be the true victors of the net.art tradition. They use many of the strategies developed in the »golden era« of net.art in an optimal way. Their work is presented at all the large media festivals, and their postings make up half of the syndicate list.⁸ They use a variant of a customized E-mail style and a web-interface esthetic that was introduced by Jodi a few years ago. They prefer the shocking and subversive behavior that was once characteristic of Heath Bunting. They try to be ironical, which was also a strategy of net.art in the mid-nineties. They seem to deny the system of star-making by sending pretty actresses to festivals as their representatives (pretending to be a cover girl can be seen as a critical statement aimed at the culture industry that makes a woman into a doll, but it can also be considered a smart PR action). They sell their best-known project – a piece of software – for big bucks!

Nothing seems to remain of the »open source« or »gift economy« ideology. The group Netochka Nezvanova is so occupied with self-promotion that it is sometimes not clear what its main project is – the software that it programs, or the extensive, irritating advertising campaign they carry out. After all, as far as their software is concerned, it turns out to be basically pretty mainstream (real-time manipulation of multimedia data – something that could be done a few years ago with SGI and which will be able to be performed in the future using a Palm Pilot). On the surface, the group has kept many features of the classic net.artists, but in fact they act like a modern e-commerce company with all its attributes: a commercial line product with online distribution, aggressive advertising, branding, marketing, PR department, etc.. They thus represent the ultimate egocentric and alienating state of a western individual equipped with the power of digital technologies. Here, we encounter a new marketing strategy: not artists functioning as high-tech dealers, but commercial companies masquerading as artists.

These days, almost every art institution has a web site as well as a net.art department, critics and curators. Almost every project claiming to be net.art aims at ending up in the hands of an institution. Any excitement regarding net.art has vanished. The only excitement at present concerns the postings promoted by NN, a new sort of advertising for a line of products whose prices are $600 and upwards. This is the reason why some people consider net.art as we once knew it to be dead.

There is no point reminding contemporary artists of the sincerity of the ideas advocated years ago. A detailed analysis would possibly uncover some economic and sociological reasons why it was useful to the system to have artists develop new spaces and new systems. It was a unique moment that was possible against a special historical background, as with dadaism or 1968. At the time this temporarily autonomous zone of the World Wide Web emerged, many factors came together (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the introduction of the graphic internet interface were among them). But it seems as if this sort of space can not exist for very long in the modern world, in which the commercial appropriation of alternative ideas occurs very rapidly; and now it is migrating somewhere else.

Even if art practices will never be in a position to change the system in a drastic manner, they still play an important role in finding forms of resistance against the control and pressure coming from authority and commerce. The next time the TAZ appears, early net.art will take its place on the list of alternative practices to learn from and refer to.

(based on a talk with Alexei Shulgin)

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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