The World's First Collaborative Sentence, Douglas Davis, 1994

One of the best things about the internet is the possibilty of interactivity. In any form of internet presentation the user must  interact with the interface. This can be as simple as just browsing through a given set of web pages, or as some creative artists have achieved, let the users/viewers themselves create the work of art.

An example of this method is seen in a piece by Douglas Davis. Titled ‘The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, it is an internet piece in which viewers are free to add to and contribute to the forming of the sentence with the given rule that they must never use a full stop. In the development of this sentence, there has been an incredible amount of content added to sentence. At the beginning it was mainly black and white text but with time users figured out they could customize it, adding color, adding video, java…and everything. It now contains ‘fractious rans, self-advertisements and myriad minor obsessions, and links to homepages and porn sites’

Museums can offer interactivity on their own websites in the form of offering a site that is in the most basic form interactive by clicking through different pages but may also encourage discourse through forums or comments on a blog. The Louvre museum finds a playful way to engage young art enthusiats (or trying to enthusize the young for art) by creating a virtual room which they can explore and interact with a character. Thus making the art experince richer.

There is a widespread discussion on the proper use of museum blogs. There are many museums that currently have a blog yet there are doubts as to wether museums are using them correctly. I believe museums should embrace this new technology and use it as a marketing tool with which they can promote their own presence as well as stimulate discussion about art and their exhibitions with their target audience.

See: Museum Blogs

Thomson & Craighead - Altitude, 1996

Art institutes try to co-opt and support online activist culture elevating and branding it as art and thus limiting its scope and character.

The artworld is archaic and elite whereas the net stands for somehting hypermodern and democratic

The statement above is taken from the intoduction to the book Internet Art, The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce by Julian Stallabrass. The internet is a platform for sharing information and data. It does not grade it’s data. Thus, every piece of data is treated equally. This is a fundamental structure of the internet that has been so since its beginning (only now slowly changing with giving different priorities to high-bandwidth sites such as for video-streaming). Many of the active users of the internet strongly believe in this. Open-source software is very popular and website such as wikipedia demonstrate that the collaborative effort of volunteers all over the world can create something grand and usefull to everyone. For free.

This stands in contrast to the artworld which is believed to be a closed, elite, archiac circle in which art is institutionalised and deemed good or bad by the top of this organ. That which is not approved or supported by the museums, galleries, curators and collectors is not considered art.

In this sense, with the internet, anyone can publish their own personal art and make it immediatly visible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. This way, an individual could possibly be an artist, well known around the world, without ever having come in contact with any form of institution to support the art.

The internet now covers a wide variety of art forms, from the amateur and menial to elaborate and earnest narratives in words and pictures.

Futuristic Landscape by Ushio18 (via DeviantArt)

The concept of the ‘museum without walls’ was first coined by André Malraux in 1947. He then referred to it as Le Musee imaginaire, which translated means: the imaginary museum. Malraux realized that it was now possible to for works of art to go beyond the museum by the means of photography. The effect this has on the work of art is that it looses its original meaning and significance as well as all textuality specific to the material of the artwork.

Malraux accepted the change that photography brought and saw it usefull. Yet he saw photography of art only as legitimate when used in the service of art.

We can think of the internet in the same way as early photographic reproduction of art. Though possibly more like a double-edged sword. The internet can be a great way of showing and distributing photographs and videos of art. For example on internet site of a museum it can offer previews and reviews of the current and upcoming exhibtions, creating an interest for potential viewers. Though if the quality is high it can also support the circulation of unauthorised copies and so it can result in losses in poster sales or some internet users may feel they do not need to visit a museum anymore after seeing the work of the artist online.

L.