The internet: If the museum’s job is not only to think about the past, but also to celebrate what is most vital and relevant now, then the internet can not be ignored as a valid location and focus for artistic practice.Despite the burst bubble, the internet remains one of the most significant inventions of the 20^th century, signalling what Rifkin describes as the move of commerce from geography to cyberspace, from markets to networks and from ownership to access ¹. The internet has developed in parallel with concepts of globalisation, the communication age, and the information age, and is integral to their definitions. As the Social History of Art has taught us, art can only be understood in the wider context of the society that produces it.Net art says a lot about contemporary society and how it is changing, as is evidenced when it is addressed in relation to established art histories.

Beryl Graham ² and others have noted that net art actually fits very nicely into hot curatorial debates about the death of the object, the erosion of media hierarchies, and conceptual art. This acknowledged theoretical continuity is easing net art into the mainstream, although it remains pretty clear that many art museums still struggle with exactly how to evaluate and accommodate net art.Art museums are not interested in works on technical grounds alone, and yet many curators still find it difficult to distinguish artistic merit from technical innovation in net art.This is inevitable when you consider the speed with which both the practice and its tools continue to evolve. But experience and confidence is growing and fuelling emerging net art canons.

Operations: In fact, both curators and other museum professionals can learn a lot from net art, beyond art history - lessons which are fundamental to the survival of the organisations they represent.Online audiences expect seamless access in a networked society, but, to quote Jane Sledge: "while cyberspace may seem to threaten national boundaries, the boundaries remain strong between different museum functions such as exhibits and registration, and systems integration remains elusive" ³.As David Bearman and Jennifer Trant have explained ⁴: the roles of Museum professionals, like other professionals, need to evolve - and to be fair, this is already happening. The information age requires interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork, across not only departments but also institutions and national borders. If museums want to improve their offerings, they must actively seek partnerships and be willing to pool knowledge and resources.What is more, they need to become flexible and scaleable enough to take advantage of opportunities.Net artists get this and can help show the way.

Visitors: Museum websites are both common and increasingly popular, yet few of them take full advantage of the potential afforded. Most acknowledge the benefits of offering access to collections and listings type information, but few have yet enabled information to travel in any direction other than from the museum to the visitor. Simplistically put, this is missing a trick. People like to communicate.Generally, they will go to museums in groups.Visiting a museum is a social activity, yet few attempts have been made to facilitate communication among online museum visitors.Net artists, with their usual willingness to participate, collaborate can help kick start community-based activity linked to museum websites.

There also remains a persistent reluctance by most museums to give their online visitors equal status to offline visitors.If statistics are to be believed then online visitors are already frequently outnumbering their offline counterparts. Admittedly they do not, on average, spend the same amount of time or money at their online destination - but if supported these figures will also continue to rise. As Jane Sledge pointed out in 2000: “museums need to stop seeing their virtual visitors as parallel, unconnected universes. They must remember their mission and goals and see how the virtual audiences fit within these goals.” ⁵.

Net art can be really helpful to art museums in this respect. It raises the profile of their web sites, both within the organisations and the wider art world. These sites no longer function purely to support offline programmes, but become instead a gallery in their own right, with, potentially, equal status to offline sites and, time-will-prove, equal claims to resources.

Tate and the internet

Tate was not quick to get online.The first Tate website launched in February 1998, supported by a sole web editor, working three days a week in the Communications Department.But once plugged in, things developed relatively fast.Highlights, in rough chronological order, include: a site re-launch in March 2000, an ‘e-business’ joint venture with MOMA ⁶ (also 2000), digitisation of the Collection and strands from the archive ⁷, a partnership with the BBC Online ⁸, a consistent programme of webcast events ⁹, sponsorship of Tate Online by BT ¹⁰, and the subsequent creation of an independent Digital Programmes Department, site search, e-bulletins ¹¹, an e-learning portal ¹² and discussion forums. This impressive sprint proves Tate is enthusiastic about the internet and what it can do – as stated explicitly in the objective from the 2001 business plan that Tate Online should “function as a sixth site for Tate, featuring a distinct and identifiable programme, appropriate to the medium” ¹³.Needless to say this programme includes net art as a central feature.

Tate Online has grown to be among the most successful museum sites in the world, attracting over 1.7 million unique visitors last year. According to independent statistics ¹⁴ it is consistently the most popular UK art website. The average length of online visits is now at just over 7 minutes, compared with just over 6 minutes for all websites in general ¹⁵.These figures are all encouraging, unlike one of the results of a survey run just before the most recent net art commission at Tate Online.Less than 1% of the 605 respondents specified net art as a reason for their visit to tate.org.uk.Survey results suggested that the vast majority of visitors to Tate Online are after offline-exhibition related information or online educational material based on the Collection. But these remain early days, and there were over 5,000 visits to the Tate net art homepage in October ¹⁶.

Tate and net art

Traditionally Tate has focused on sculpture, painting and the graphic arts. However, since the 1960s, divisions and hierarchies between media have become increasingly blurred as artists move between media and combine different techniques. Following the lead of contemporary artists’ working across-boundaries, Tate has, slowly since the 1970s but more urgently since the 1990s, built up a considerable photography collection and an important collection of film and video installations.The most exciting new challenge for Tate, as for artists themselves, is how now to explore the myriad new and continuously evolving technologies available in a global, digital era. Tate has now presented net art on four occasions: in 1999, 2000, 2001, and again, last summer in 2002.

1999: The first Tate net art project was Broadcast by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope ¹⁷.This work was an event commissioned as part of Tate Modern’s pre-opening programme and was a re-working of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Twenty-nine contemporary pilgrims were selected and on September 11th 1999, their tales were broadcast live in Borough Market (Southwark, London) and webcast online.

2000 ¹⁸ The first net art works included on the Tate website were commissioned the following year to accompany Tate’s re-brand and physical extension i.e. the opening of Tate Britain and Tate Modern.The commissions were acknowledged as a simultaneous and deliberate attempt to extend Tate’s work in the virtual world. On this occasion, a small team led by a freelance curator, Matthew Gansalo ¹⁹, commissioned 1996 Turner Prize nominee Simon Patterson, and established net artist, Graham Harwood, to create “a dialogue about the interactive nature and possibilities of net art, exploring the relationship between the virtual and the real object, and the role of the museum and the internet in contemporary art” ²⁰.

Simon created Les Match des Couleurs ²¹, a table of colours with their hexadecimal equivalents, matched with all the teams from the French football league. Radio France’s commentator Eugène Saccomano reads out the results, and this work can still be bought in screensaver format from the Tate shop ²².Graham created a piece called Uncomfortable Proximity ²³, which was a reworking of the Tate website, made up of critical texts and disturbing photographs referring to Tate’s history. Support texts for both projects were commissioned from Matthew Fuller ²⁴.

2001: The third time net art appeared within the Tate network was IRG (in a real gallery), Tate Britain, in 2001.The show was part of the Art Now programme aimed at generating discussion and awareness of new art in Britain.It was called Art and Money Online, was curated by Julian Stallabrass and sponsored by Reuters.Three installations were presented, each of which examined the commercialisation of the internet. Included in the selection criteria was the requirement that all works be accessible to visitors who may previously have been put off by the computer interface.

Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portway created a new work for the show, called Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium. The work used the internet to accessing live stock market data and represent companies as stars at night, both on a flat screen and a dome in a darkened room. The group Redundant Technology Initiative was also in this show ²⁵.RTI presented Free Agent, in which they re-purposed old computers to search online for the word 'free'.Mixing video footage with these results, a networked ‘no-cost’ video wall was created, across 36, 14” screens. The third set of artists to take part in Art and Money Online was Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead ²⁶.They showed CNN Interactive just got more interactive in which the viewer was encouraged to select ‘mood’ music, via a touch screen kiosk, to accompany the online news. The one-day conference that accompanied the show is available as a webcast on the Tate website ²⁷.

2002: The most recent Tate net art commissions launched this summer, again at Tate Online, but this time under the aegis of the newly formed Digital Programmes department. A shortlist of 14 artists/groups was invited to submit proposals responding to the historical context of network art, or to the context of Tate as a communication system, and which would hopefully involve significant elements of participation.The two artists eventually commissioned were Heath Bunting for Borderxing Guide and Susan Collin’s for Tate in Space. The two works are very different in tone and content, but similar in that that they will both evolve over the first year of display. Support texts were again commissioned, this time by Josephine Berry, Florian Schneider and Paul Bonaventura ²⁸.

Heath’s proposal was to develop new work in a series that was currently underway in which he documents walks in Europe, locating and crossing borders without a passport, and subsequently publishes the information online.Or at least that was what the work was going to be until a few weeks before links to it were included on Tate’s website. Heath added another layer to the work at this stage and denied access to most of the content, hosted on Irational’s server, to ‘unauthorised’ visitors. Unauthorised visitors are greeted with a list of authorised clients, including Tate, various media labs in Europe, whole countries such as Afghanistan, and several Easy Everything machines, and encouraged to travel to one of these clients to view the work. Alternatively, and if suitably equipped with a static IP (Internet Protocol) address, the visitor can apply for ‘authorised’ status themselves.

This tactic provoked a fair amount of discussion at Tate, where there was some concern that the piece would frustrate Tate’s core objective of increasing access to and understanding of art.In fact what Borderxing Guide succeeds in doing is promote critical awareness of naïve, wishful interpretations of the internet as somehow the great equaliser where movement is unrestricted and information is freely available to all.In this respect, and on one level, it is a specific provocation to museums to reflect on their culturally imperialist tendencies, as much in evidence online as off ²⁹.Ironically then, perhaps, it has proved very popular with other arts organisations – including MUDAM (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean) in Luxembourg, the London ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) and Sao Paolo Biennali, all of whom have also already included this work in their shows.

Expansionism is also one of the themes in Susan’s proposal for a Tate in Space.At this stage of the development the Tate in Space website is the key route through which members of the public can follow programme progress.Forget Las Vegas, forget cyberspace, Tate in Space explores ways in which Tate might extend the visitor experience and engage new audiences in ‘outer space’.Formally, the site presents online visitors with no radical surprises, based as it is on the existing graphic identity of the Tate website.Sufficiently so that most visitors are taken in at least for a while…including the British National Space Centre who called with questions about the satellite, and asked whether the proper permissions had been secured for Tate’s space explorations.

As stated in the press release, the ‘site acts as an arena for debate and reflection on the nature of art in space, raising questions about cultural and institutional ambition and the very human desires to observe and communicate’ ³⁰.Online visitors are successfully co-opted in the fabrication of a Tate in Space via various means including an architectural competition, a request for sightings and a discussion list.Through this participation they are encouraged to examine ‘the contexts in which art institutions, artists and viewers play out their interconnecting roles ³¹’.

The future for net art at Tate

26 - http://www.thomson-craighead.net

27 - http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/artonline.htm

28 - http://www.tate.org.uk/netart

29 - The webcast of an event entitled Border Crossings, at Tate Modern (October 2002) is available at http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo

30 - http://www.tate.org.uk/home/news/latestnetart.htm

31 - Paul Bonaventura ‘Floating World’ 2002, http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/floatingworlds.htm