vant-gardes tend to be identified long after theyíve passed. The wind had already died down in dadaís sails, for example, by the time Robert Motherwell published several of European dadaís important manifestoes in the U.S. in 1951. Itís a small risk, however, at this pre-millennial moment, to suggest that the final avant-garde of the twentieth century is a technological one. There is less than a year to prove this wrong, and I doubt that any radically new trend in painting is likely to emerge to seize the crown. Of course, many feel that the very notion of the avant-grade is dead given that novelty lasts no longer than fifteen minutes before it is usurped by popular culture. In terms of art, enduring art, this may not be so. Conceptually complex art cannot be easily absorbed; indeed, the culture may not recognize it as something desirable. Godardís uncompromising cinema comes to mind, especially a work like Scenario du Film Passion, a visually and textually layered study of his own 1982 film, Passion. Even Sundance Channel will not, I assure you,be showing it soon.

By ìthe technological,î I am referring to that art created with the aid of the computer, or to be more specific, within the computer. Digital technology, for which the computer is the basic tool, embraces all areas of contemporary, technologically-involved art, from films, to photography, to synthesized music, to CD-ROMS and much more. The technological avant-garde is of interest because it challenges all the categories familiar to art discourse: objects (paintings, sculptures), spatial relationships, perspective, time, gesture, and so on. Walter Benjaminís much touted anxiety over ìmechanical reproductionî in art (if it can be reproduced easily, the ìaura,î of the original, as he calls it, is gone) is now only of historical interest. The issue of ìreproducingî images via copying machines and moving or still cameras has little to do with the current, radically new capabilities of creating work that has no referent in a non-digital world; indeed, that has no referent in the three-dimensional world as we know it. ìReproductionî is to the digital world, what the hot air balloon is to aviation. Using digital technology, artists are now able to introduce new forms of ìproduction,î not ìreproduction.î Virtual Reality, for example, one of the more mystifying outgrowths of digital technology, is not a mere translating of data into life-size images that mimic reality. It is its own reality.

The new power that digital technology brings to the image is that is renders it infinitely malleable. Formerly, visual information was static in the sense that the image, although editable in film or capable of being incorporated into other images in montage, was fixed. Either originating in the computer or once transferred to the computerís digital language every element of the image can be modified. The image becomes ìinformationî in the computer, and all information can be manipulated. And this is whatís new. ìBut is it art,î we ask?

Limiting this discussion to ìnet artî or art on the worldwide web, the answer, as always to this question, is mixed. The answer to the more difficult question, ìIs it good art?,î is very much up for grabs since no aesthetic boundaries have yet been dictated by the art history police. Thus, critical carte-blanche is here permitted. A recent survey of web art, most often but not always, sponsored by institutions (museums, art centers), suggests that there is indeed life out there, or in there, even if one risks getting carpal tunnel syndrome to find it.

The most interesting art on the web is that which engages the medium itself in fresh conceptual ways. John Simonís Every Icon, 1997 (www.numeral.com/everyicon.html) addresses computer language directly in a conceptual scheme that seems to stretch the notion of ìtime artî to its limits. Heís created a square or grid with 1,024 smaller squares within it, 32 to a side. Through a series of calculations he has arranged all the possible variations of darkening these tiny squares (like on/off switches), one line at a time. The top line alone has 4.3 billion variations, which would take sixteen months to display on a continuously operating computer. The second line would take six billion years, and so on. Looking on screen like a kinetic Josef Albers or Agnes Martin, Simonís ìart game,î in which he invites the viewer to watch the grid as it lightens and darkens, can never be completed, but it goes far toward visualizing a notion of infinity.

Simon has assisted other conceptually oriented artists like Jenny Holzer and the team of Kolmar and Melamid in the design of their art on the web. Holzer places a series of provocative statements on line in Please Change Beliefs 1998. Each phrase (ìloving animals is a substitute activity,î ìmurder has its sexual sideî) can be highlighted and another phrase will appear. Each screen page has written at the bottom ìPlease Change Beliefs.î

Kolmar and Melamid created The Most Wanted Paintings, 1997 (www.diacenter.org/km/) which began with an online survey of people from many different nations that asked what they like to see in a painting and what they didnít like. Based on those peopleís expressed preferences, the artists then made paintings that were exhibited online. A thread of intentional banality runs through each of these works on the web, and oneís response to it will be similar to the artistsí non-web work.

The Musee díart Contemporain de Montreal sponsors a website containing dozens of links to web art (media.macm. qc.ca), one sample of which (obsolete.com/artwork) is particularly amusing in light of the aforementioned Walter Benjamin. Entitled Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1998, the site consists of words and numbers flashing so fast on the screen that the viewer is unable to read them. The anonymous artist or artists who created the work place the following explanatory note at the bottom of the computer screen ìa translation meant for readers who do not understand the original.î They evidently believe that the speed of reproducibility has accelerated so much since Benjamin that even his words, when reproduced, have little meaning.

Graphic design emerges as central to the web art enterprise. Blurrying boundaries between art and craft, computer graphic artists, expert in lettering, layout, and multi-dimensional imaging, assist visual artists from other media in adapting to the computer. Peter Halley is representative of this new breed. His Exploding Cell, 1997, viewable on the Museum of Modern Art website (www.moma.org), consists of nine squares that ìexplodeî with a kaleidoscopic array of colors. The problem with graphics, however, is that they tend to blend into sameness. Grids, flashing boxes of color, geometric forms and fanciful lettering are everywhere to be found in web art. Nothing yet exists to match the excitement generated by the Russian constructivistdesigners earlier in the century.

The artists team called jodi may be suggesting their own frustration with the current limits of computer graphics on their website (www.jodi.org). The strobe flashes of green rectangles that greet the viewer appear to be announcing some exciting visuals waiting within, but, thatís all there is. Click on the square in the corner and nothing happens. Diaís site (www.diacenter.org) contains some promising work. In Fantastic Prayers, a collaboration with writer Constance DeJong, video artist Tony Oursler and musician Stephen Vitiello, visitors discover a maze of connections that range from Ourslerís familiar disembodied mouths spouting phrases ( e.g. ìsome of it I likedî) to a tract on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, all of it accessible by a mere click of the mouse. After repeated clicks, oneís starting point appears lost forever as free association replaces any sense of linear narrative.

At the same site is video artist Cheryl Doneganís Studio Visit, 1997 containing a virtual studio of ideas, web paintings, video, and graphic displays. Here the artist places herself, clad in a shower cap and covered in strands of videotape, within large swirls of primary colors. Images proceed in a staccato form (they donít ìmorphî into one another as in films) as the visitor clicks on and on. It feels primitive, but playful.

This tendency toward irony or humor can become grating when the ìaestheticsî of MTV, Beavis and Butthead, or video games like ìBattlezone,î ìFrogger,î and ìManeaterî are apparent in what is trying to pass as art on the web. www.One38.org is a case in point. At this one site you can establish links with, among other things, ìNet Art Sucksî (which turns out to be a black screen), some low grade cartoon art, and a chain letter intended to overcrowd (and thus crash) big guys like AOL, Prodigy, and Microsoft. The web has no curatorial policy.As anyone who has surfed the net knows, the speed at which connections are made is dizzying. Art on the net reflects this. Most of this art participates in the game of interactivity, tricking visitors into thinking they are helping to create the art, which in a sense they are. Sometimes when the clicking and traveling reaches a level of frenzy one really does forget where one started and a feeling of disorientation sets in. Looking at art, taking a virtual tour of the Grand Canyon, or getting the best deals on airfares can all feel the same.

This, I suppose, is the challenge of all art today: to differentiate itself from prevailing distractions and provide a space for reflection, even if it does so through obtuse, abstract, or fragmented means. The task for the technological avant-garde artist is to find within the infinite malleability of digital information, some information worth attending to, so mind and spirit can be enriched instead of exhausted.

Editorís Note: other sites of interest for our readers include:
www.thing.net     www.rsub.com     www.rhizome.com     www.thecooker.com
ww.channelp.com     www.guggenheim.org     www.zkm.de     www.queer-arts.org

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