February 10, 2000
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL 
On This Network, Nothing but Internet Art
o you want to see if there's another fabulous art work behind door No. 3? But first, a word from the sponsor. It's the Art Entertainment Network, coming to you live and online from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
You won't find examples from Picasso's "NYPD Blue" period or hear Renee Fleming's take on "The Sopranos" on the Art Entertainment Network (AEN). Instead, the Walker -- already among the most progressive cultural institutions when it comes to digital art -- has mounted one of the largest curated exhibitions of Internet-based works to date: 42 projects, a dozen of them making their debut on Friday when the AEN Web site officially opens. The site is close to being fully functional now.
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The opening page of the Walker Art Center's Art Entertainment Network changes each time it is loaded.
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Developed as a parallel exhibition to "Let's Entertain," which opens on Saturday in the Walker's real-world galleries, AEN examines how contemporary artists have used the seductive appeal and cheap thrills of popular culture to comment on society while exploiting its ability to lure audiences.
Unlike "Let's Entertain," which includes works by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and 80 other artists, AEN is focused on digital culture. The projects include online stories like Vivian Selbo's "open_source" (to which readers can contribute), interactive toys like Mark Napier's "CBots" (which lets visitors build a creature from a jumble of easily identifiable body parts) and computer games like Natalie Bookchin's "Intruder," a brilliant adaptation of a brutal Borges short story. Others, like C5's dazzling "1:1" interface for accessing any site on the Web, make art out of the Internet's raw materials.
Steve Dietz, the Walker's director of new-media initiatives, curated the AEN exhibition. "Especially on the Internet, there's an increased blurring of the lines between art, entertainment and commerce," he said in a telephone interview. "AEN lives on those blurred boundaries, both in how the artists look at the very existence of the Internet and also in how we approach the model of the museum exhibition" in the digital age, he said.
While last year's "Net_Condition" exhibit at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany, wrestled with methods for displaying Internet-based art in a real-world gallery space, AEN raises questions about how museums should present online works to an Internet audience.
Walker Art Center
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A revolving door at the Walker (shown here under construction) will let visitors see various Web projects on screens.
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To make AEN something more than a simple set of links, Dietz appropriated one of the Web's most common formats, the portal page. AEN's visitors are greeted by an interface, developed by Selbo and Matteo Ames, with artist-designed versions of many of the features that portals offer: links organized by topic, a search engine, a highlighted link-of-the-day, background colors that users can change -- even a banner ad.
But reload the page and its elements are randomly reconfigured, with Mongrel's "Natural Selection," for example, replacing Maciej Wisniewski's "Turnstile II" as the search engine. Door No. 3, as it were, leads back to doors 1 and 2.
"We've essentially ended up with a one-page Web site that's never the same," Dietz said. "It's supposed to be fun. And frankly, if you're looking for a straightforward experience, sometimes it will be a little disconcerting."
The goal is to get people "to question these formats that already seem so normal after just a few years," Dietz said. "It's one of the things that artists bring to the Internet. They understand very well how it works, and through their projects they challenge that it's a fixed form."
The portal concept also challenges the traditional museum sensibility. "A lot of times, the museum as an institution is about bringing people to your space, not bringing them in and then sending them out somewhere else, which is one of the things a portal does," he said.
"Let's Entertain" will also have its own version of a portal. To display AEN in the museum's galleries, the Walker hired Antenna Design, a New York firm, to construct a revolving door that, as museumgoers push through it, shows different projects on small screens embedded in its panels.
Although the Walker, which has been a pioneer in commissioning new digital work, did not sponsor new pieces specifically for the exhibition, AEN is spawning a number of new online activities.
The museum will run a 12-week online forum, Entertainment, Art, Technology, to discuss topics like "mischief" that are related to both shows. The Daily WebWalker, an online site for commentary, will serve as AEN's catalog. ArtWarez is an online gift shop with free downloads and digital-art items for sale. And there will even be a real-world event: Sins of Change, a two-day conference on media art in April.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
arts@large is published on Thursdays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
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Matthew Mirapaul at mirapaul@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.
