the museum in rhizomatic culture

"Think of the artworld as a PBS nature documentary. We are an ecology. Diverse. Abundant. Teeming with life. . . . When we think of the environment or an ecology, we often think of the food chain, a hierarchy of sorts. No matter how much the omniscient narrator of our fictive nature docudrama expounds on the interdependence of all life, we sense, somehow, that it's better to be the lion than the microbe. . . . The network, we all now know through endless recitations of the early history of the Internet and nuclear warfare, is nonhierarchical. It is decentralized. Nodal. It is rhizomatic. I am interested in fomenting the role of the museum in a rhizomatic culture.

What is the role of the museum in a nonhierarchical--or should I say differently hierarchical--ecology? One possibility is based on the meme. Richard Dawkins has written that the idea of a meme is based on the gene. It is an idea or cultural unit that replicates. The network, of course, is a significant distribution mechanism for the replication of memes. But it is important to note that for memes to survive, it is not enough for them to have a worldwide distribution mechanism. They must replicate. So what is the relation of museums to memes? Heath Bunting might say, "own, be owned, or remain invisible." I want to argue that museums are good at surviving--Dawkins' definition of a successful gene--and perhaps we can figure out a way to take advantage of this. . . . I would argue that in order to survive in the rhizomatic age, museums must quickly shift their emphasis from what they own to what they know. . . . [P]erhaps they can be very good at the task of transmission, embedding net art in the culture meme that is replicated in future generations."

Steve Dietz
from "the museum in rhizomatic culture"

Walker Art Center Visual Arts Curator, Philippe Vergne, investigates the sights, sounds, and SIGNS of Tokyo and beyond.

"It is like having a relationship with someone who does not understand what you want and then offers you something you did not ask for."

art.commerce

Maybe. Maybe not.

The penultimate question I usually am asked by the press is a prediction about future directions. My stock response--and genuine belief--is that I feel my job is to follow the artists, not predict what they will do.

I have not done a statistical analysis of the listserv discussion for "Shock of the View"--now archived online--but unquestionably a significant percentage of the discussion centered around money. Following the money. . .

There is nothing particularly new about art-commerce projects since well before Claes Oldenburg's Store or Keith Haring's Pop Shop--and nothing particularly unique to artists about this focus. After last year's Ars Electronica, Rachel Greene and Alex Galloway commented succinctly on the art.commerce trend in their essay for [techne], "New New Media Art."

"Climbing the charts faster than the gloomy, "browser.art" aesthetic of hell.com is an interest in the corporate, both through corporate endorsements (mostly fake) and corporation-style organizations. Everyone's doing it: Easylife.org, RTMARK, etoy. This is where the power of the corporate mogul happily merges with the aesthetic vision of the avant-garde fringe."

And the virtual rush for gold continues.

• I don't know if he was the first, but recently Wolfgang Staehle put part of The Thing up for auction on eBay. The description read:

  Used contemporary art website with prime net.art collection. Own a part of net.art history (1995 - 1998). View at http://old.thing.net.

  Jordan Crandall, Matthew Drutt at the Guggenheim, and yours truly were among the bidders, although no one met the reserve price.
• While it didn't sell either, Jeff Gates placed personal demographic information on the eBay auction block
• Prema Murthy's Bindi Girl on The Thing, like hell.com's latest project skinonskinonskin, ends in a pay-per-view model
• Teo Spiller organized the net.art.trade forum to orchestrate the sale/purchase of his Megatronix, in part, one has to assume to model acquisitive behavior as well as to try and make the process more transparent.
• A spin off of that effort is a new banner.art competition:

  "In the environment of the relatively young and rapidly evolving cultural economy of the Net, the field is wide open for artistic and critical interventions in the commercialization of digital communications. Following the line of investigation of institutional critique developed by conceptual, performance and installation artists, we seek to encourage art projects which incorporate critical reflection upon their place within the art market and the broader cultural economy."

• Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's AIRWORLD, the first Walker-Jerome Emerging Artist/Emergent Medium project, which launches in August, imbricates itself in Doubleclick's advertising infrastructure, using it as a mechanism for a distributed art project, rather than a centralized Web site.
  

• Even Robbin Murphy's wonderful Multiples on Demand, while free, takes advantage of the desire for a transactional relationship to comment on the idea of value

• Brian Carroll, military infrastructures
  
  

  "a photo-essay of 17 frames, examining the exposition of military merchandising after the Urban Warrior warfighting experiment in Alameda, California. see cybernetic drones, bees and other, a stealthy ship, a harrier jet, and the indoctrination of youth into a cultural zeitgeist of war power. This was pre-Kosovo, but Kosovo was on my mind throughout the event."
  Brian Carroll

  Carroll's photos have a similar dead-eye, deadpan look as Chauncey Hare's Interior America--except for the stealth boat, which retains a Star Wars awe-fulness--with the ironically natural voice that Bill Owens achieved in Suburbia (one of Matt Groenig's "Top 100," apparently). More significantly, military infrastructures is the kind of significant, "personal project," that mainstream publications will not support but for which the Internet provides a potential alternative channel of communication and accessibility.

• Through Your Eyes: personal experiences of the artwork, archives, people, and other resources of the Walker Art Center

  Join Kaimay Yuen-Terry as she engages the Walker. "...I hope [it's] art that always leads the way, and not politics," says Kaimay Yuen-Terry, a member of the Community Advisory Committee since the group's inception in 1994. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she came to the United States when she was 18 to pursue her education and a career in social work. Bringing a lifelong interest in art and a disposition that bridges Eastern and Western cultures, Yuen-Terry shares her thoughts on the Walker, contemporary art, and American culture.

• Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker, DissemiNETion

  DissemiNETion was first exhibited in "Body Mecanique" at the Wexner Center for the Arts. It recently won a Silver award for interactive installation from I.D. Magazine and is currently on display in "Interactive Fictions," USC Fisher Gallery. DissemiNETion is now hosted as part of the Walker's Digital Arts Study Collection.

  "DissemiNETion is designed to elaborate a diaspora on the web. Creating a repository for personal and social memory, DissemiNETion uses web technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits, retrievals, and loss) through which we experience memory. The DissemiNET reelaborates such terms as 'origin,' 'home(site),' 'diaspora,' and 'search,' in terms of and through the mechanisms of the web. Drawing parallels between diaspora and the dispersal of meaning over the web, dissemiNETion in response provides spaces (lacunae) for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell stories about their own experiences with homelessness and dispersal. Over time, dissemiNETion will become a collection of errancy."
  Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker

• In "STARRY NIGHT and Stillman," a post to the Rhizome list, Lisa Jevbratt, creator of A Stillman Project for the Walker Art Center compares her various Stillman projects with Alex Galloway/Rhizome's new STARRY NIGHT and discusses the implications of data mapping for artistic practice.

• The Unreliable Archivist, a Gallery 9 commission by Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito was one of 14 projects selected for REEL NEW YORK, "an online companion to WNET's annual televised festival of local independent film and video, [which] showcases outstanding Web-based works."