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Why I'm still scribbling for a living
When a stock trade cost me my job writing about Silicon Valley, everyone assumed I would join a dot-com and get rich. But I'm a newspaper journalist.
By Chris Nolan
[03/14/00]

Technology: View from the top
The privacy police?
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21st Challenge
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
[03/09/00]

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Ten years, several zines and a few experimental novels later, 39-year-old Amerika is finally surfacing in the mainstream art world -- via the Internet. As one of nine Internet artists included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2000 Biennial Exhibition, opening next week in New York, his work is being lauded as a seminal example of an emerging medium. His first hypertext novel-cum-interactive art experiment, Grammatron, will be shown alongside everything from a Web-controlled Ouija board to a Java applet that displays all possible variations on a pattern of black and white dots.

Also Today The trouble with the Whitneys Artwork that slams Rudy Giuliani's reaction to "Sensation" leads to a little dynastic squabble that may cause the family to withdraw its name -- and not-so-little fortune -- from the museum. By Frank Houston

Is it pixelated garbage, or is it art? Net art is starting to battle the same question that every experimental art form faces as it enters the mainstream. (We'll leave the answer to future art historians.) As Net art begins to leak into galleries, the artists are tackling the traditional difficulties of introducing a new, technology-based medium to the world of dealers and collectors. When you're working with a cold medium dominated by dot-coms and commerce, how do you convince the technophobic art world that your oeuvre is more than just a fancy home page? And how does an artist earn a living when his work is online, digitally reproducible and therefore free to the viewing public?

"People just keep asking me whether the inclusion of Internet art in the Biennial validates Net art," sighs Ben Benjamin, the creator of Superbad.com and one of the artists included in the Whitney show. "I say that it's already valid -- what I think it does, it makes it look more valid to the art crowd. So all of a sudden because it's in a museum it's not crap anymore?"

The 70th biannual Biennial exhibition, generally considered the definitive survey of new contemporary art in America, will include over 200 works from 97 different artists. Covering film, video, sculpture, painting, photography and installations, the works will most likely range from the shocking to the serene to the simply horrible. Almost 10 percent of the work shown will be from artists who describe themselves as "Internet artists," using the medium of HTML as their primary outlet. Although Net art is by no means a new concept -- creative minds have been fiddling with code and graphics since the days of Mosaic and ASCII art -- it's certainly the first time that the much-disparaged medium has been so prominently included alongside the more traditional arts.

The works were selected by a team of six curators, none of whom had prior expertise in Internet art. Larry Rinder, director of the California College of Arts and Crafts Institute for Exhibitions and Public Programs in San Francisco, had never even looked at Net art before his assignment; set on his task, he had high-speed Net access installed and spent the next few weeks huddled in front of his computer, surfing the Web. "I knew there was Net art being made and it was our collective responsibility as curators to research it and find out what's out there," he explains. Although his expectations going in were low, he says he came away surprised by what he found: "I was not aware of the scope [of Net art] and when I entered into this process I was not as impressed as when I finished."

The Net artists who will be exhibiting in the Biennial range from the mischievous collective @rtmark, which runs an online brokerage for anti-corporate pranks, such as inserting anti-Nike leaflets in athletic shoes on store shelves; to Annette Weintraub, whose virtual VRML tour of New York's Broadway examines the chaotic and seedy sides of that famous street; to author Darcy Steinke, who's "Blind Spot" interactive narrative innovatively uses windows to tell the story of a woman terrified by the rooms around her. These works will be exhibited in an online gallery, as well as being screened at the museum itself -- on work stations placed around the museum, and projected on walls. One collective called fakeshop, which creates disturbing online soundscapes, will perform "live" during the show (exactly what this means isn't very clear).

In fact, the works by these authors are so varied that it's hard to define exactly what Internet art is -- except, perhaps, that they all use a medium known best for sports scores and e-commerce as the backbone of their art. Much like video artists and photographers before them, Net artists are claiming what is often seen as a commercial medium as their turf; and, as a result, are having a more difficult time convincing the world that yes, that strange home page they built is an artwork in its own right. Many artists are instead having to support their art habits with jobs as Web designers and site consultants -- after all, their abilities with HTML and Shockwave Flash are extremely valuable in the networked economy. While they wait for the world to value Internet art as highly as painting or sculpture (or photography or video installations) they've got to find a way to pay the bills.

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