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E R R O R 404: F i l e Not Found The distributed nature of the Web and the ease of email naturally invited an attempt to gather the opinions of several artists and theorists living in geographically separate parts of the world, so this year, the jury for the Net-Works section of the Digital Salon did not meet in New York. The jurors, from the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, and the Netherlands, were sent a list of the URLs that were submitted and given a month to have a look at them all. The selections in the exhibition are the results of their independent assessments of the entered works. Without exception, the jurors all experienced problems in viewing these works, and, despite the geographical divergence, the problems were consistent. I think that it may be of some value to those producing art for the Web to ponder these conclusions, which, while they may be conceptually known to artists making these works, may strike home ‘more sharply when heard from several corners of the globe: Local phone service, in most of the world, is metered, and most Internet service providers charge for time or data transferred . This means that people accessing already slow and overcrowded Internet, they do not understand the level of frustration (and expense) created for the viewers of their work. ~~ the Web with a dial-up connection are paying two parties for the time they are on line, and it is not cheap. The result is that one must decide not only if a work is interesting enough to spend time with, but interesting enough to spend money on. The notion of “surfing” the Web was invented by those in the United States who can stay online all day for 10 cents and pay a small amount for unlimited monthly Internet access. Hand-in-hand with the above, bandwidth, in most of the world, is severely limited. When artists working on high-speed university lines and local networks do not take into account how their works may be received over a modem connected to an Those who are making use of specially configured browsers and hardware have less chance of having their work seen. Most of the jurors remarked on the problems of having to install the diverse plug- : ins required by many of the works. As an extreme example, one artist’s application stated that the work “requires all currently available plug-ins.” This work was not selected by the jury. VRML (a Web-specific form of virtual reality) is, unfortunately, still obscure. While there were a number of VRML works submitted, none were selected by the jury due to a combination of the problems stated above. Unfortunately, this extremely interesting and important 0 1997 Ken Feingold Ken Feingotd, ERROR 404 449 dimension of the Web suffers not only from the economic and network problems mentioned, but also from a need for specific types and configurations of computers. himselE if, after three attempts, a Web site could not be contacted or found, he took it off the list. This may seem harsh to those with time to kill-but think about it-if you go to a gallery three times and it’s not there, or closed, how likely is it that you will ever return? How The Web is a sometimes thing. Servers are often inaccessible. file names are . long can an artist expect anyone to “keep trying”? changed with no reference, routes are unavailable. One juror created a rule for So, if one can say anything about a common thread running among the selected works, it is that they could actually be viewed under present-day circumstances. The gap that remains speaks very clearly. This is not to say that works that are hard to view are without interest or significance as artworks-it says only that it is difficult to be certain that they can be seen at all. One other remark I find it quite incredible that the current definition of net-works, as practiced by artists, remains totally Web-centric. Not a single work in any other form was entered for consideration. No MOOS,no online performance works, no...