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September 3, 2001
Nytimes.
ARTS ONLINE
And the Best Internet Art Is . . . Virtually Anything
By MATTHE MIRAPAUL
The writer Neal Stephenson, last year's winner in the Internet category of Prix Ars Electronica, even though he had not entered.
And the Academy Award for best picture goes to . . . MTV? It would never happen at the Oscars. But for a prominent Internet prize being given out tonight, that is not so far-fetched.
The prize in question is the Prix Ars Electronica, awarded annually during the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. This electronic- arts festival is a mecca for Internet artists, computer-music composers and others working in the digital realm. The six-day event, which began on Saturday, will be attended by more than 20,000 people.
The Prix Ars Electronica has become something of a hot pomme de terre in recent years. Opportunities for recognition in the digital arts remain rare, and the Prix Ars, sponsored by the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, is as prestigious as they come. Golden Nica statuettes (of the Winged Victory) are awarded to Prix Ars winners in several areas, including computer animation and interactive art.
But it is the Internet category that has sparked controversy, demonstrating that the Salzburg Festival is not the only Austrian summer arts gathering with a penchant for stirring passions.
The fun began in 1999 when Prix Ars jurors bypassed hundreds of official entries to pick their own nominee: Linux, an alternative to Microsoft's computer operating system. The choice, they said, would start a discussion on whether computer code could be considered as art. Jurors took a similar route last year, ignoring the official submissions and instead honoring Neal Stephenson, a science-fiction author whose vision of cyberspace has inspired software developers.
Internet artists squawked, both at the nonart nature of the choices and at how they were made. The digital artist Mark Amerika, for example, posted a public note asking why he should bother to nominate his work "when the judges always pick someone who has not entered."
Conor McGarrigle, a Net artist from Dublin, took the protest a step further, opening an area on his Stunned.org Web site, where anyone could hazard a guess at this year's winner. Among the possibilities were President Bush ("He works successfully with virtual reality") and takeout pizza (without it, "many computer geeks would starve").
The organizer of Prix Ars responded by revamping contest procedures this year. Jurors are now limited to voting for the official entries, augmented by a short list of nominees submitted by experts like the science-fiction author William Gibson.
Yet the contest's critics are bound to be dissatisfied by this year's Prix Ars recipients. Although the winners of the two Internet-theme prizes will not be announced until 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time today, the six finalists from which they have been drawn are already known, and the choices favor the commercial over the cultural.
For the Net Excellence prize the finalists are a record-label Web site, a graphic-design project and "Manhattan Timeformations," an interactive map charting the city's growth. For the new Net Vision prize, the finalists are two computer games and a cell-phone message system. (All can be accessed at prixars.orf.at.)
If these do not sound especially artsy, that is just fine with Christine Schöpf, the Austrian Broadcasting official who has run the competition since its start in 1987. Ms. Schöpf explained that the Internet category was expanded beyond the arts this year to reflect the digital medium's widespread influence on business, politics, science and society.
The change clarifies what the Prix Ars voters have long understood, said one juror, Bruno Beusch, co-founder of TNC Network, a new-media concern in Paris. The award, he said, "is not an arts prize, but a prize for the whole spectrum of innovative activities on and with the Internet."
For example, he said, jurors liked the Warp Records site because it showed how a small music label can use the Net to sell its wares and stay independent. PrayStation, by the New York artist Joshua Davis, was praised not so much for its graphic-design experiments as for its educational and community-building elements.
Nearly anything goes, then. By this thinking, the file-sharing service Napster should be eligible for a Grammy Award because it has forced the music industry to rethink itself. And MTV, which has had a profound impact on visual culture, should be a viable Oscar candidate.
"The failure of the jury to come up with Net art winners represents an inability to understand what distinguishes this artistic practice from creativity in literature or the development of operating systems," said Timothy Druckrey, an independent curator in New York and editor of "Ars Electronica: Facing the Future" (MIT Press, 1999), a history of the 22-year-old arts center that serves as host for the festival.
He continued: "A lot of thinking has grown up around the idea that the secret of media art is technical, that software can be art. But technique is only a means to an end. A well-implemented technology can change the way experience is encountered."
Noting that two of the finalists were computer games, he said, "A game engine doesn't change the way I experience art, even when there is a clever interface."
It is too soon to tell if the flak has diminished the prestige of Prix Ars, or if the revamped contest procedures will enhance it. Organizers boasted that there were nearly 700 entries this year, compared with 250 a year ago. The prize money — each Golden Nica winner gets 10,000 euros ($9,128) — helps, too.
Nor is there much competition when it comes to serious Internet-art competitions. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art awarded an inaugural prize for online art in 2000, but the program was suspended this year while the museum mounted a high-tech art exhibition. With the departure of David A. Ross, the museum director who secured the prize's financing, its future may be in doubt.
The Webby Awards, which bills itself as the Oscars of the Internet, doles out an annual arts prize. Although this year's finalists were all top- notch Internet-art projects, the Webbys are generally regarded as a glitzy affair and most of its categories are unrelated to the arts.
Ms. Schöpf pointed out that the value of Prix Ars continues to be that "we recognize digital art in the same way as traditional arts like literature and music are recognized."
To date, though, "Ars Electronica has not managed to make this award one that is relevant to the Net-art community," said Mark Tribe, who is the founder of the online media-arts resource Rhizome.org.
Mr. Davis, the creator of PrayStation and its Once-Upon-A-Forest.com sister site, acknowledged this to be the case. Although he said he appreciated the validation that the prize would give to his work, he said he had not entered the competition and that one of the experts must have nominated him.
Asked why he had not submitted his own work to the Prix Ars Electronica, Mr. Davis replied, "I didn't know about it."
[ 04-09-2001: Message edited by: Ice Honkey/Grim Rapper ] |
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