Like white noise canceling out utopian prognostications that computers will, in and of themselves, make the world a better–and safer–place, most facts about the physical characteristics of computability will prove wrong over time–including the ability to read your computer in “B” places. What we are left with, and what is less clear, is whether we will ever sit awake in bed, hours past the time we should be asleep, because we are so engrossed in what we are viewing on screen.

As its timeline and roster of artists makes clear, äda'web is a pioneering Web site of important works. As the essays by founder/curator Benjamin Weil and critic Robert Atkins make clear, äda'web has been influential. Almost everything that the artists and producers of äda'web tried set a standard–usually for what to strive for, sometimes for what to avoid. What can only be discovered, over time, is that as visionary and as maddening as äda'web can be, above all, it is endlessly engaging. Even though you can’t–right now–you will want to take it with you to the beach, the bathroom, into bed.

The file header hints at a process carried out by an unspecified we. From the outset the site deliberately masked the presence of the individuals working behind the screen. This cryptic stance was adopted to maintain a sharp focus on the work and to foreground the notion of the site as a space for exploration with a singular personality–äda. Only with diligent hunting and scrolling could a visitor eventually find a short list of first names with e-mail links @adaweb.com, and it changed over time.

How did this shifting we work? Generally, like obsessed autodidacts; specifically, without job descriptions; and typically, with a shared, intense dedication to enhance the collective pool of Web-related understanding touched by periodic creative discord. We answered questions with more questions. It went something like this:

“What is the initial concept? What kind of ideas are meant to be expressed or examined? What is the most important information to present? What type of experience is implied? How will it be arrived at? Who is the anticipated user? How will they find their way around? What will the user walk away with? What will they come back for? How will the experience be organized or structured? What kind of intrigue, drama, or entertainment will there be? What kind of system or software will they need? Are there alternatives? Is there any degree of change over time? How much flexibility is there? Is there timely information to display? How often will that information change? What materials will be displayed? How will they be presented? Is there a simpler way to do it? Is that the best way to do it? How does someone else do it? Who will own this project? Who is going to do what in its creation? Where will it sit in the site? What is the schedule? How will it work within the rest of the Web? Will it need to be updated? Does it work as expected? How will others find it? Does it require adjustment?” And always, “Have you seen this other site?”

That kind of inquiry should be evident in any Web production plan–idea, development, production, testing, and follow-up. Dialogue shapes a blueprint. What’s unusual is that this exploration was conducted for and with an artist by a team that was not simply helping to implement, but also in some sense to cultivate, their concept. The resulting exchange often surprised and challenged both sides of the table. Together they conceived the necessary invention for translation. The äda'web team carried it out.

The engagement with this process varied with the artist. Julia Scher drew a loose conceptual map of Securityland on a very small Post-it note, regaled us with vivid theoretical rants and atmospheric descriptions of its zones, frequently visited and enacted her ideas in the office with hand-cuffs and in situ surveillance cameras, supplied an abundance of visual materials, scientific catalogues, her own texts, and many megabytes of sound files, but left the sifting and shaping of what went where to us. Doug Aitken had a specific idea of the loaded5x story plan, but its map came as a surprise. Ben Kinmont and Matthew Ritchie came in with tight storyboards that didn’t change. Darcy Steinke’s filmic musings inspired the peel-away design of blindspot. Homeport’s Web page replicates a fax sent by Lawrence Weiner, whereas the texts in the Homeport Palace rooms were randomly assigned.

During the last year of operation, budget constraints severely limited the number of projects undertaken and much of the team’s energies were redirected to the production of studio sites, promotional videos, and many business or strategy plans. When our concentration returned to the site, we directed it towards the fourth and final site interface, and decided to awaken the dormant/usage section. There, within /reach (yes, it’s a bad pun), we included a credits page. It lists by full name, chronologically, forty-two talented individuals who worked in the office during three and a half years of collaborative endeavor, though it doesn’t state precisely what each one did. The personnel inventory breaks down into thirteen people on the äda'web staff proper or freelance, eight within the larger studio technical or programming fold, and twenty-one ambitious interns.

So what is the collaborative process? It seemed only appropriate to ask for more opinions:

“Isn’t it obvious? The corporate division of labor with its segregated production process doesn’t allow for people who understand the language of technology to be involved in the decision-making process (e.g., the infamous Photoshop comps that are supposed to stand in for Web pages). The result is a product that has a form that does not reflect its function.

"The do-it-yourself ethic is wonderful but taking it too far results in a learning curve that can be exasperating and a waste of time. Why not ask someone who can supply you not only with information but suggestions? We’re all scavenging for ideas at the moment–why do it alone?” –Ainatte Inbal

“Collaboration is like walking–a constant loss of balance followed by recovery. So you move forward.” –Matteo Ames

“I love collaborative work. It means that I can be as pushy and irritating as I want to be with less brain-work.” –Isabel Chang

“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” –Alexander Graham Bell (via Cherise Fong)

“Collaboration basically allows for things to happen that would never reach the light of day, seul. Fire happens. Execution happens. It’s different–it’s gloriously different.” –Julia Scher

Vivian Selbo was the interface director of äda'web. She is an artist and information architect based in NY. Her recent work includes killer @pp: it’s all t@lk! the first part of an online project called partsofspeech; Vertical Blanking Interval; and Enclosed Caption Viewing. She also produced a portion of Predictive Engineering.2 by Julia Scher, The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and InterNyet: A Video Curator’s Dispatches from Russia & Ukraine, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

äda'web was founded in late 1994 by entrepreneur John Borthwick and curator and critic Benjamin Weil, who shared a conviction that the Web promised new paradigms for the production and distribution of art. Clearly, it offered an opportunity to bring art to an expanded, global audience. Perhaps more importantly, it marked the emergence of a new artistic medium. Their vision was to build a research and development lab, inviting artists (visual artists, architects, composers, filmmakers, and so on) to collaborate with experienced designers and programmers in an investigation of the creative potential of the Web. From the launch in May 1995 of äda'web’s first project, Please Change Beliefs by Jenny Holzer, to its abrupt loss of financial backing in March 1998, äda'web collaborated on over 20 web-specific projects, with artists includingLawrence Weiner,Julia Scher, and General Idea, composer David Bartel, andfiction writer Darcey Steinke, as well as four collaborations with The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The site took it is name from Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace (also known as Ada Byron), an accomplished scientist and the daughter of romantic poet, Lord Byron. In the mid-19th century, Lovelace wrote a set of operating instructions for a calculating machine designed by Charles Babbage. Over a century later she’s become, de facto, the patron saint of software. (The United States Defense Department’s eponymous programming language–ADA–pays homage to her as well). äda'web’s working model was inspired, in part, by Bell Labs' Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), where artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol teamed up with engineers in the 1960s. äda'web’s process was accurately summed up one day by the proprietor of Mom’s Cigars, our neighbor on 22nd Street. After hearing a description of the project, she said: “Oh I get it, it’s a digital foundry.” Exactly.

äda'web was born the same month that Netscape released its first browser–December 1994. The Internet itself has been around since 1961, developed at the RAND Corporation, based on a strategy of using existing telecommunications routes for communication after nuclear war. A decentralized network, it was designed to be reliable at all times.(2) With the advent of the World Wide Web, which put a graphical interface on what had previously been a text-driven vehicle, it was suddenly front-page news. The Web was considered a technological TKO with Guttenberg, Edison, and Marconi on the ropes. Here was a cultural, not to mention commercial, tabula rasa that would blow print, television, even the phone, out of the water. Excitement generated by initial public offerings such as Netscape fueled the frenzy and investors took risks on start-up Web companies hoping to ride the wave.

From its inception äda'web shared an office with another Web site backed by Borthwick and his partners, Total New York, the brainchild of four recent graduates of Penn. Though at first incorporated separately, the two companies were rolled up into a single corporation–Web Partners–by the end of 1995. The pairing of an experimental art lab and a urban zine might seem odd, but it was typical of Web start-ups at the time. Word, a New York-based experimental literary site shared offices and an owner with Charged, an extreme sports destination. Total New York adhered closely to a magazine model and was perceived as commercially viable by investors backing the Web Partners venture, while äda'web was seen as a loss leader. Clearly more cutting-edge than Total, äda'web nonetheless had great cachet among new media cognoscenti. Wired Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and a host of others had written it up early on. MSNBC’s television program, “The Site,” featured coverage of äda'web on it’s first show; the magazine Entertainment Weekly named it one of the top ten multimedia products of 1996. Together, äda'web and Total were seen as an attractive investment opportunity, and early in 1997 they were acquired by a subsidiary of American Online (AOL), Digital City.

Prior to the acquisition, the primary revenue strategy for äda'web was an online store called “exchange,” which launched on Valentine’s Day in 1996. Products ranged from books and videotapes to items created by artists with projects featured elsewhere in the site, such as pencils, caps, and T-shirts. “ädaphenalia,” as this merchandise was called, generated the greatest sales. Visitors clearly wanted a souvenir of their experience, like honeymooners at Niagara Falls who go home with a set of commemorative spoons. While the store did generate revenue, it was not profitable, as maintenance costs outweighed earnings. Another revenue strategy was licensing content to other Web sites, such as Microsoft’s Slate, which featured Matthew Ritchie’s The Hardway. Online advertising in 1995 and 1996 was generally a no-cash arrangement, as when Sun Microsystems traded computers in exchange for an advertising banner. Corporate sponsorships met with limited success. France Telecom underwrote composer David Bartel’s Arrangements project, but more often than not we ran up against the hard fact that commercial ventures are ineligible for funds earmarked for not-for-profit organizations. Support for the arts in a corporate context falls into one of two categories, either it is purchased outright for a physical collection or funded as a charitable deduction.

Once äda'web was acquired by AOL, it became increasingly clear that the projects on the site were being deemed too challenging for a mainstream audience and there was an interest in reining in our activities with artists. We proposed formalizing äda'web’s role as a research division, but that was incompatible with the existing structure of AOL. So a business plan was drafted, with the aid of angels including a foundation executive and an investment banker, outlining the advantages of converting äda'web to nonprofit status. The proposition was that AOL would reallocate the funds designated for the operating budget of the site as the first gift to the nonprofit äda'web. The site would seek funding from other sources as well. AOL approved this scenario, and covered the legal costs of the transition. But on the eve of filing with the Internal Revenue Service, a decision was announced to close down both äda'web and Total New York. In a final act of generosity, AOL agreed to donate äda'web to a museum. A number of institutions were approached, but it was the Walker Art Center that wholeheartedly accepted the idea, free of contingencies (for example, “we’ll take that project, but not this one”) and agreed to archive the site in its entirety.

There’s a computer error message that sums up the demise of äda'web: “the connection was terminated due to lack of network activity.” But it was one mad tea party while it lasted.

1. For a thorough investigation of role of “virtual” art in the museum seeThe Shock ofthe View, a collaborative online salon hosted by the Walker Art Center.
2. For a succinct, engaging summary of the inception of the Internet, read Bruce Sterling’s, Short History of the Internet (1993).

Andrea Scott was an executive producer of äda'web from 1995-1998.

äda'web 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 curator Benjamin Weil, äda'web was headquartered in New York. By the time it closed in February 1998, äda'web was regarded by many commentators as the premier showcase for online art.

Named after Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace–the daughter of Lord Byron and a 19th century-scientist whom many consider the first computer programmer–äda'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.) Like many early online artists and producers, Weil 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 e-mail 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 artist Julia Scher and 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. äda'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 the visitor to rearrange the well-known artist’s aphorisms. Weil went on to produce more than a dozen other works by an eclectic mix of artists ranging from those with major reputations as Conceptual artists (Lawrence Weiner,Antonio Muntädas) and respected mid-career artists of various stylistic persuasions (Julia Scher, General Idea), to artists such as John F. Simon, Jr., who focuses primarily on computer and online work, and writers such as Darcey Steinke, who was fascinated by the medium and wondered how such a project might affect her writing.

Collaboration was central to the online works that äda'web produced. Dealing with text, graphics, photographs, video, and sound (or any combination thereof) required a process remote from the romantic mythology of the artist working in tortured isolation in the studio, à la Van Gogh. The often expensive procedures for creating major online artworks is closer to that of video-art production or fine printmaking, in which an artist who may know very little about prints works with a “master printer” who helps him realize his ideas in an unfamiliar medium. Many äda'web works evolved from an original concept into something unexpected–experimentation became 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–this essential characteristic of the medium provided feedback utilized in the works' completion. (Meaningful uses of interactivity such as 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 stepfather’s affair with an Avon lady or confront him directly?)

What is showcased on the äda'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 her work Securityland, while artist Matthew Ritchie produced for äda'web a second and (projected) third version of his work, The Hard Way. Because it mimicked–and commented on–computer-game formats, Ritchie’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 äda'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, äda'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 äda'web’s popularity increased and its 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 (AOL) and the Tribune Company. Throughout 1997, äda'web’s new corporate owner did not reveal its intentions regarding its WP properties, but in February 1998, Digital City gave up the philanthropic enterprise of funding online art, and äda'web’s “doors” were permanently shuttered. In late 1998, äda'web was acquired by the Walker Art Center for its new Digital Arts Study Collection. Toward Interpretation: The Cyber and the Hybrid äda'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 (cyber- or Internet-based) phenomena, it brilliantly illuminates and reveals the contours of its non-cyber (real life or actual) 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 that 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, äda'web similarly helps illuminate and underline the tensions in the rapidly evolving world of contemporary art.

Online art is perhaps 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 both exhibition and catalogue 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 that have arisen to describe film, television or CD-ROM products that blur the distinctions between education and entertainment. 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 äda'web as such a significant 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 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 monitor 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.

In 1998 it appears that 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 was not until the end of the 19th century that opinion-makers even considered the multipurpose 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 such as 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 20th-century art. And this suggests one of äda'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 legitimize it. Weil’s interest in collaborating with several 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 these 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 art-world types were already “there,” inhabiting its creative spaces.

It is this nonobject status that has also made online art a ghetto still rather remote from the mainstream art world. Although at least one Web site 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–äda'web was one of the few nonuniversity facilities to provide artists with this sort of support.

Nor did Weil have any commercial art-world models to employ in creating äda'web as a production facility. Instead, he turned to New York’s burgeoning hightech 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 that 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 1995-1996, but like so many hightech 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 1994-1995, eight percent of all Web sites 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.”

For many of us working in Silicon Alley, 1995 and 1996 were heady times. The frequently-invoked maxim, “Content is king” defined the moment. Large corporations were wasting enormous amounts of money creating ill-conceived Web sites. 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 microtransactions. Pundit Nicholas Negroponte 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 hightech start-up firms tend to change frequently, sometimes even quarterly. äda'web, too, evolved, and 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 nonprofit arts organization: äda'web commissioned, produced, and presented artworks, as well as solicited donations and offered memberships. Weil considered transforming äda'web into a nonprofit 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: äda'web, after all, did not belong to its founding innovator Weil, but to WP Studios and then Digital City. The clock ran out.

Ironically, when äda'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/C.O.O. 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 that indirectly put äda'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 äda'web “belongs” to the Walker Art Center, comprising one of the first additions to its growing Digital Arts Study Collection. Given the ambivalent attitude most American museums have displayed toward online art, this is a curious fate. Not a single American museums 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, Director of New Media Initiatives, the Walker is fashioning an ambitious online art and education program, that includes the upcoming commission of four new Jerome Foundation-funded Web works by emerging artists, to supplement a previous commission to artist Piotr Szyhalski. Such programming was a major factor in determining äda'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 äda'web comprehensible to a new audience. I have not seen the formal agreement transferring ownership to the museum, but presumably it allows for the concept of exclusive distribution, but not copyright, of the artworks produced by äda'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 äda'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 is irrelevant if anyone wants to showcase, comment on, and/or organize an online exhibition about äda'web, or any work contained within it. To link äda'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 äda'web to the museum was to ensure that in the Walker’s hands, äda'web’s artworks will remain together. (Even though–as with Matthew Ritchie’s perennially unfinished work The Hard Way–the notion of a completed work isn’t always easy to define in a medium designed for or capable of constant updating and tweaking.) But äda'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. äda'web’s evocative interface–serial designs that were primarily the work of artist/designer Vivian Selbo–helped make the experience of visiting the site so satisfying. The interface, of course, provides navigation information and guidance, but rejects the straightforward table-of-contents approach that characterizes the typical homepage. Instead, surprises come in the form of animation and movement that make entering the site a delightful and active exploration, a taste of artful pleasures to come.

äda'web was also a social experience. It was a vital organization that supported the nascent online-art scene of the mid-1990s and operated as a virtual (and sometimes real) meeting place for New York denizens of the online world. These aspects of äda'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 äda'web’s importance. Few people realize how many intended donations are rejected by museums, much less solicited. äda'web’s “avant-garde” artworks, and a particular moment of “avant-garde” creation, has been institutionalized within a larger narrative of 20th-century art. In the process, the Walker acquires the cachet of owning important contemporary artworks and äda'web acquires the prestige associated with the Walker. This is a familiar modernist progression; no modernist art form–no matter how ephemeral or immaterial–has eluded the grasp of the museum.

In our ever-so-contradictory postmodern era, however, the situation is far more complex than it once was: it would be sentimental and false to suggest that many artists would resist the acquisition of their work by museums today. In fact, it is more often than not a heady rite of passage (unless the artist is elderly and unjustly neglected). But in the case of äda'web, institutionalization signals not only arrival into the arena of art history, but also the end of an era. äda'web’s acquisition by the Walker brings with it a melancholic sense that a vital moment–the birth of online art–has already passed. (Lest I be accused of romanticism, I want to point out that new art mediums arise only once or twice in a lifetime.) Even in our speeded-up century, it is astonishing how quickly this evolution from nascent to recognized art form has taken place.

Robert Atkins is the producer and editor of TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse, the first American online journal about online art, and the author of ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords; ArtSpoke: A Guide to Modern Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords (1848-1944); and From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS. From 1996-1998, he served as editor-in-chief of the Arts, Technology, Entertainment Network, which produced television and online programming about the arts.

In the beginning of the 1990s, three initiatives were developed concomitantly that aimed at exploring the possibilities of the then nascent online world for the development of a conversation about art as well as an investigation of new forms of art-making. Echo,The Thing, and Artswire were electronic bulletin board systems that all sought to foster the building of a strong cultural community. While Echo was probably closer in its scope to the San Francisco based The Well, The Thing elected to fully focus on the arts, quickly developing nodes in Germany, where its founder, Wolfgang Staehle, had strong ties. As technology evolved, The Thing was in fact the first attempt at creating an international art community online. That was before the Internet–and the Web–became accessible beyond the scientific and military communities.

When the first multimedia Web browser was invented in Illinois in late 1993, the possibilities became infinitely more enticing. All of a sudden, one no longer needed to log on to a server directly (which was the case in the early ‘90s, therefore terribly diminishing the potential of international online “gatherings”). Also, the type of document became much more versatile because it was suddenly possible to embed images, sounds, and text–such files had until then been self-standing and required several applications to experience each of them. More importantly, html documents were related to others with links that became the structure for the creation of artworks as well as commercial pages. As soon as early 1994, art students at universities adopted the Web, mainly to promote more traditional forms of art-making, such as painting and sculpture. A student at the French Ècole Polytechnique also developed one of the first online extensions for the museum, Le Web Louvre. These pioneers were soon joined by more institutional endeavors and one of the first art projects online, produced by the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago. Indeed, Muntadas’ The Fileroom: Archives of Censorship was released online in the fall of 1994, just when äda'web was created. äda'web, in turn, released its first online project in May 1995, although it had started “emitting” a few months earlier (February of the same year). The Digital Foundry Not unlike printmaking studios or foundries, where artists confront their projects with the technical expertise of a producer or group of producers, äda'web was set to offer artists the possibility of addressing the new medium without necessarily having any specific notion of computing. Rather, the input happened more at a conceptual level, with an understanding of the network that was informed by a practice developed with other media. Artists involved would be the ones who had an interest in the public space, an experience with various media, and who specifically did not rely on any form of craftsmanship to produce their work. Most of them had already collaborated with technicians or engineers, and envisioned their work as the result of a dialogue with producers of some kind.

The commanding principle was to offer the online world an alternative to the “online galleries” and other “virtual museums,” where one would basically find glorified catalogues and other forms of “brochureware” somehow presumptuously referred to as “digital art.” Producing work online gradually became a process the äda'web team understood as an ongoing dialogue with the artists as well as a sort of translation of concepts into the realm of the network.

Art online has evolved quite a bit since then. Inexpensive real estate (Web-hosting prices are low, and continue to be less and less expensive) and the relative ease of programming basic Web pages has enabled a number of artists to just go ahead and produce their own work, without the need for any mediation or support. With the contribution of such artists as Jodi and other early adopters such as Alexei Shulgin(1), this kind of production has become fundamental to the development of a community that preferred to stay away from the traditional art circuits. They maintained an approach to their practice–the making, display, and distribution of their work–akin to the one informed by thoughts that fueled the art scene of the late ‘60s and '70s, when artists questioned the system as a mercantile and dubious environment. In the context of the Net, this also means that art actively participates in the development of new media and online culture, thus repositioning this type of reflection in a more central cultural position.

However, there is first an issue of context. Today, a stand-alone artist Web page has little chance of receiving any attention. Things were different a few years ago when äda'web was set up and developed, as there were fewer sites available and the constituency of Web “surfers” was a more daring and probably more knowledgeable one than it is today. The problem of information and management of the ever-growing number and range of possible destinations has made it harder for the average “Webist” to find out where to go. It has become increasingly difficult to keep abreast of new projects. This is where syndication and the setting up of cooperatives are interesting models to contextualize artists’ work. One example that comes to mind is The Thing. The fact that Staehle and his team offer Web-hosting and eventual technical assistance to their peers has made The Thing a place of choice for artists to host their pages. This means that anyone accessing the Web site has an opportunity to check a growing number of artists' projects at once. However, in that kind of economy, artists either have to know how to build their pages on their own or pay for technical support. Moreover, as the Web becomes increasingly organized with the advent of “portal” pages, it is increasingly clear that the model to follow is the one of aggregation and personalization, with some guide-like features. An example that comes to mind is the CyberAtlas, produced by artist-write-curator Jon Ippolito and offered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The digital foundry model ideally offers both the hosting of projects in a specific context and the providing of real production support whenever necessary. In the case of äda'web, the foundry is also a filter, as there is a curatorial dimension brought to the development of the Web site. Indeed, artists who created work for äda'web were commissioned, which of course makes the offering of projects tighter in its scope. In the case of projects produced by artists themselves, the selection process is the result of a dialogue with the artists who were interested in the context but could do their projects alone. Thus there is less immediate input as far as the scope of the project and the technical resolution are concerned. Curating Online Curating has necessarily been a matter of adapting to the nature of the art praxis it has had to work with. When most artists were producing finished and discrete products in their studio, the curator’s function was to coordinate the selection and display of an artist or artists' work, so as to reveal a specific viewpoint or angle of looking at the work. In that sense, the curator’s modus operandi was closer to that of an editor. In most cases, the curator was working within the institutional structure, and part of the agenda(s) he or she had to address was related to issues of conservation and collecting, even when the exhibitions included contemporary work. As the practice of art evolved to encompass a variety of different approaches, materials, or techniques, the role of the curator subsequently had to reflect those changes.

Furthering the Duchampian notion of art only having a validity for the historical context in which it was created, artists since the ‘60s have often adopted an approach to their work that no longer includes such preoccupations as durability. In fact, this phenomenon started even earlier, when painters such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko included condiments as part of their palette, making it all the more difficult for conservators to restore their works today!

Ephemera and performance-oriented types of projects called for a repositioning of the curatorial intervention. In that light, the examples of now historical projects by such curators as Harald Szeemann in Switzerland (When Attitudes Become Form,_1968) or as Kynaston McShine in New York (_Information, 1970), show how a new generation of curators engaged in rethinking their work much more along the lines of being a facilitator and dialogist, an emulator of some sort. By fostering exchanges between themselves and the artists they worked with, their position somehow shifted away from the institution and closer to the art and its makers. Moreover, they did not need to be affiliated with an institution, and thus became less concerned about issues pertaining to the specificity of the institution’s role. In a certain sense, even if it proved a little problematic at times, the curator adopted a somewhat artist-like vision and sought to create an interpretative surface for the selected works, creating a relationship to the art that is not unlike the one a conductor maintains with the musical score. On that note, Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta published in the late '60s is a seminal piece of writing.

The relationship between the curator and the ephemeral works of art created a few decades ago calls for a rethinking of the notion of presentation and conservation. To that extent, the recent publication of Ippolito’s paper on what he refers to as variable media is exemplary: as he poses the artwork as a set of instructions that can be interpreted and adapted in relation to such issues as technical evolution and other elements that tend to be time sensitive. However, this is only the beginning of an investigation that needs to be refined before the right solution is found, one that respects both the ephemeral quality of the work and the conceptual intentions of its original creator.

The Web, in a way, takes its cue from an understanding of art that tends to be rather open. Projects function more as propositions, or as a means for the viewers to engage with a certain thought process they will “interact” with in order to create a specific viewing experience. So, rather than presenting a finished work of art, most artists seek to engage viewers in order to let them participate in the experience and generate meaning. In that sense, there are elements reminiscent of earlier art praxes, such as Conceptual art or Fluxus. Furthermore, art produced for an online environment and context is generally a collage of various elements that somehow takes its cue from the structure of the World Wide Web, namely multimedia and networked.

Online, the notion of finished artwork is challenged in two ways: the first, as mentioned before, has to with the very nature of the project as proposition; the second has to do with the medium itself. As a thought process grows, an artist may want to proceed with her or his idea, adding as well as possibly modifying existing elements. Somehow, the fluidity of the medium calls for unfinished thoughts and, consequently, unfinished work. This is probably why a growing number of artists working online tend to primarily envision their body of work as a multidimensional investigation whose elements are all linked under the same url. Jodi (Joan H and Dirk Paemans) registered their own domain name very early on. There are, however, many other examples, such as Easylife.org (Alexei Shulgin), Vuk.org (Vuk Cosic), or Irational.org (Heath Bunting), to name some of the most prominent artists. Things may be different when artists’ work is commissioned and/or produced by a lab or an institution, where work processes and schedules tend to be more defined in time. However, on äda'web, projects such as Julia Scher’s Securityland have been unfolding for the whole life span of the site–from February 1995, when the trailer was released, to the late summer of last year, when Wonderland was added. Similarly, Matthew Ritchie’s The Hard Way was released in two iterations, and it is only because äda'web has ceased to produce new projects that there was not a third. It is also noteworthy that a number of artists have come back to the äda'web team with the will to either revisit their project, or make a new one.

As network media develops, numerous projects that have appeared online confront the whole notion of the nature of art. Indeed, trying to understand and decide what is art and what is not is a difficult and challenging role that the curator has to engage with. A recent project, Extension (produced by art historian Susan Hapgood, whose main interest and focus is Fluxus; Ainatte Inbal, a producer who was also working at äda'web before its recent demise; and myself), consists of a selection of art Web sites (projects, information-based, and magazine types). In the selection of sites, some were deliberately included to reflect upon the meaning of art online–how some projects seen from an art viewpoint can be understood as art, or as important in the context of such exploration. Extension was also intended to reveal the dynamics that may exist between those sites, how they link to each other, how they refer to each other. This may, of course, be a spontaneous alliance that may eventually call for a further reflection on the role of the curator online.

One could see two overlapping models that complement each other while offering a varying scale for the curator’s intervention in the work: be it a dialogue, a real collaboration in the process of production, or simply a selection that refers to an interpretation and/or a context.

Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net is a recent and interesting approach to the latter form of curating online. Curated by Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center (note the shift in title!), the “exhibition” consists of a straightforward information-driven interface that groups a number of projects he found on the network. In a way, this approach somehow echoes the existence, very early on, of link pages that sites have put together to create some kind of a context for the projects and information they present online.

As in the case of more “traditional” art (if one may call the art practices of the late ‘60s and '70s traditional), the boundaries between the curatorial roles can be hard to decipher. When Jodi offers a map of the various sites they seem to feel some kind of affiliation with, they somehow operate on a curatorial level. When other artists create an environment in which they invite their peers to work, they somehow engage beyond what could referred to as “art.” Such is the case, for instance, with Irational.org, as well as Easylife and many others. Yet, it is clear that these activities are complementary, and create an interesting and important dynamic.

When äda'web was created about three-and-a-half years ago, it proceeded with a curatorial approach started with other media, and tended to explore means to engage art in the public arena, take it away from the institutional walls, and address a different public, with strategies that definitely needed to be adjusted to that realm. Indeed, when visitors choose to enter a museum, they know what they’re in for. But if art is coming to the street, one way or the other, it has to somehow morph into a more adaptable and fluid form, which reaches out and yet does not impose on the potential viewer. Since the Web is a public environment, one can easily see how the strategy is to reach out and offer an eclectic array of projects that investigate the medium and truly help to shape it. It is no surprise to learn that, while äda'web was still operating, a large part of the site’s audience was composed of developers.

The second model of curating online consists of commissioning and coordinating the production of projects with invited artists. At first, äda'web’s mission was only that. As the site grew and started having a real presence online, artists who were working online expressed interest in anchoring projects from the äda'web site, because they were interested in the context it would create for their work. As a consequence, äda'web soon offered an “associate” dimension in which projects by such artists as Michael Samyn (GroupZ), Jodi, and Maciej Wisniewsky were featured.

The curatorial function in that context is quite close to the one evoked before: the curator becomes a facilitator, an emulator, and a kind of a translator, at times. By bringing in artists whose main medium is not the Web to explore this new realm, the idea was to foster a discussion between the artists and the producers so as to create ideal conditions to produce work reflecting the artists’ interests and concerns. In effect, while I was directly involved in the production process at the inception of äda'web, I soon became aware that I could not keep up with the technological evolution on a practical level, and gradually withdrew from the technical part of the production process.

Curating a project is slightly different from curating a Web site. Indeed, the construction of a Web site is informed by an accumulation of works, as it is no longer necessary to “close” projects in order to proceed with others. Issues pertaining to interface and navigation, trying to understand how to best present the projects or access them, is also part of the curatorial duties that working online demands. äda'web’s team undertook a regular reworking of the interface to provide visitors those interfaces that best reflected the nature of the site and were user-friendly without being didactic. The first interface sought to separate the content into four different categories–project, influx, context, and extension–_while offering random access to any page in the site and an icon for access to the site’s shopping area. The main idea was to find an appropriate metaphor for virtual space while keeping the design very evocative of four distinct dimensions. For instance, random access was signified by a “diver” icon_ and the whole interface looked like a plaza.

Introduced about 10 months later, interface 2.0 ventured into exploring the metaphor of film. While access to the four dimensions remained, the core of the interface was a film strip that featured the newest content, mainly projects. That idea of promoting the most recent work available was pushed one step further with the introduction of a splash page that came with the decision to produce a series of artist pages that denounced the CDA (Communication Decency Act). Soon, however, this page became the locus for the presentation of the latest “feature” of the site.

Interface 3.0 offered a new categorization of content, resulting from the conclusion that some content was “experience-based” while other was “information-based.” “Works” (produced in-house and experience-based, included the “influx” and “project” dimensions), while the “associate” subdimension appeared in “context.” Furthermore, this interface included an index that enabled users to directly access the content they wanted to experience. Indeed, the äda'web team deemed it important to offer regular visitors quick access to the projects they were interested in as well as provide easier access for new visitors who seemed interested in finding projects by artists' names. Until then, it was assumed that artists were either not specifically interested in putting their names forward–considering their works as the result of a collaboration–or they had deliberately preferred anonymity in this environment, echoing the strategy they had developed in their thinking about work for public spaces.

This may denote an interesting shift in the conception of the Web as a space. While older artists considered it deliberately as a public space, it is conceivable that younger ones thought of it as another working space, possibly because none of these artists had actually worked in public space before working online. Others chose to mask their identity, so to speak, by adopting a brand name, such as Michael Samyn with the “brand” GroupZ, or Joan H and Dirk Paemans with the name Jodi, addressing issues of anonymity from an angle that echoes the increasingly sophisticated names of corporations that no longer adopt the monikers of their founders.

While maintaining the index, interface 4.0 introduced a new dimension to the notion of interface. While the goals were similar–improving navigation and potentially serving a growing community of visitors who may not have the same relationship to the screen as their predecessors–the need to position the site as different from the magma of commercial sites that were opening daily became more aparent. Hence the somehow joking approach to the omnipresent “frameset-cum-left-side-navigation-bar.” In the case of äda'web, this navigation instrument proved hard to use, as the icons were in perpetual movement. The interface, thus, is stated as being more than just a navigation tool: it reflects the thought processes engaged by the production team and offers a real context for the work on display as well as the content.

It is also at that point that a complete revamp of the “investigate” subdimension occurred. As the number of visitors to äda'web was growing and their knowledge of art was probably less than the “early adopters,” it was deemed important to provide specific information about the projects. Hence a whole series of tools was developed to facilitate a better understanding of the projects, including a more organized “fact sheet” on the works' “authors.” While developing this new interface, it also became clear that the links page had to evolve. Unfortunately, the work that Susan Hapgood and the rest of the team engaged in never concretized on the site, although it was carried out and is now hosted as part of Ippolito’s series of charts (CyberAtlas, a dimension of the Guggenheim’s Web site).

Going back to the issues relating to the function of the online curator, a somewhat controversial topic pertains to the curator as a participant in the definition of a viable economic model for the online production and presentation of art projects. So far, content in general has had a difficult time finding a sustaining model and we can see how this has created tensions. It is obvious that most models pioneered by commercial sites are hardly applicable to an art context. For instance, banner advertising is completely irrelevant as it implies a disturbance in the experience of the work. If one takes the example of Slate magazine, which decided to give access to subscribers only, one may conclude that this is not a viable model for the arts either. Indeed, this implies that the whole notion of link and the potential to create amorphous projects becomes impossible. A third option is to try and sell by-products. This, as well, is sort of a problem as it implies online productions need to be sustained by off-line products ranging from multiples to screen-savers. Yet it is of crucial importance to find revenue models for art online if we really want this kind of cultural production to have more than a reduced impact as far as pioneering and defining this new medium.

Finally, part of the curator’s function is to find adequate links between online art production and its possible presentation in the traditional art-viewing venues. Indeed, art institutions have started showing interest in displaying online artist projects and that requires some forward thinking in terms of the possibilities for exhibiting this type of work. For instance, some of the artists who were invited to participate in Documenta last year were appalled by the way their projects were presented, with computer stations displayed in an officelike environment. Along with the artist, the curator has to address these issues so as to be satisfied with the potential effect these presentations may have on the understanding of their work. Curators also need to think about the ways this type of production can be accommodated within the institutional walls. Map The Gap, an exhibition organized by the äda'web team in the fall of 1997, was an attempt to address those issues.

With the demise äda'web and its transfer to the Walker Art Center comes a whole new set of questions pertaining to the collection and conservation of art online. This probably constitutes a new challenge while bringing the curator back to issues that have very much been part of her or his function with more traditional media.

1. In the case of Shulgin and other artists from Eastern Europe, although the strategies might have been similar to, let’s say Jodi’s, the motivation was a little different. The Eastern European artists did not have to be defiant of the existing infrastructure, because it did not exist.

Benjamin Weil is the Director of New Media at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He is the cofounder and was the curator of äda'web. He graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1989. His writings have been published in such international art publications as Flash Art International, Frieze, Art Monthly, and Atlantica. He has also published texts in museum catalogues for the Hara Museum, Tokyo; the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; and the Hayward Gallery, London. As a curator, he coordinated a part of Aperto ‘93 (45th Venice Biennale, Italy, 1993). Other curatorial projects include The Desire of the Museum, Whitney Museum, New York, 1989; Itinerari, Castello di Rivara, Italy, 1991; and Manifestor, a street exhibition of artists’ projects on posters in Cologne, Munich, Turin, Tokyo, Paris, and Stockholm, 1992-1994.