Art Meet Net, Net Meet Art

Log on to the Tate web site and behind the first window opened up in your browser you'll find another, its double. You're not on the receiving end of an information service about the galleries, but in the middle of a work of art. Graham Harwood, a member of the artists' group Mongrel, has copied the official web site and switched its contents.

Artwork has been made via computer networks ever since they have been around. In the 1960s, this meant using the private networks held by corporations and universities. The bulletin board systems of the 1980s, such as the Thing network [4] (many of which are still running today) gave way to the Internet and later the World Wide Web, providing a widely exploited realm for production, communication and invention for artists and many others.

Throughout this time, such work was only occasionally and tangentially covered by institutions. The Net is a tricky space for organizations oriented around neatly provenanced objects locked into standard-issue art modes. Although in the last few years several major museums worldwide have showcased this area of work, it remains at the showcase level—like painting by chimpanzees. Although this is the first new medium since video, the art punditocracy reassured themselves that they could safely wait a hundred years until Net art, like film, became a respectable form.

The action goes on independently. Artists set up web sites and circulate information via the Net. Mailing lists and news services have grown up to link the information to people. When galleries and museums are used, it is mainly as an adjunct to a process that is already ongoing. These institutions provide legitimation, a range of vocabularies, theoretical tools for thinking through and making work and, importantly, access to other audiences and participants. It is this, from the artist's point of view, that makes institutions worth dealing with. On one level, then, the process is equivalent to dance music makers licensing some of their tracks to majors and publishing other tracks independently. But it is not only an alliance between traders. There is a certain kind of utopian opportunism that dovetails nicely with the technology. This, on the one hand, allows artists a greater area of maneuver. (Mongrel, for instance, usually creates a triangular relation of circulation for its work between art structures; cultures of the Net; and the social, familial and community networks in which they operate. This allows them to avoid being pinned down in any one domain, but is also useful for creating ways of making the contexts in which they operate strange to themselves.) On the other hand, such Utopian opportunism finds in the Net a way to initiate or take part in a process of producing clusters of data, of signs, while not pretending or even hoping to have any determining control over the outcome: data can be moved and data can be mutated.

At the same time, though, it is not an uncomplicated story. Something happened a few months before Tate Modern opened its doors on Bankside. Around the corner, Backspace, a space run by artists and others, which was one of the richest nodes of net-culture in London, had its doors closed by bailiffs [5]. The owners of Winchester Wharf have more money to make from the local property "boom." Boom suggests a blowout, a bit of excitement, but this was simply the story of the removal of access to land, of places to live, work and socialize from people in the city. This is a story stuck on repeat.

The Tate itself has had little previous connection to this area of work. As an institution, it has only recently come to accommodate photography or video: the focus is firmly on visually pleasurable, minutely disciplined, singular and valuable objects. What is interesting therefore is not simply that it has chosen to begin an involvement now. For culture-bunkers, the decision must be made to collect now or face the possibility of archival lack. This is of course only a possibility; there is much art in the collection of the Tate of which public memory...