Just the Facts

Ada'web (adaweb.walkerart.org) is an online-art site or gallery on the Internet. Following its opening in May 1995, it presented (and in many cases produced) more than two dozen artworks and projects designed for Internet viewing. (By online art I mean original, interactive art that can only be experienced on the Internet, rather than the digitized images of paintings or sculpture presented on many gallery- or museum sites.) Founded by the curator Benjamin Weil (pronounced vile), ada'web was headquartered in New York. By the time that it closed in February, 1998, ada'web had come to be regarded by many commentators as the premier showcase for online art.

Named after Ada Byron King, the daughter of Lord Byron and a nineteenth-century scientist whom many consider the first computer program, ada'web was, in 1994, a glint in Weil's eye. Starting in 1990, the Paris-born curator had been involved with a group of New York artists creating online projects. (Their work culminated in the first American art-bulletin-board, the Thing [www.thing.net].) Like many early online artists and producers, he understood the significance of the release of the first web browser, the University of Illinois Super Computing Center's Mosaic (1993), which preceded the release of the commercial browser software we use today--Netscape's Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Web browsers helped transform the Internet from a text-only environment suitable for email and chat, to an environment (the part of the Internet now known as the World Wide Web) hospitable to graphics, video and sound. Weil created a prototype online work with the artist Julia Scher. He used this "trailer" to help secure the financial and production support of John Borthwick, a new-media developer in Manhattan's Silicon Alley and the founder of WP Studios, which produced the online city guide, Total New York. Ada'web's offices and production facilities were adjacent to those of WP Studios, and the team that collaborated with Weil included Vivian Selbo, Ainatte Inbal, Cherise Fong, Susan Hapgood, and Andrea Scott.

In May 1995, the site officially debuted with Jenny Holzer's Please Change Beliefs, an interactive work that allows visitor to re-arrange the well-known artist's aphorisms. Weil went on to produce more than a dozen other works by an eclectic mix of artmakers. They ranged from those with major reputations as conceptual artists (Lawrence Weiner, Antonio Muntadas) and respected mid-career artists of various stylistic persuasions (Julia Scher, General Idea), to artists, like John F. Simon, Jr., who focus primarily on computer and online work, and even writers, such as Darcey Steinke, who was fascinated by the online medium and wondered how such a project might affect her writing.

The process of collaboration was central to the online works that ada'web produced. Dealing with texts, graphics, photographs, video, sound (or any combination thereof) requires a collaborative process remote from the romantic mythology of the artist working in tortured isolation in her studio, a la Van Gogh. The often-expensive procedures for creating major online artworks is closer to that of video-art production or fine print-making, in which an artist who may know very little about prints works with a "master printer" who helps him realize his ideas in a medium with which he's not familiar. Virtually every ada'web-work evolved from an original conception into something unexpected, since experimentation is the most logical way to innovate in an untried medium. In fact, some projects such as David Bartel's Arrangements, were released in an unfinished, or beta state, which allowed viewers to exploit the potential of online interactivity--an essential characteristic of the medium itself--to provide feedback utilized in the works' completion. (Meaningful uses of interactivity like this are in short supply on the Internet, where interactivity typically involves something like voting for plot options on soap operas: Should Mary Jane tell her mother about her evil step-father's affair with an Avon lady or confront him directly?)

What is showcased on the ada'web site does not--cannot--always reveal the often surprising or attenuated processes by which the works were made or conceived: Julia Scher collaborated with students from the Rhode Island School of Design on Wonderland, an expansion of Securityland, while the artist Matthew Ritchie produced for ada'web a second and (projected) third version of his work, The Hard Way. Because it mimicked-and commented on-computer-game formats, Richie's ambitions for The Hard Way, too, expanded as the technology for online gaming improved. The chancy and evolving nature of new technologies also affected ada'web's experimentation. The full effect of Lawrence Weiner's Homeport, for instance, depends on software created for the Palace, an interactive virtual environment, that appeared to be gaining widespread popularity, but then fizzled.

In addition to the projects Weil and his team oversaw, ada'web also hosted more than a dozen projects for individuals, galleries, and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York. These projects included publications, lectures, online exhibitions, artworks by important online artists such as Jodi and Maciej Wisniewsky, and web-documentaries such as Barbara London's Stir-Fry, an increasingly popular format that often chronicles a producer's travels, from an interactive, on-the-road perspective.

As ada'web's centrality to the geographically dispersed, online-art community increased, its own prospects for survival grew dimmer and dimmer. In late 1996, Borthwick sold WP Studios to Digital City Inc., a company owned chiefly by America Online and the Tribune Company. Throughout 1997, ada'web's new corporate-owner did not reveal its intentions regarding its WP properties. In February 1998, Digital City gave up the philanthropic enterprise of funding online art, and ada'web's doors were permanently shuttered. In late-1998, ada'web was acquired by the Walker Art Center.

Toward Interpretation: The Cyber and the Hybrid

Ada'web is important not only for its pioneering contributions as a producer and distributor of online art, but as a catalyst for new ways of thinking. Like so many virtual--that is, cyber or Internet-derived--phenomena, it brilliantly illuminates and reveals the contours of its "real life" counterparts. As M.I.T. theorist Sherry Turkle has observed, the Internet emphasizes and underlines the tensions and social fault-lines in "real life." The most spectacular instance of this may be the contribution of the Internet to the end-of-century redefinition of gender roles: In online chat rooms thousands of men have impersonated women and vice-versa, behavior which would be both difficult and dangerous for most people to even contemplate carrying out in real life. Although it is a far less dramatic example, ada'web similarly helps illuminate and underline the tensions in the rapidly evolving world of contemporary art.

Online art is the most hybrid art medium ever. It not only employs many other media such as video, graphics, photography, text and sound, but it is a medium in which production and distribution, design and aesthetics are often (disconcertingly) intertwined. Its hybrid nature is so pronounced that it even extends to the concept of the online exhibition. The online group show may be little more than a collection of links to artworks housed on various computer servers; making it simultaneously both exhibition and catalog or anthology.

What do hybrid states or phenomena reveal? That many conventional categories are too clear cut to represent the evolving realities they are supposed to describe. Witness the new, hybrid categories of InfoTainment or EduTainment, terms which have arisen to describe film-, television- or CD-ROM products that blur the formerly sacrosanct distinctions between education and entertainment. (Their growing popularity is certified by David Letterman's explanation of the term InfoTainment on a recent show.) Such terminology may be unappealingly awkward, but we recognize-or at least intuit-the reasonableness of this linguistic development: The new terms do attempt to describe a verifiable shift in the nature and categories of cultural production. To understand ada'web as such a harbinger of cultural change, it must be considered from multiple viewpoints-artistic, economic, and institutional.

From Soho to Silicon Alley

The most revolutionary artistic aspect of online art is its dematerialization. (Although it may share this dematerialized quality with videotapes produced by artists, video art in museums and galleries is often presented as a component part of physical installation-works.) Visual art is invariably associated in the popular mind with the creation of objects and distinguished from other dematerialized forms such as literature by its physical presence and relation to our physical sense of ourselves in the world. (This helps explain some of our varied responses to a gestural, human-sized, Abstract-Expressionist canvas and an Elizabethan miniature.) Equally radical, a particular work of online art may look different to each viewer, depending not only on the size or quality of the screen-, or wall projection, but on traffic conditions on the Internet and local networks that may determine, for instance, whether images are downloading quickly--or at all. Never before has there been a medium in which such chancy conditions can help determine the viewer's experience.

Needless to say, in 1998 few people are even aware of online art. (Blank stares have usually accompanied announcements of my interest in it over the past four years.) That's because the Internet is not primarily an art medium. In some senses, the history of photography is similar; it took until the end of the nineteenth century for opinion makers to even consider the multi-purpose technology as a potential art medium. But the photograph's nature as a materialized-if not unique-object allowed it to be exhibited in galleries and assume the aura of art imparted by the gallery itself. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his "readymades"-everyday objects like bottle racks-around the time of World War I, he similarly exploited, and helped formulate, the context-defining strategy that has allowed artists of this century to range so far afield.

Stated baldly, context is everything in twentieth century art. And this suggests one of ada'web's historic contributions. It provided the first (and arguably still the most important) online-art context. Its seriousness, ambition, and presentation of works by celebrated artists, also helped legitimate itself. Weil's interest in collaborating with even a few well-known artists unfamiliar with the Internet was controversial: Some online-art pioneers regarded it as a heretical rejection of the medium itself, if not downright pandering to a celebrity-obsessed culture. But working with a few well-known artists also helped validate the entire online art medium and stake a claim for the new technology as potential art turf. If the physical context of the exhibition space is missing, at least some familiar artworld types were already "there," inhabiting its creative spaces.

It is this non-object status which has also made online art a ghetto still rather remote from the mainstream art world. Although at least one website has been sold to a collector, the medium's nature is inimical to the production of commodities and, not surprisingly, has attracted the attention of only a handful of art dealers anywhere. (Even single-channel videotapes by artists quickly found distribution through sales and rentals.) Yet producing online art can be arduous and expensive, particularly if it is not your primary artistic focus: It requires hardware, software and the technical expertise to use it. Ada'web was one of the few, non-university facilities to provide artists with this sort of support.

Nor did Weil have any commercial art-world models to employ in creating ada'web as a production-facility. Instead he turned to New York's burgeoning high-tech industry. Silicon Alley's emergence and vitality in the mid-nineties stemmed from its proximity to traditional-format content industries including book- and music publishing, the media, and advertising. Weil and Borthwick hoped, according to Weil, to eventually convince corporations of the value of online art "as a form of creative research which might make them better understand the medium they were investing in" and a means of positioning their companies as innovators. This was by no means a naïve stance in the heady days of 1995-96, but like so many high-tech undertakings it was decidedly risky.

Silicon Alley has long valued art and artists. Many of those working in content- and design firms consider themselves artists--or at least artistic. The artful and idiosyncratic "look and feel" of the Web was partly created by artists. (In 1994-95, eight percent of all websites were art-related; presumably the majority were the personal sites of artists.) As David Ross, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently observed: "The digital domain is going to be more pervasive than TV...and the active involvement of artists is critical to developing the potential of this medium. The alternative is..a world of online shopping and spam. Artists have been involved early enough to affect the [online] vocabulary."

Nineteen ninety-five and ninety-six were heady times for many of us working in Silicon Alley. The frequently-invoked maxim, "Content is king," defined the moment. Large corporations were wasting enormous amounts of money creating ill-conceived websites. The playing field seemed level and the future rosy: Writers, for instance, might publish online and be paid a few cents by each reader in a brave new world of micro-transactions. Pundit Nicholas Negroponte prematurely declared 1996 the "year of electronic commerce." All this is still likely to come to pass. But in the meantime, a remarkable moment of innovation that married the experimental cultures of computing and contemporary art was undermined by the regression to the conventional television model of advertiser-supported content, which was imposed on Silicon Alley by the media, entertainment, and advertising industries.

The business plans--and focus--of many high-tech, start-up firms tend to change frequently, sometimes even quarterly. Ada'web, too, evolved. Although it was part of a corporation, it never managed to sign up any commercial clients. Instead it operated-in typical hybrid fashion--like a non-profit arts organization: Ada'web commissioned, produced and presented artworks, as well as soliciting donations and offering memberships. Weil considered transforming ada'web into a non-profit organization in order to secure newly available grant funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and the few foundations that were beginning to support online art in 1997. But the idea was complicated: Ada'web, after all, did not belong to Weil. The clock ran out.

Ironically, when ada'web debuted in 1995, AOL hosted a live, chat-event for Jenny Holzer in its online "auditorium." It's not very likely that Holzer would be featured on AOL in 1998. Under President/COO Robert Pittman, formerly of MTV, AOL has passionately embraced television's mass-media business model. Today, cultural and entertainment content developers pay to have their products showcased on AOL; the company no longer produces its own content. And it is AOL which indirectly put ada'web out of business: Digital City Inc., the company that bought WP Studios, is owned by AOL and the Tribune Company.

Back to the Future: A Round Trip

Now ada'web "belongs" to the Walker Art Center. Given the ambivalent attitude most American museums have displayed toward online art, this is a curious fate. Not a single one employs a curator of online art, although some have new-media- or contemporary-art curators informally acting in this capacity. A few museums have commissioned original online artworks (the Dia Center for the Arts' program stands out), but, for most, interest in the Internet has usually extended only to the doors of education and publicity departments. Of course, institutions are notoriously slow to respond to new phenomena. But the Walker Art Center is quicker than most. Under the auspices of Steve Dietz, its Director of New Media Initiatives, the Walker is fashioning an ambitious online art and education program, which includes the upcoming commission of four new-Jerome Foundation-funded webworks by emerging artists, to supplement a previous commission to the artist Piotr Szyhalski. Such programming was a major factor in determining ada'web's move to the Walker Art Center, rather than to other interested museums.

What exactly has the museum acquired? Although no money changed hands, the Walker Art Center committed itself to providing resources for programming, such as this essay, which will help make ada'web comprehensible to a new audience. I have not seen the formal agreement transferring ownership to the museum, but presumably it allows for the exclusive distribution, but not copyright, of the artworks produced by ada'web. Sooner or later the site will likely move to the museum's computer server and, at that point, issues including distribution of the artworks and projects that ada'web hosted, rather than produced, will need to be resolved. The donation also includes archival materials relating to the site.

But legalities that apply in the physical world often have little meaning online. The exclusive distribution I mentioned is irrelevant if any one wants to showcase, comment on, and/or organize an online exhibition about ada'web, or any work contained within it. To link ada'web to another site requires no permissions, just a single line of html coding. To those who are unfamiliar with online culture, the gift economy of the Internet and concepts of ownership (or borrowing) like these will seem porous, if not bizarre.

One of Weil's goals in donating ada'web to the Walker was to ensure that in the Walker's hands, ada'web's artworks will remain together. (Even though-as with Matthew Ritchie's perenially unfinished work The Hard Way-the notion of a completed work isn't always easy to define in a medium designed for constant updating and tweaking.) But ada'web is more than merely a collection of online artworks or digital, computer files. It is also the site's interface or "architecture," its structure and point of entry. Ada'web's evocative interface(s)--serial designs which were primarily the work of artist/designer Vivian Selbo--helped make the experience of visiting the site so satisfying. The interfaces, of course, provided navigation information and guidance, but rejected the straightforward table-of-contents approach that characterizes the typical homepage. Instead, surprises came in the form of animation and movement that made entering the site a delightful and active exploration, a taste of artful pleasures to come.

Ada'web was also a social experience. It was a vital organization that supported the nascent online-art scene of the mid-nineties and operated as a virtual (and sometimes real) meeting place for New York denizens of the online world. These aspects of ada'web's contribution are both difficult to define and essential for understanding the project. An imperfect analogy might be the collaboration of Picasso and Braque that resulted in Cubism. The Cubist canvases exist on their own, but without knowledge of the creative process involved, an essential context is lost. The Walker Art Center's challenge will be to get the story right: to make both the work, and its historical and social contexts, accessible.

Finally, the Walker Art Center's acquisition provides validation of ada'web's importance. (Few people realize how many intended donations are rejected by museums, much less solicited.) Ada'web's "avant-garde" artworks, and a particular moment of "avant-garde" creation, has been institutionalized within a larger narrative of twentieth-century art. In the process, the Walker Art Center acquires the cachet of owning important contemporary artworks and ada'web acquires the prestige associated with the Walker. This is a familiar modernist progression; no modernist artform--no matter how ephemeral or immaterial--has eluded the grasp of the museum.