Conference Reviews: a trio

Museums in the New Millennium
presented at Location One
November 16, 2000

Representatives of four major New York museums recently convened in a Soho gallery to reflect upon the issue of museums and technology. The event was the first in a series of conferences entitled "(e)fusion: Art and the Alley Connect," which address the "interfaces between NYC's artistic/cultural communities and Silicon Alley." It was organized jointly by The New York New Media Association, an industry association for Internet and related new media businesses, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's "Thundergulch" group.

The speakers were Maxwell Anderson, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Carl Goodman, Curator of Digital Media at the American Museum of the Moving Image; Jon Ippolito, artist and Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum; and Astrida Valigorsky, Manager of New Media at The Museum of Modern Art. Eli Kuslansky, artist and Managing Partner for strategic Business Development at Unified Field, moderated the discussion. The discussion explored the ways in which museums are incorporating technology into their practice - not only in their working methods, but also in the ways they relate to audiences and in the art they collect and present. As new technologies have become a more powerful and widely available tool for reaching and educating larger audiences, and as museums perpetually face the challenge of increasing attendance, much of the dialogue revolved around the ways museums are deploying technology to that end.

The only new gadget reported at the gathering was an onsite visitor information tool, the contents of which will be replicated on the web. The American Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) has developed a prototype of an MP3-based wireless artifact-information system called "eDocent," in partnership with an Internet firm called Organic. It will hold information consisting of text, audio, still and possibly moving images.

However, the panel discussion was primarily devoted to speakers presenting in turn their various web initiatives and plans for technology implementation in their organizations.

The Whitney in particular casts itself as a forerunner in the presentation of technologically inspired art within its physical walls. The Whitney's 2000 Biennial included digital art in a significant way (accessible in "Past Exhibitions" on the Whitey's website, www.whitney.org), and an upcoming exhibition, Bitstreams (opening in Spring 2001), will be wholly devoted to new media. A project is also under way to set up in the lower gallery of the museum a space exclusively occupied by new technologies. The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim are also reportedly enhancing their initiatives in these areas.

As for on-line exhibitions, they are progressively becoming a matter of standard practice, though the genre of the on-line exhibition remains in its infancy. MoMI appears to have developed the medium to a greater degree than its panel peers, if current websites are any indication. For example, Shutters, Sprockets, and Tubes: How Moving Image Machines Work teaches this material in a straightforward, engaging way made specifically for the web (see www.ammi.org/). However, in terms of web replications of physical exhibitions, MoMA is equally advanced (particularly for broadband users), as its current Modern Starts offering demonstrates (www.moma.org/exhibitions/openends/enter.html).

Beyond exhibition-based on-line pedagogy, each museum uses the web as an educational outreach tool more broadly. The Whitney Museum offers an outstanding model resource with DOCEO (www.whitneydoceo.org/take_atour.jsp) a well-planned educational initiative targeted specifically at teachers and students and based upon the permanent collection. DOCEO substantially develops the user group or listserv model into a potent group communication and information dissemination tool. This is also the intention of AMICO, the art museum image consortium (www.amico.org), which is a database of some 65,000 images from participating institutions (among which the Whitney was a founding leader) that is available by subscription. MoMA is reportedly also developing enhanced web-based educational resources and working in collaboration with the Tate on another art and artists database.

Clearly, the web enhances possibilities for museum collaborations. In addition to AMICO, the Whitney provides a link to the Art Museum Network, a portal with links to some 250 institutions from North America and Europe (www.artmuseumnetwork.com). ExCalendar, available via the Whitney and Arts Museum Newtork sites (and at www.excalendar.net), allows visitors to find exhibitions happening around the world on a specific date.

The price of new technologies and the pressure it puts upon museums was necessarily a topic of interest. Corporate partnership, such as Intel's sponsorship of the Whitney's American Century (1999), is one model for upping the high-tech presentational anti. A more radical idea, however, was recently put forward by Gary Larson in an article entitled "Imagining the Future in the 'Internet Century'" and published in the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader (Vol. 11, no. 2, Fall 2000). Larson's idea is to extend to the internet the special status that nonprofits have in the physical world; suggestions include a "public lane" on the internet and subsidized broadband access to foster noncommercial civic, educational, and cultural values in this click-and-buy-dominated medium.

There was also more philosophical discussion about the way museums conceive their websites, the work of art, and what the near future may hold. According to Jon Ippolito of the Guggenheim, most museums conceive their web sites as e-space, used as an "exercise-land" for the deployment of their overall strategy. Museums thus usually offer "ware-works" under branded names and the legitimizing aegis of educational instruction. The model is authoritative and centralized.

On the other hand, the 'Napster model' [the popular MP3 download site] reverts these criteria and is based upon the principle of extraction rather than instruction. The notion of the brand (the presenting/owning entity) is banished, as value does not rest in the rarity of the artwork and its ownership, but in its availability. [An availability, incidentally, that the Bertelsmann media conglomerate seems to have found a way to commodify given its recent acquisition of the upstart Napster and its Robin Hood 'business model.'-ed.]

The Guggenheim aspires to conceive its website on this opposing principle by championing an "aperture" concept. The idea is to decentralize - or at least proliferate - the authoritative voice and open up the museum via a set of viewpoints provided by expert figures (scholars and critics) that would function as dynamic bookmarks or hyper-documents. The implication is that the website could function along the lines of the world wide web itself, with dynamic links to a multiplicity of viewpoints, information sources, etc.-a sort of porous web-based meta-museum in which a work or an idea opened up a world of exploration. Conceptually, this idea would appear to be the opposite of such (proprietary) sites as AMICO, where a keyword search for "Van Gogh" or "piazza", for example, would bring up all the Van Gogh's or piazza images in the database.

The Guggenheim's web concept also bears a relationship to the virtual museum it is in the process of constructing with Asymptote Architects - one that has not launched yet but promises to be a "morphing structure that is in constant flux" (see www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/virtual/virtual_museum.html). Judging from the current website, the Guggenheim has quite a ways to go in implementing both its virtual museum and Mr. Ippolito's advanced ideas.

The work of art and the nature of preservation are also up for grabs in the near future. One possibility is to store digital artworks on CD-ROM, but these are stored out of context, in a sense, because CD-ROM space is limited, whereas the World Wide Web is, apparently, not. Similarly, the CD-ROM may also be ephemeral in its use (think of the 1.44mb floppy). And how about the media-player-should it be preserved, also, in preparation for the day it will be obsolete?

An answer to this issue could lie in the notion of variable media: the artwork should be conceived at the onset by conservators as based upon media that will necessarily vary. This, however, raises other problems relating to shifting aesthetics via media migration: for example, do you also transfer the sound the original projector made onto the DVD? Another answer might lie in reinterpretation: the work of art is recreated each time it is transferred to new media, like a theater production based on an original text. This standpoint (implicitly, that the digital work of art is independent from its support) is more radical than that to which we are accustomed, but it has the virtue of flexibility in a rapidly changing world.

The question - for which there does not appear to be a good answer right now - touches on the nature of collecting itself. The Guggenheim, for example, has a tradition of collecting performative works, for which there is nothing to store. The same approach, it was suggested, could be applied to net art. But what then is a work of net art? Is it not in perpetual motion and in this case a conversation?

One of the most interesting and important questions currently under debate revolves around the nature of webspace itself. Is it competitive or cooperative and can it be both simultaneously (as Gary Larson would like to hope)? Museum representatives lauded the possibilities that new technologies have to offer the museum world, although they acknowledge that many aspects remain unclear, and frankly, beyond their control. These leaders stressed the cooperative dimension of the net and are excited by the prospects of constituting mega-databases of works of art, a process in which AMICO is currently leading the way. At the end of the day, however, such cooperation seemed especially promising when they were the ones offering privileged - and branded - visitor access.

Jeanne Bouhey
jbouhey@aeaconsulting.com

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