No. 73
May 18, 2001
Immediate Release

Contact:
Karen Gysin 612.375.7651
karen.gysin@walkerart.org


JOSEPH SQUIER'S AWARD-WINNING WEB SITE ENTERS THE WALKER'S DIGITAL ART STUDY COLLECTION

Joseph Squier's acclaimed Web site the place (www.walkerart.org/gallery9/dasc/theplace/), called "a Web classic" by the New York Times' Cybertimes, enters the Walker Art Center's
Gallery 9 Digital Art Study Collection in June. the place, launched in September 1994, was one of the earliest artist sites to work with the Web as an independent "place" for creative expression. It is inhabited by random memories, dream-addicted mercenaries, and secondhand scraps of excitement. In artist-writer-educator Squier's site there are no objects, spaces, or bodies--its beauty is seductive but elusive, governed only by assembly, disassembly, investment, and exchange. the place includes the elegiac and evocative Life with Father and the hip and mysterious Urban Diary.

In 1999, the place was featured in the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Squier is associate professor and head of the Media Narratives Studio at the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Begun in fall 1998, the Walker's Digital Art Study Collection (www.walkerart.org/gallery9/) presents seminal net-based digital artworks in a critical context. It currently includes the archives of äda'web, Art Dirt, Franklin Furnace's The Future of the Present series, Shu Lee Cheang's Bowling Alley, DissemiNET, Beyond Interface, and many other works. The collection illuminates both the relevance of net art and the relationship of net artists and the work they create to net culture in general.