Web
Biennial 2003: International Bi-annual Contemporary Art Exhibition
for the World Wide Web.
Abstract:
Web Biennial 2003 is the first international bi-annual contemporary
art exhibition that will be located exclusively on the World Wide
Web (W.W.W). The Web Biennial has been anounced, produced, exhibited
and then will be documented on the Web. This approach is unique
among other exhitions and Biennials as the consept is built upon
this de-centralisation. Technically the navigation is based on a
simple portal and a custom search engine. In this structure the
participants not only host their own contents in their own servers
but they also voluntarily change the source code of their index
pages for navigation through the web. Hence the Web Biennial not
only aims to offer an alternative approach for exhibiting online art
but also an alternative approach for exhibiting art online.
Key Words: Web-art; net-art; World Wide Web; contemporary art;
online exhibition; community formation; Biennial.
Web Biennial is a contemporary art exhibition which will be realised
exclusively on the World Wide Web (W.W.W.) in every two years. The
previews of the Web Biennial 2003 started in March 2003, the
exhibition starts in June 2003 and the exhibition will be online
till the end of the year 2003. Currently 60 artists from 15
countries confirmed their participation to the Web Biennial 2003.
The access to these artworks will be from the portals www.istanbulmuseum.org/webbiennial.html
and www.webbiennial.org/.
This project is the result of a seven year research on the
exhibition methods and represantation problem on the WWW. Most of
the galleries or museums present representations of the artworks,
such as scanned images of paintings or digital photos of sculptures,
as online exhibitions. Moreover these images and information are
mostly hosted on a single main server. In contrast Web Biennial
deals mainly with artworks that are created for the networked
environment or virtual artworks. More over the projeckt also uses
the relations of the virtual environment.
For example the Biennial has been anounced and will be realised,
produced, exhibited and than documented exclusively on the W.W.W.
Several hundereds of e-mails have been exchanged. We made many new
virtual friends. Still the project not only aims to offer an
alternative approach for exhibiting online art but also an
alternative approach for exhibiting art online.
In the exhibition all the projects are presented as diverse as
possible. There were no limitations on media or size. We wanted to
artists to create as unlimited as possible. Hence we created an
alternative 'nformat'on structure. The exhibition portal contain ed
hypertexts that will lead into individual sites of the artists or
groups. The main server will not host any information other than the
information on the directory page. In this regard the project
differentiates from many other online museums and galleries but at
the same time resembles other web formats such as link lists or web
rings. All the participants were required to change the source code
of their index pages and add the texts "Web Biennial 2003- Name
of the Artist- Name of the Project" in their titles. Hence
these voluntary re-coding not only underlines the participation,
colloboration and a different form of community creation but it
created a different form of navigation system.
The de-centralised structure of the exhibition has many
disadvantages but also advantages. First of all, de-centralisation
enabled us to carry no limitation on media, size or the number of
the artists participating in the exhibition as we mentioned above.
Still we needed a custom made search engine to navigate through this
complex structure. Peter Dalhuijsen a programmer who we met in a
forum on the web, designed an alternative search engine for us, in
which the embedded words in the search parameters "Web+
Biennial+2003" and title tags helps us search for a clustered
sample of the W.W.W.
The news on Web Biennial had spread all over the world during 2003
and it is translated to many languages. Some of the media that
announced our event are: La Mediatheque du Musee d'art contemporain
de Montreal, Canada; Inside Film Magazine, Avusturalia; Associazione
Culturale Mirada; Art info.ru, Rusia; Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil; Kanon Media; Austria; Art Ministry; NYFA Artswire,
USA; <nettime>amsterdam, Holland; ISEA-Japan; sito.synergy;
Fine Art Forum; Art Craze; Nihayet Icimdesin, Sanart Turkey.
As a result, a large global exhibition of international net artists
was created with a very small budget and with a small organisation
team. A grand exhibition with 60 artists from 15 countries is
created with a total organisational cost below 100 USD a year. This
low budget also enabled us to make a large exhibition without a
major sponsor. This online cooperation should also be regarded as a
new way of social interaction and colloboration among artists. Our
previous exhibition which was called 'Reload' and this exhibition
has been evaluated in the paper "Please 'do' Touch the Artwork:
New Approaches to Interactivity in Arts, both as an Ideology and a
function of New Technology". Though 'Reload' was an individual
exhibition it began to be exhibited in other museum portals as an
artwork itself, for example at the le-musee-divisioniste . This
showed that not only the individual works but the exhibiton process
itself became an example for networked art (net-art).
For the project, all anouncements were made online and the calls
were posted on free public domains like rhizome.org,
nihayeticimdesin.com, artswire.org and absolutearts.org/. We used
e-mail groups to distribute the information. We tried to reach all
artists who are active or who wants to be active on the WWW. After
seven months of online announcements, through September 2002 to
March 2003, more than 60 artists from 15 countries responded to our
call, they send us their URL's and changed their source codes.
The artists and groups and the names of their works
The artists and groups and the names of their works that are listed
in the "preview"section of the Web Biennial are: Ali
Miharbi: brush 1.1/ Contiguo, Cabrera, Debona: Paul Vater/ Bovey
Lee: Ultimate Life/ T.W.C.D.C.: ACOS v2.0/ CarianaCarianne:Two
Minded Chat/ Melinda Rackham: __line__/ Leftloft: Daily Distillery/
Sal Randolph: Free Manifesta/ Stefan Sun: Figurative Words/ Paul
Catanese: Invisible Maps/ redcaiman: Im an Animal/ Viktor Vina: Flux/
Katie Bush: destroy evil/ dlsan: HyperMacbeth/ ravi jain: Gallery of
Transportation/ Jody
Zellen: Crowds and Power/ Matteo Peterlini: doppiamano/ sante
scardillo: LIFESTYLE/ melody owen: Deadly Nightshade/ enrico
mitrovich: Obsolescence of G.U.I./ Elizabeth Bajbor: Digital
Gobelins/ Judson: THE PASSAGE OF TIME/ D. Alvarez Olmedeo:
Conexiones/ Paula Cordova: Kronos/ Jillian Mc Donald:
HomeLikeNoPlace/ Agricola de Cologne: Violence Online Festival/ Kate
Armstrong: The Relation Papers/ Joddy Zellen: Crowds of Power/ T.
Vujinovic, Z. Simcic: Hardbody/ zhangming hong: zp/ Michaël Sellam:
Le Cri/ Adad Hannah: Stills/ Marina Zerbarini: Latido/ Gabriel Otero:
Estado Flarmanico/ gianluca costantini: oracle/ R. Miranda Zuñiga:
Vagamundo/ Victor Liu: delter/ Aleksandra Glokobar: Hello my friend!.../
babel: Patinage/ Luigia Cardarelli: Fragments/ Grant
Corbishley: podmedia/ Andrej Tisma: Remember Crimes
The artists and groups and the names of their works that are listed
in the Galery 2: isabel saij: hidden/ Ingrid Bachmann: Digital
Crustaceans/ David Clark: a is for apple/ Amsterdam Editions:
working together/ Genco Gulan: When ever I see a plane.../ Stefano
Vide: 15 SilosCoupleFallingInLove/ tamara laï: Urbangs/ jacques
perconte: Tempo e pause/ ros-ka: ros-ka/ Kanarinka: Color Stories: y
e l l o w/ Murielle Dupuis Larose: Horizons humains/ GI Film:
CyberPlex/ Lisa Rosenmeier: House of Love / Doctor Hugo: CyberBull
Drawings / J. Nothnagel & PAN-Kunstforum: Euroscreen 21/ Shirin
Kouladjie: photomontage/ Igor Marinkovic: Magical Carafes/ Eva Sjuve:
Text Map / Orhan Cem Çetin : Deri deriyi iter
Web Biennial is an 'open' exhibition which means that the
participating artists were not chosen or invited by any one. All the
applications to the exhibition were accepted to create a
non-hierarchic form of a collective. We only had to exclude
commercial and portfolio sites. We believe that at the end, not only
the individual works but the exhibiton process itself became an
example for networked communication and exchange.
Last but not the least, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum iS.CaM,
which organises this exhibition, is a web based virtual museum as
well. It is an artist run independent organisation with no physical
exhibition space. There are no sponsors of the museum other than the
artists themselves. Still iS.CaM, portal www.istanbulmuseum.org
will not be the only location for the exhibition. We will create
mirror sites with different URL's and we are expecting others to
create mirror sites for us, so that the de-centralisation prevails.
Today, new digital technology and computer networks bring new tools
for interaction. But still using these tools does not guarantee a
perfect interaction as well. Therefore we should study interactivity
in terms of multiple levels of information exchange. In this regard,
the net-art exhibition "Reload: Net Art Open 2002"
organised by istanbulmuseum.org can be regarded was a useful example.
The Biennials are mostly named after the cities. For example Venice
Biennial is named after Venice and Istanbul Biennial has been named
after Istanbul. In contrast Web Biennial will not be located at any
specific city but it will be spread through the web. Therefore we
can argue that the Web Biennial will not only help to legitimise web
based art such as web-art or net-art but also question the current
Biennial models and it will help to strengthen the core notions of
W.W.W. itself.
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