Re: [-empyre-] Presentations in galleries & establishments

[Peter Luining <email@ctrlaltdel.org>]

Though I did not read all the mails in this thread I got the feeling 
I missed something really important in this discussion so 
far and that's the importance of presentation. I can agree
here with Adrian Miles who describes his experience in a gallery 
setting as "whenever i see net.art in a gallery the first thing 
i usually do i see if i can surf somewhere else, usually i'm 
curious to see how quickly my own stuff can load, then i usually 
politely return it to the work on show". My experience is that
Daniel is not the only one who acts this way, and there are other 
even less polite people. It was about 3 years ago that somebody 
formatted some computer harddrives at a show where I was involved. 
Computers are quite open tools, so anybody who has a little bit 
knowledge can do a lot with it. In shows and media- art festivals 
you often see a lot of black screens, win or mac destops, and hotmail 
pages from people that did check their hotmail accounts. 
Another annoying point for me as an artist is "the more then one art 
piece on one computer" issue. There were even festivals that did do 
over 20 pieces on one computer. And in such cases you can ask 
yourself: "Why should I be in this show?"
Since I became involved in net art, especially questions around
the subject of presentation interested me, one of the reasons 
of that is that I'm being serious about what I do. In my early 
presentations on computers I saw a lot of people just wacthing 
and not wanting or daring to touch the mouse. When I switched to 
presentations on touchscreen monitors, because this experience 
fitted my work more, I still saw people not knowing or wanting to 
touch the screen.
When 2 and a half years ago I was invited to curate a net art show in 
Amsterdam I could experiment with a totally different presentation 
of net art taking things described above into account. 
For the part of the show (called "net affects") held in physical space 
I decided to present the work to be non-interactive. All pieces were 
projected on 5 huge screens. All vistitors of the space got a catalogue 
including screenshots of the urls projected, so they could look up 
the works at home. Instead of walking along rows of monitors, people 
had a different experience of seeing pieces that passed by quick and 
slowly. Especially the combination of catalogue with urls and
the large screens did well, I saw a lot of people making notes in the 
catalog.  
The virtual part of the show consisted of urls, the possibilty to chat 
with the artists and a mailinglist, this part still is online at
http://www.pavu.com/netaffects
The show in physical space was especially critized for the non-
interactive presentation, though this is a point, I was in the first
place interested in showing people net art works and esthetics, and 
trying to get, by urls in the catalogue, people to surf to these works 
themselves. What also should be noted is that the public of the artfair
"nietdekunstvlaai" where the show was held was an audience that was not 
a specilized new media- art audience, so for many of them it was the 
first time they got in touch with net art.
The last two years I more and more became aware that presenting only
net art pieces in galleries, etc. is good but not enough. Especially 
when pieces need a lot of interactivity a lot of people that visit 
art spaces have a lot of difficulty with it. For that reason I more 
and more become convinced that it is important to do presentations 
of my work in which I explain it's backgrounds. I noticed that this 
really helps the audience a lot more then just having it showed 
somewhere in an art space. 


Peter

netaffects - http://www.pavu.com/netaffects    
netaffects pics presentation physical space - 
http://www.pavu.com/netaffects/kunstvlaai4.html
netaffects chat logs, etc.
http://www.pavu.com/netaffects/news.html