Ross's 21 Distinctive Qualities of Net.Art

1. The ability to move and assemble audiences. Artists working in theater or cinema are used to constructing a work that assembles an audience. Poets have been doing that since time immemorial. But the net allows us to take that audience and move them into another work, to transform them, or to transform the space in which they are into a space no longer controllable. You may be responsible for their initial gathering, that then the authoritarian relationship breaks down. The way that audience reconstructs itself and how it moves, is for the first time, an element on the palette, something to consider.

This leads me to my second distinctive quality or potential for net.art. And it regards authority, particularly in my always conflicted role of museum director, curator, teacher. I never liked going to school, never believed in the authority of teachers. I never liked being lectured to.

2. Authority shifts between reader and writer. I am interested in what happens when authority shifts. I'm interested in when and how an artist can generate a work where not only the nature of where an audience disperses and reassembles, but also how that critical line of being a writer and being a reader is blurred, eliminated. I'm interested in where one can cross over that border and where the idea of authority is no longer inherently a function of who owns the camera, the broadcast transmission tower, who stands at the microphone, but purely a function of who has the best idea or whose turn it is in an iterative dialogue or whose role it is within a complex, new social dynamic which evolves in a space where even fast-talking New Yorkers like me can necessarily hold forth. It's very interesting how the dynamic of social intercourse has changed in relation to BBS dialogues. People are taking a different kind of time to react, to engage in the dialogue. That's why those kinds of conversations were so special. A discourse evolved from a new form of community interaction. One might say that in an ideal, polite seminar this could happen, but the reality is it doesn't. But it was possible immediately in the BBS environment, when I got involved with Echo and later with The Well and similar online communities and I think we've all seen how that aspect has transmuted as artists have made use of the internet, especially as the speeds have increased, and the ability to transmit not just text, but sound, still and moving images in a different kind of iterative dialogue.

3. Net.art is based on an economy of abundance. The net, even though it's not really free and we know that the idea that we've walked into a completely democratic world where all the social and economic barriers have been erased, we all know that's bullshit. However, it's such a large step in a direction of abundance that we actually can begin to talk about that. Broadcast and cable television, those controlled forms of communication in which control is a function of commercial enterprise in an era of late capitalism as well as political control in an era where governments have long known the power of controlling communications, has been changed. We've seen how the internet's relative freedom and low cost once you have access to the tools of production and distribution, which are the same tools. That changes the idea of what can take place within that new space, in fact changes the nature of this space instead of using the analog of museum space where it seems like you'll never run out of space, but of course you will.

The economy of scarcity was the economy of thirteen channels of broadcast. The economy that we thought cable was going to usher in was enormous, we thought seventy channels would provide space for everyone, every artist could do whatever they want. Of course, they ran out of space three minutes after they opened the goldrush, because it was structured to be another, but larger and more profitable, economy of scarcity. The economy of abundance is a new economic model which will produce enormous profits for many. It already has. Look at every internet stock IPO. That's based on a broad assumption by investors worldwide that this is where the money is--the new goldrush. I'm not negative about this. I pray for the success of my wealthy patrons. I want them to succeed so well that when it comes to supporting the arts and artists and a culture in which they're comfortable and not threatened, they will allow for a world to exist because it's in their interest to encourage a kind of freedom and diversity and openness.

4. The net allows for the production of epic work. Brecht talked about epic theater which was a challenge to conventional notions theater, to the notion of theater as a commodified spectacle. Theater that actually related to the direct lives of people, with all the attendant boredom, the interstitial space between things happening in life. Art has always been about compression, always within a confined space of materiality, despite the large-scale possibilities. The real scale is day-to-day life. It's artists who began to blur that line, artists beginning with Duchamp and on to Fluxus and others. Those artists finally found a medium where they could work unfiltered. That can take place within an economy of abundance, can make epic work possible. Someone could come to me with a proposal for SFMoMA's website that would take the next twenty years. This is feasible. That abundance allows for amazing things. We've seen this with webcam activity. I find it fascinating. Andy Warhol must be jealous that he didn't live to experience webcams. He would have had a webcam on every corner of the factory just looking at the water cooler. I haven't really seen anyone online take on that kind of epic aesthetic activity. Epic time is variably defined.

5. Net.art is purely ephemeral. The opposite of the epic quality of net.art is its pure ephemerality. There's no trace. It can have poetic brevity, that brief a life in the collective consciousness.

6. Net.art is produced within a medium in which extraordinary digital tools are available. Artists are able to make images of a quality which is unprecedented. They're able to create and reproduce sound which is unprecedented. The actual texture is novel. It doesn't look like video or film. It looks like what it is. Artists are just now discovering the unique qualities of the net, the ways in which text and layering can take place, the ways in which color plays. There's enormous potential for exploration on a purely formal level, disregarding all the other social and aesthetic concerns.

7. Digital technology affords the possibilities of simulation and construction of truly credible images. We must be alert to it. But it allows for enormous aesthetic opportunity and playfulness. Digital manipulation is clearly an important quality that has to be confronted and dealt with.

a. Shifting of identities. The 80s and 90s was a time to look at identity. But what's taking place in the use of identity within the web, which is so easily falsified, manipulated or acknowledged, and the constructions that develop within this anonymity and presentness, is truly amazing. I don't understand it. I'm fascinated by it. The most overt examples are Artmark, the collaborative Bay Area group, doing the Barbie Liberation Front--they constitute themselves as an anonymous investment banking firm to generate support for socially interesting projects both in the web and in real space. Their insistence on being anonymous is important, shifting of identities, hiding their aesthetic practice as Duchamp did for thirty years of his life, declaring what they're doing as not art. That kind of active non-art art-making is clearly going on within this frame of identity shifting.

b. The relationship or equity between individuals and larger corporate entities. By corporate entities, I mean many things. For example, Switch is a corporate entity, SFMoMA is another, or the kind of websites generated by individuals who may claim to be corporate entities or may claim to be individuals, but their power and their presence, their ability to manipulate all of the aspects of the audience, of the tools themselves, are equitable. That's a radical shift in power relationships and that is a distinct quality of this new medium.

8. The intimacy of this medium. It's directly in your face. There's rarely someone else with you. It's odd to be on stage with a web image or a computer screen and it always seems completely out of space. The idea of being on the web is like reading a book, it's that kind of space. It's not theater space. Yet it has aspects of theater space, that kind of tension. But the real space is intimate and that intimacy lends itself to a variety of aesthetic manipulation. I think back about Vito Acconci, with pieces like "Command Performance" or "Theme Song" in which his ability to command the audience to use that relationship to the video monitor to assume a kind of intimacy with the viewer opened up the idea of the monitor. In this case, the computer monitor as that kind of surrogate window as a kind of connector, surrogate sexual link in the ultimate safe sex.

9. Iterative nature. There is a back-and-forth continuum quality of the net.

10. The discursive quality can be embedded into the actual work. Never before has the ability of the work's critical apparatus been included in the actual work itself, so that the work and its critical reception and its transformation in relation to its reception, in fact, is all the same thing. There's an absolute collapse of space that we all thought was as distinct and unchallengable as the space between readers and writers.

11. The collapse of the distinction between critical dialogue and generative dialogue.

12. Small-scale surfaces. The kinds of images, texts, and graphical design that tends to be contextualized within it, that makes use of the fact that we have frames within frames. Often these frames are no larger than eight or nine inches. That we're working along the same scale that is paper size and that scale calls upon certain kinds of approaches to the graphical organization of space.

13. The ability to chose not only the transformation of the audience, but the exact size of the audience. We can create work that is generated to the entire internet space, point-to-space kind of broadcast, or we can identify groups or individuals that we wish to communicate with or create a work of art within. That control over the size and nature of our audience is a distinctive and unprecedented quality of this medium. You could create a work that is broadcast to infinite numbers of people, or just to a select few, via a password, like the "Hell" project of last weekend. It's not really "space" but more a set of connections.

14. It's transactional. There's selling that can take place, various kinds of buying in, of voting, of reacting distinctly to an offer, sometimes a barter. Money can actually be transacted. New kinds of currencies evolve. The idea of being able to work with currency reminds me of Yves Klein who threw golddust into the Seine as an extraordinary gesture of artistic will and the relationship of value to a certain kind of action. Yet we have within the framework of this medium, to work transactionally, to work with the transfer of wealth.

15. The net is not directly commodifiable. I used to think the same think about video until dealers started producing limited editions of artists' videotapes. There was this fairly successful attempt to commodify video until video installation became a hyper-commodified form of video. To this point now, I've not seen a way of the artworld, gallery structure commodifying net.art. One could charge a fee though. I'm thinking of Voyager's web poetry project where you had to pay $1.50 to buy a subscription to see it. It was a small transaction, but your money was going to each poet. Imagine the scale of transaction and the money you could make--if each person visiting your site paid a dime, you could do pretty well. It's a different kind of transaction in which the artist is in the center, in control.

16. Net.art is anarchic and dangerous. We shouldn't ignore the inherent anarchy in its form. The people for whom this is the last free space, who will be dragged kicking and screaming away from the ability to work in this free space. That freedom is rare.

17. Three "nots": it's not cinema, drawing, sculpture. Defining something for which it's not may be strange, but it is something else. Unless we define sculpture in a Beuysian way as a manipulation of social space, then it can be seen as sculpture in that way. That's a bit tenuous. I haven't seen any net.art that could fit that definition, but I think the potential exists.

18. The morphing of images and texts is unique in net.art. The graphical ability to transform text and images blurs the relationship between the two.

19. It's inherently global. We can say that cinema or books are global, but net.art is inherently and instantaneously global.

20. It inspires the creation of a corporate entity. Artists seem to want to cluster in this way, perhaps because of production costs, or because of the way people work clustered together.