INTERNET ART AND RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

Emerging in the 1990s and rapidly developing and spreading in the 2000s, internet art is the art movement of the 21th century, a movement which uses internet (network connection) through computers and can only exist in that environment. Internet art started becoming a global art form in the mid 1990s with the overspreading of the graphic browsers like Mosaic (1990), Netscape Navigator (1994), and Internet Explorer (1995). Referred to as the first internet artists in 1995 (although they predate the online artistic experiments and thus should be called off-line artists), a group of artists contributed to the expansion of internet culture and criticism throuh Nettime established by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz and supported by Heath Bunting (England), Olia Lialina (Russia), Alexei Shulgin (Russia) and Vuk Cosic (Slovak Republic) (Greene, 2004). In the same year, Canadian artist Char Davies created Osmose, an interactive environment of virtual reality, which involves the participant in the process. Following these developments, the New York-based Rhizome.org, created by artist and curator Mark Tribe in 1996, provided an open discussion forum on internet art and also brought up the idea of forming an archive for the first time and worked towards that goal. Founded by the new media curator Steve Dietz, Walker Art Center, Internet Art Initiative took a great step towards supporting the internet art by hosting an important collection and several online exhibitions. With the establishment Jodi.org, considered as the best net art known, in the 2000s and then the opening of online digital museum in Berlin, exhibitions opening in 2001 one after another, sponsored by big computer firms like Intel, and with the growing interest of the big museums in the subject, internet art has penetrated even into the countries with limited access to internet (Wands, 2006). Although the internet art has been called as net art, network art, web art during this historical development, in recent years particularly artists indicate that there is a clear demarcation line between internet art and web art (Baysar, 2006: 18). The term net art that involves connection first came to use in 1995 when Slovak artist Vuk Cosic opened a corrupted anonymous mail because of the low software performance of his computer. Towards the end of the 1990s, firstly, German net art historian Tilman Baumgarteldan and then the artist Alexander Galloway with his approving commentary on Baumgarteldan made official that the online phase of internet art had started. Keeping pace and changing along with daily improving technology, net art consequently is built upon a shaky ground. For this reason, net art has become one of the most controversial art movements of the recent years and it has risen upon a base of internally problematic terminology. The first question about net art is whether it is an art or not. From the perspective of traditional approaches of art history, net art cannot satisfy the definitions of art, artist, form, content, or classic ways of seeing and habitual aesthetic understanding. In this context, accompanying confusion is sought to be overcome with the novel ways of seeing, critical criteria, aesthetic understanding and definitions, and thus art history gets updated as a field. When we consider the literature on internet art, among the long list of discussed topics such as exhibiting, archiving, perception, and control, we find that Nicolas Bourriaud’s term “relational aesthetics” first used in 1995 at “Traffic” exhibition can be applied to net art. The concepts of relational aesthetics and relational art have been proposed as an alternative way of reading to the critics’ frequent search for a key in the art movements of the 1960s to the art works of the 1990s. Deriving a concept from the similar works of the eminent artists of the period, such as Rirkrit Trivanija, Philippe Parreno, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Jes Brinch, Henrik Plenge Jacobsen, Christine Hill, Carsten Höller, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Pierre Huyghe, Bourriaud founded this term on interactives, collectivity, and relationality. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work entitled “Aperto” in Venice Biennial consists of a metallic gondola that encircles a burning gas stove/oven and boiling water in a huge container on top. Around the gondola is casually scattered camping equipment. Lined on the floor along the wall are paper boxes. Most of their tops are open and they are filled with Chinese-made instant soups for visitors who can eat them by adding water in them if they wish. This work stands at the crossing borders of all definitions: Sculpture? Installation? Performance? Social Activism? Presenting models of sociality incorporating such viewers and displayed in the works of other mentioned artists, relational aesthetics has been taken a step further in the works produced by new techniques like internet and multimedia, and under the name of relational aesthetics, it has become a source of reference for net art critiques. In the participatory art of the 1990s, the artist was in a more active position with some power to manipulate participation because artistic activity took place in a controllable environment. On the other hand, internet provides us with unlimited freedom; that is, anyone can participate in art in a more “free” and “independent” environment under any identity one wants to assume. In short, increasing accessibility, emancipation of identities, and forming of the environment’s aura in virtual reality are among the characteristics that cause relational aesthetics change its form into relational aesthetics. Taking the cue from what Benjamin Buchloch says about the conceptual and minimalist artists of the 1960s, both in the participatory art of the 1990s and the internet art of the late 90s “artist” can simply be defined as the one who shows, whereas “art” is an activity for producing relations in the world by means of signs, forms, actions, objects or various interfaces. This new definition of art has been the best definition supplied for internet art. Indeed, the greatest advantage (and sometimes the disadvantage) of rapidly and constantly moving internet art is its being interwoven with economy. Taken in this context, interactivity is considered as more of a term of marketing. Actually, the support behind the internet art and its advance in a short term is certainly related to this fact, and art is seen as a good source of advertisement and profit by the big computer companies. Although the artists initially opposed to this situation and tried to prevent the mediation by people and institutions like galleries, sponsors, and curators, these efforts would later become ineffective. Guy Ernest Debord’s views in the 1960s that capitalist relations of consumption create a spectacle regardless of country and ideology and that this situation will turn the world into one single market can be considered as the predecessor of Bourriaud`s views, who claims that internet art excludes specificity and local cultural context due to its abstract and ahistorical site of production. It should also be remembered, in his book Bourriaud’s observation that we are at the final stage of transformation (representations replacing true relations) towards the society of the spectacle defined by Debord, supports Debord’s view. After Guy Debord, in the 1970s Michel de Certeau put forward the concept of tactical media practice, which aimed at reversing the unidirectional flow of communication and power from the mass media and putting some control back in the hands of the people, and as such, this concept has been the best field of application for the internet art. Forming the concept of relational aesthetic in the 1990s and basing it on solid references, Bourriaud sees art as a human activity founded on commerce and thus as both the object and the subject of ethics. For Bourriaud, modern art illustrates rather than describes and infiltrates the social fabric rather than drawing inspiration from it. It points at the values in the society, the values which can be transferred elsewhere. In internet art, with business at its foundation, illustration turns into the virtual reality created by the artist, while the social fabric entered is transformed into the re-edited social structure. The materialist philosophical tradition that relational aesthetics belongs to was given by Louis Pierre Althusser the interesting name of "Aleatory Materialism" or "Materialism of the Encounter." According to this definition, there is always an encounter and never an end. Relational aesthetics, too, is not a theory of art founded on an origin/beginning or end; it establishes a theory of form (Bourriaud, 2003: 29). The implied form is an autonomous entity born out of the “deviation” of two parallel elements and their chance encounter. In internet art, one can no more speak of form but formations. These formations are not superior to daily occupations and they bring us face to face with reality through the genuineness of a relationship with the world and through fiction. But reality is open to debate; whose reality or which reality? In this virtual reality, the person called “onlooker” by Bourriaud is actually “the participant” with the internet connection and the mouse under her hand. The participant is encouraged to complete or even direct the work, and similar to the case in the participatory art of the 1990s, this is another common denominator between the net art and participatory art. Creation of “authentic” art (and authenticity is not used in the sense as it appears in Walter Benjamin`s work ) is realized collectively with the participant onlooker. As we speak of “authenticity,” it might be useful to remember that Walter Benjamin`s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production” is regarded as the staple text by the internet artists. Considering that the concepts of “uniqueness” and “valuableness” have been dethroned with the advent of the internet art and that internet has been welcomed as art and even some works have been glorified, it is also essential that the concept of “uniqueness” be added to the new glossary of terms, since it has undergone a transformation as well. Interestingly, Borriaud does not agree with the idea of accepting internet art as art or even its promotion to the position of “uniqueness.” In his discussion of relational aesthetics, Bourriaud claims that 1990s art was not understood and evaluated correctly, and by proposing new ways of reading, he argues that people should feel more sympathetic towards such new artistic experiments. Yet, towards the end of his work, he himself adopts a view on the internet art, similar to the one he has criticized before. That is to say, he argues that the internet art projects are not as widely accepted and worthy of new critical readings as claimed and adds that “it is not more than a somewhat useless project, at best” (Bourriaud, 2003:109). When he discusses the subject, Bourriaud argues that the relationship between art and technique can be based upon operational reality. Operational reality defines the work of art
When internet steps in, things change a bit. What the onlooker views are primarily instructions; because participation is enabled by instructions, which tie the onlooker to the socio-economic field. The art materialized between the borders of the real and the imaginary drawn by technology presents a functional model rather than a template. The concept of dimension is left out because it changes depending on the resources and resolution of the computer, which makes the possibilities almost innumerable.
Bourriaud’s concern, which is shared by many researchers and artists working in the field, is that if the technical structure predominates, then production of relationship models with the world may be put aside and the works produced may remain bare and superficial. Bourriaud’s view is supported by Felix Guattari’s opinion on the aesthetics that “aesthetics must primarily accompany social changes and transform them,” a view that points at the foundation of relational aesthetics and the necessity of pursuing a similar goal in the internet art as well. Internet artist Wolfgang Staehle expresses almost the same concerns as Bourriaud: “Big institutional ‘interactive’ exhibitions are contented with displaying digital ‘niceties,’ arty flash animations, inadequate java applications hooked on playful formalism and they ignore the more extensive cultural and sociopolitical issues that have come to the fore with the rise of global communication networks.” For them, internet artists have the vast repertoire of subjects under their hands; topics discussed worldwide in mail discussion groups, such as intellectual property and copyright, private life, free software, encoding, peer to peer networks, Domain Name Server control, and freedom of expression are ready material for the internet artists. One of the pioneers of the internet art, Jodi.org is undoubtedly one of the best known groups that are interested in such issues. Coordinated by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, Jodi.org’s works draw from an artistic background consisting of photography, video and performance and these works imitate and interpret the technological failures (error messages, viruses, computer accidents) which turn the computer screens into a series of abstract animation and images. Defined as technological abstraction, these works tear down the scanning process by means of the mouse and the keyboard, and the traditional interface between human and computer. Through internet art, an important social movement like feminism has been made a current issue again. Yet, feminism has changed its dimensions this time, and under the name of virtual feminism, it has caused a stir in the world with its manifestoes written in a freer, even bolder language. The said manifesto put forth in 1991 by the group VNS Matrix was followed by Anne de Haan’s manifesto in 1996. Apart from these works which can be reached at Nettime and Rhizome.org, another recent work on women is Lyn Hershman Leeson’s “Agent Ruby.” The issue of construction of woman’s identity on the social plane and the related problems of social conditioning are addressed by this mostly by means of alter ego, which is a narrative construct, or by means of an agent. While dealing with various issues like wars, political developments or economic events, artists use different technological supports, programs or devices. Wolfgang Staehle’s system at Postmaster’s Gallery on surveillance, voyeurism and live broadcasting focused on 9/11 attack. With “BorderXing,” Heath Bunting was questioning the meaning of national borders. Alexander Galloway, Mark Tribe, and Martin Wattenberg’s “Starrynight” (1999) was another work of internet art, which would provide access to the archives of Rhizome.org, a popular media art web page founded by Mark Tribe in 1999. With its function as a browser interface, it derived its theme from technology and internet. This work was informative and entertaining at the same time. As the viewer scrolled the information on the screen, pieces of texts appeared and when clicked on the corresponding stars, an essay from the Rhizome archives opened. With each new click, stars shone more brightly, and the viewer had a change to have an idea of the reading habits of Rhizome group. During this process, constellations were formed between the related topics. As interface art, “Starry Night” illustrates opportunities offered by internet, such as global cooperation, information gathering and filtering by using automated software, and graphic interpretation of database information. As it can be seen from the few examples given (because there is a large number of artists and large area of interest in the internet art) and contradicting all those worries, there are powerful discourses and a wide range of topics in the internet art. Although internet has been organized in a very short time, it is observed that internet art day by day fulfills the criteria towards being called an art. Modern art will continue its evolution by incorporating new technologies into its development and it will become as much integrated with daily life as with popular culture. All of these will lead to the emergence of new aesthetic evaluations, concepts and readings in art history. With the transformation of relational aesthetics into relational aesthetics and with new additions or distinctions, internet art presents new ways of seeing and criticism to art history.
NOT: Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi'nde türkçe olarak sunuldu.
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www.nettime.org
www.rhizome.org
The syndicate network for media culture and media art : http://anart.no/~syndicate www.v2.nl/syndicate
WB05 e-symposium published as ISEA Newsletter #102 -