Arts and New Media

Jennifer Lee
Annenberg School for Communcation, USC
ANSC 544, Arts and New Media
December 1996

The Web as Art

Introduction
As the World Wide Web proliferates, it continuously challenges classical notions about what constitutes art. Approaches to art in cyberspace range from traditional uses and presentations, as seen in virtual museums like the Louvre, to cutting-edge attempts at pushing the creative envelope, found in interactive virtual environments such as TechnoSphere. While the former merely translates traditional art on to the Web, innovative endeavors like the latter help to define the Web itself as a new artistic medium.
The key difference between art on the Web and the Web as art lies in the user's online experience. As art critic and new media curator Soke Dinkla suggests, "The mimetic strategies of interactive art do not aim primarily at visual qualities; rather a dialogue between program and user constitutes the artistic material" (Dinkla, 1996 p. 279). Hence, multimedia on the Web, including graphics, animation, sound, 3-D modeling and virtual reality, facilitate a dynamic forum for artists to develop online experiences and dialogues with users. Furthermore, the Web's interactivity, enhanced through nonlinear hypermedia, empowers both creator and user to collaborate on a unique artistic venture through time and space. The resulting experience amounts to Dinkla's "artistic material."

Roots of interactive artforms
Despite the present hype surrounding this emerging digital medium's creative interactive capabilities, interactivity is deeply rooted in past artistic movements. Fundamental elements of Web art, such as user participation and the artistic material embodied in the dialogue between artist and beholder, echoes Futurist performance art, Dadaism, Concept Art and Happenings. Dinkla offers some additional historical perspective for the emergence of interactive art, "As far as viewer participation is concerned, interactive art follow the avant-garde traditions of the beginning of this century, traditions that reacted to the widening gap between the mass media and the art audience" (Dinkla, 1996 p. 279).
Each of the following movements emphasized the relationship between artist and audience, as does the interactive Web art of today. Futurist performance art required audience participation to bridge the gap between performer and viewer (Dinkla, 1996). Dadaist Duchamp expanded on the idea of the dialogue between artist and viewer when he emphasized the "technical transfer of perception." According to Dinkla, Duchamp wanted to stress that not only do the artist and his artwork share a relationship with the viewer, but they also share a relationship with the machinery or technology which ultimately alters perception (Dinkla, 1996). Another interactive artform, Happenings, "stressed a minimum of direction and a maximum of participation" (Pelfrey, 1996 p. 307).
The Web's hypermedia enables users to surf through pages at their own discretion, allowing them to create their own meaning from the successive pages they access. This emphasis on individual experience also recalls Conceptual Art. Video art curator Ken Feingold explains, "Artwork made for the Web emerges from Conceptual Art because, as Conceptual Art did, it takes ideas to be of primary importance, and because its makers generally share the express desire of those earlier artists to challenge the public's notions of what art is and where one finds it. The destination is of no real significance in this form of experience - it's all about the encounter" (Feingold, November 1996 p. 459).
Many artists from other disciplines have discovered how the Web's nonlinearity can enhance their original artform by allowing the user to experience art wherever they find it. "In hypermedia, artists and designers are creating a new art and communications medium that perfectly expresses the non-linear 'field' nature of technology" (Cotton and Oliver, 1992 pp. 20-21). The site Aixia, a hypertext selection of poetry and images, demonstrates how nonlinearity can enhance literary artforms, allowing them to transcend the narrative boundaries of the traditional written word. The site allows the user to meander through the linked lyrics, inviting users to create their own impressions as they click on the hypertext and pictures to experience a new poem.

The interactive marriage of image and word
The Web's graphical interface has inspired many artistic combinations of graphics and text. These elements can be used to complement each other or to blur the lines between word and image to achieve a desired aesthetic. According to video art curator Rudolf Frieling, "The old dualist concept of image versus text was visibly shattered when, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the Cubist painters introduced printed letters into their paintings. After Cubism a whole series of avant-garde practices, from Dadism and Surrealism to Futurism, Fluxus, and Pop art, furthered the integration of text and writings into the fine art tradition, which has ultimately become the domain of Conceptual art. Contemporary artists such as Joseph Kosute, Nancy Dweyer, Jenny Holzer, or Lothar Baumgarten, to name but a few, set words in relation to space and examine social structures through language. Painted, formed, lit or projected - words in an art context are more than anywhere else perceived as being concrete and abstract at the same time, cognitive rather than intuitively understood." (Frieling, 1996 p. 269).
Many artistic Web sites, including Death, employ this aesthetic of juxtaposing text and image in a meaningful way. Each page in the contemplation over death leads the viewer through a series of messages conveyed through the tension between both words and images. Other examples of words and graphics melded in an artistic fashion include online multimedia journals. These hypermedia montages of photographs, scraps of paper, things-to-do lists and personal entries invite the viewer to explore another person's daily activities, thus transforming mundane discoveries into art. The scrawled messages on torn bits of paper link to other images and text, intensifying the meaning and experience. This stream-of-consciousness exploration through images and words reiterates Feingold's idea that the art is "all about the encounter."
Temporal interactivity
Another facet of online, interactive art is participation through time which reiterates experience as art. As editor and author Marlena Corcoran points out, "A new mode of technology is interacting not only with particular, individual works of art, and not only with the development of formerly unimaginable genres. The new technology is participating in the ongoing evolution of our sense of aesthetics as such. Our aesthetic attention is shifting from the museums to the visit; from objects in space to activities in time. Digital art objects versus digital art activities. The medium of digital art is not only space but time" (Corcoran, 1996 p. 375). Corcoran uses the X-Art Foundation's collective project Blast as an example of an "artistic manipulation of time - both deliberate and by chance" which has to be "experienced over time" (Corcoran, 1996 p. 375).
One site which also plays on the idea of progression through time in an artistic manner is 24 Hours in Manhattan. Users experience the passage of time as they wait to download individual photographs of clocks taken throughout an entire day in Manhattan.

University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, takes this idea of progression a step further with his notion of flow. According to Csikszentmihalyi, artistic Web sites "are not about navigating content, but staging experience." Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as, "Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably form the previous one ... Your whole being is involved..." He relates this experience to Web site design when he says, "A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrees, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same. Web site designers assume that the visitor already knows what to choose. That's not true. People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff."
My New Neighborhood demonstrates Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow as it leads viewers through the experience in a deliberate sequence in order to enhance artistic expression and convey a meaningful message. It also combines text and images in an artistic format, using simple animation to combine the two.
Misconceptions of interactivity
Putting a different slant on Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow, some critics assert that the nonlinearity of the Web merely gives the impression of interactivity. Skeptics like print and new media author Matthew J. Costello believe that viewers do not significantly influence the experience, rather they just follow the designer's flow or one of the many deliberate paths predetermined by the artist. "Magic is about illusion, and interactive media is, to a large extent, about the illusion of interactivity. We think we're part of it, we think we have an active role, but it's an illusory one. Nothing will happen that the designers haven't programmed. The interactivity is a fantasy" (Costello, 1996 p. 401).
Artist Perry Hoberman from the Banff Centre of the Arts elaborates on this misconception of interactivity. Through insightful scrutiny of his own art work "Bar Code Hotel," Hoberman reiterates Costello's concerns that, despite the guise of interactivity through participation, users often do not permanently impact the overall experience. In his piece "Bar Code Hotel," participants are handed bar-code wands before entering a room decorated with bar codes. These patterns of black lines represent directives like "grow," "fight" or "suicide." With the wand, participants create objects, common items such as paper clips or sunglasses, which then show up on a screen. Using the bar-code commands, participants can make these objects interact with each other. "I called the piece 'Bar Code Hotel' to reflect the limits of interactivity," explains Hoberman. "When you say something is interactive, it sounds like you should be able to change it somehow. But generally the choices are very restricted, and leaving is like checking out of a hotel room: the work returns to its pristine condition, and there is not evidence you were ever there."
Some of the interactivity present on the Web demonstrates such shortcomings. Sites, including Info-Neurosis, allow visitors to traverse through interesting, dynamic pages enhanced by sounds and animation, making users feel as if they are partaking in a unique interactive experience. Yet, when they are done, the users have not contributed to the process. Instead when the next person surfs the site he or she will just go through the same set of hoops as the previous viewer, not benefiting from or sharing in the other's experience.
Some Web sites, however, attempt to overcome some limitations of interactivity by letting users contribute to the evolving online artwork. Examples include TechnoSphere, a virtual environment where websurfers can design artificial lifeforms that interact with other creatures in 3-D cyberspace. Each creature effects the lifecycles within the entire electronic biosphere, thus each participant's contribution impacts the overall piece. Another example of what artist and critic Michael Gibbs dubs "cumulative artwork" (Gibbs, October 1996 p. 20) is Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence where viewers can tag words on to an ever-expanding sentence. Adaweb's Arrangements also demonstrates artistic user participation in an interactive Web site. Visitors can collaborate on a "worldwide sound/color collage" by submitting compositions of sounds, colors and letters (created through tools on the site). These three examples emphasize the aesthetics of the interactive experience by making the artwork a product of participation, or Dinkla's artistic dialogue between creator and viewer.
Artistic boundaries on the Web
Currently, bandwidth constraints and technical limitations of the emerging medium (such as inconsistent web browsers and spotty plug-in support) challenge web developers to find innovative ways of expression in this dynamic medium. That challenge in itself can be said to be an artistic endeavor, as explored by HotWired culture columnist Andrew Leonard. "[A]rtists who take limitations seriously, find they are forced to make important choices and concentrate their focus on cleaner images and crisper iconography to make every frame count." Marianne Petit, co-creator of "The Grimm Tale" expands on Leonard's idea, "[The Web's limitations] force you to make decisions, and sometimes the decisions are based on things you don't want to base them on ... but I think a lot of really good art comes out of having those restrictions." Thus, even though the Web can potentially offer a rich multimedia interface and extensive interactivity, artists must grapple with the medium's restrictions in order to create a meaningful site that enthralls the viewer long enough to endure the download and experience the art work. The Dotted Line toys with economizing bandwidth by incorporating minimal HTML and graphics and the user's scroll bar to simulate animation. In this example, the artist's attempt at grappling with the Web's limitations enabled him to find a creative solution for representing movement.
Multimedia enhances the experience
Web developers on the bleeding edge of technology are attempting to push current boundaries with artistic uses of tools such as Shockwave, Java, QuickTime, animated GIFS, RealAudio and VRML. Although some of these sites demand high bandwidth and patience, they provide a glimpse into a more multimedia-intensive and interactive Web of the tomorrow. One example of a site experimenting with virtual reality is artnetweb's VRML metaworld special intrest group site. Throughout this site they attempt to explore 3-D immersive environments in which users can interact. The Reactor site showcases some of the multimedia capabilities available through Java. Users can roll over different areas of an image to hear ambient sounds, to see messages in the status bar or to click over to a different page. Susan Hiller's Dream Screens combines interactive fields of color accompanied by a RealAudio soundtrack in six languages to explore states of consciousness. These are just a few examples that demonstrate how multimedia can enhance the viewer's experience and add new dimensions of interactivity.
Conclusion
In addition to the Web's proven success as a dynamic communication vehicle, this burgeoning medium offers new avenues for artists to explore as well. The inherent interactivity of hypermedia and the ability to incorporate audio, images, text and animation allow artists to create online environments that invite viewer participation. Following the groundwork of previous interactive artforms, many artists have exploited the Web's nonlinearity and multimedia capablities to develop a dialogue between artist and beholder. These creative endeavors help to establish the Web as an emerging artform.

Related Links
Look Ma, I'm a Multimedia Artist - Wired News, June 19, 2000

References

Costello, Matthew. (1996, November). Don't Press That Button. Leonardo, v. 29 n. 5, 401-403.
Cotton, Bob & Oliver, Richard. (1992). Understanding Hypermedia: From Multimedia to Virtual Reality. London, England: Phadion Press Ltd.
Dinkla, Soke. (1996). From Participation to Interaction: Toward the Origins of Interactive Art. In Lynn Hershman Leeson (Ed.), Clicking in: Hot Links to a Digital Culture (pp. 279-290). Seattle: Bay Press.
Feingold, Ken. (1996, November). What's the Use? Leonardo, v. 29 n. 5, 459-460.
Frieling, Rudolf. (1996). Hot Spots (Don Reneau, Trans.). In Lynn Hershman Leeson (Ed.), Clicking in: Hot Links to a Digital Culture (pp. 267-278). Seattle: Bay Press.
Geirland, John. (1996). Go with the Flow. Wired. http://www.hotwired.com/wired/4.09/features/czik.html.
Gibbs, Micheal. (1996, October). Net Working. Art Monthly, n. 200, p. 72.
Leonard, Andrew. (1996). The Jerk-Aesthetic: Using the Web's limitations to create art for the times. HotWired. http://www.packet.com/leonard/96/41/index3a.html.
Pelfrey, Robert & Hall-Pelfrey, Mary. (1985). Art and Mass Media. New York: Harper and Row.
Pinchbeck, Daniel. (1994). State of the Art. Wired. http://www.hotwired.com/wired/2.12/features/digital.art.html.
Prophet, Jane. (1996, November). Sublime Ecologies and Artistic Endeavors: Artificial Life and Interactivity in the Online Project. Leonardo, v. 29 n. 5, 339-344.

| résumé | avon breast cancer 3-day walk | active minds | | graduate work | ayako arts | home |