To the uninitiated, webart consists of work that centres around and makes use of the web. While countless websites contain works of art, be they reproductions of Rembrant or the latest Turner Prize nominees, webart can only be defined by sites that actually are art. Webartists not only use the very fabric of the browser to create and show their work, but often, for its very subject matter. And so good has some of the work become, that various dignitaries of the international art establishment are beginning to sit up, take notice and wonder how on earth this stuff can be sold.
Last month at the CyberArt99 event in New York, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Maxwell L Anderson, impressed on his audience of curators, art dealers and new media gurus the importance of creating a proper art market for the digital arts. Users, he suggested, should be encouraged to purchase web-based art online in much the same way they might pay to download music files.
Anderson's speech followed news that Slovenian based artist Teo Spiller had sold a work of webart to Ljubljana's municipal gallery for $500, after an open auction conducted over the web.
Britain is developing a notable webart scene. On first glance Backspace, an experimental digital workshop for the online arts, looks like a natty youth club - albeit one encumbered with leftover kit from an aborted space mission. Visitors could easily think that they have wandered into some kind of futuristic mechanics' workshop, where casually dressed youths saunter around the various bits of kit, chatting over chipped cups of tea, or hunching over screens staring intently at complex layers of code.
To define Backspace is not easy, but to think of it as a cyber-cafe for the digital hardcore wouldn't be far off the mark. Set in the Dickensian backstreets of Southwark, not far from Tower Bridge, it is a self-funding workshop and internet service provider (ISP) where different groups from London's new media scene hang out, swap ideas, and occasionally attempt the kind computer abuse that would be frowned upon at a more conventional cyber-establishment. Many also see the place as the unofficial heart of the city's digital art scene.
That luminaries in the art establishment are beginning to take their work seriously has left the patrons of Backspace somewhat bemused. Some, like Mathew Fuller, of British-based webart activists I/O/D, see it as a sign that the art "establishment" is trying to muscle in on an art form that has so far existed outside the traditional structures of gallery and market. After all, he suggests, "the internet is so forgeable, and so fluid, that it is very difficult to verify provenance and that's something that shakes the established institutions up".
The artists of I/O/D www.backspace.org/iod started their web "activism" in 1994 by producing multi-media presentations via floppy disk. Their work focused on the use of the computer itself - in order to provoke change, or "blow the conventions up", as Fuller more cheekily puts it. Their work became infamous for engulfing your computer, reducing it to a frustrating, but addictive series of seemingly randomly generated dialog boxes, a labyrinth of commands and answers that would crash the whole system more often than not.
More recently I/O/D has made the web its favoured target. Its most recent work, the Webstalker, blows open the structure of the web by stripping sites of all content and design, leaving only a two-dimensional mnemonic showing a skeletal map of how the web is linked together. The Webstalker has already received over half a million downloads, but Fuller and his partners, Colin Green and Simon Pope, see free distribution of their work, the subject of Anderson's speech, as the essential principle of webart. For a group of young British artists I/O/D seems surprisingly uninterested about being paid for work.
This comes is no surprise to Pauline Van Mourik Broekman, co-editor of Mute, the London-based, European art and technology magazine, and occasional loiterer at Backspace. Van Mourik Broekman began shouting about webart back in 1994 when she and co-founder Simon Worthington left art school.
Aware of both the cultural and artistic potential of the web and of the work of early practitioners like Heath Bunting www.irational.org/heath and Belgium-based JODI, and as no other art magazine seemed to be taking up the art and tech nology cause, they decided to extend Worthington's one-off arts and technology newspaper, Mute, that had formed a part of his masters degree at the Slade. Or to try and help "nurture debate and discourse, to bring it in to being, to not just sit around and wait", says Van Mourick Broekman.
As they put it in their editorials, Mute started as "attempted response to the do-or-die mythmaking of the digital revolution", to debunk the wealth of hype, that threatened to obscure the many good things that were actually happening in the early days of the web. Mute began to pay particular attention to artists like JODI who were then anonymously "performing" their work on the web, which messed with and often crashed the browser used to view it. Or how Heath Bunting used a hacker's eye to sabotage the workings of the web.
Although very different in look and feel, both were using the web in a way that artist Jon Thomson recently described as a kind of work "where form, content and their means of transfer collide and collapse together". For artists like JODI and Bunting the "whole thing is the art work", according to Van Mourik Broekman. "Right from the beginning they both tried to deconstruct the principles at work, and both wanted to show that there was an archaic element to the web."
Once artists like JODI had become known, their influence quickly spread. American-based artists Potatoland also started producing work on the web. Late last year they unleashed the Shredder - a work that perhaps best exemplifies how the platform itself can become the art. With the Shredder Potatoland went so far as to design their own browser that, just like Netscape or Explorer, can access just about every corner of the web. But the Shredder works by "shredding" the sites it visits, stretching gifs to abstraction and displaying the html and java script beneath them in a beautiful display of colourful code.
If Van Mourick Broekman has any reservations about the current state of the webart scene it is that the growth of the movement has led to a subtle change in its meaning: that the beauty of the code revealed in JODI and Potatoland is distracting from the very political comment that existed at their inception. Whereas artists like JODI began by ripping fabric of the web apart, and making comments about its unpredictable and ephemeral nature, they now produce something more akin to a virtuoso performance, that Van Mourik Broekman likens to more performance-based arts like contemporary dance.
Like dance, webart works are of a very temporal nature and therefore can vary over time. Webart also has no real physical presence and must be stored digitally. But with the hardware and software used to create it constantly changing, preserving the work is immediately problematic. Benjamin Weir, the director of new media at the Institute of Contemporary Art, recently lectured on the problems surrounding the curation of webart.
A former critic and curator of conceptual work, Weir became involved in the webart movement when he co-founded adaweb, a website that commissioned and hosted work by artists who were using the web as a medium. As Weir pointed out in his recent seminar at the ICA, the old adage that works of art are never finished, just abandoned, is fundamentally challenged by webart. Not only are sites like JODI and Potatoland in a constant state of flux, but they can be manipulated, updated and redesigned by the artist at any time. Again Anderson's notion that webart can be bought and sold in much the same way as a pop song is challenged by the never-quite- finished aspects of webart.
Weir agrees that the European webart scene is in a better shape than its American counterpart, and that Britain, for the moment, has a wealth of funds thanks to the lottery and even New Labour's commitment to the creative industries. But he has some reservations about how long this financial idyll will last in Britain. "At the moment the European scene is much more grounded, because Europe has a culture of publicly funded arts, but how much money will be left when the current crop of online art student start to leave college?" he asks.
That webart has managed to firmly establish itself is now beyond doubt. How the movement will sustain itself is still in question. Benjamin Weir: "The whole economy of online art is part of an equation that still needs to be resolved and I don't think we are remotely close to finding a solution."
Still, back at Backspace, those casually-dressed youths keep pushing back the artistic and technical frontiers of the web. In between chipped cups of tea, of course.
