Urich Lau

Preface: the Desktop Museum
Increasingly, the computer has become one of the tools in the artist’s studio today, or of anyone as a matter of fact. It can be as essential as pencil and paper, but even the primary function of pencil and paper can be replaced by a keyboard, monitor and writing software.

The artist’s computer performs the daily tasks of e-mailing and writing letters and proposals, and saving pictures and videos of artworks for documentation purposes, and even as an artist’s tool in making art. Countless ventures can be done by sitting at the desk with the Internet serves as the definitive travelling guide for the qwerty-inclined, as an instantaneous channel for information and imagination throughout the cyberspace.

Furthermore, what good is the Internet if it is not for an outlet for the artist’s exposition? The website is a liberating album for art and ideas. All you need to show your work is probably a name card with the Universal Resource Locator (URL), and the audience can log on to an express visit at the “desktop museum”.

Technology has always dictated how art is made, how it is seen and moved. Artists have used the latest inventions in realising new forms and functions in aesthetics and methodologies. Case in point for video art, the Sony Portapak video camera introduced in 1967 has been noted to be the electronic icon for the beginnings of video art, in the inquisitive hands of Fluxus artist Nam June Paik.¹ In addition, video art is a staple to one of the most common technologies — the television. An early demonstration of this is when German artist Wolf Vostell in 1957 integrated a television set into one of his works.²

Present-day technological phenomena like the fusion of the mobile phone and video camera has spawned video festivals that showcase works made from such electronical hybridity.³ This evolution of the art and methods of video making has succumbed to the prosaic practice of the ordinary people, away from high-end video recording and editing. The artistic interjection by modern and common technology is instrumental in contemporary art.

Video art has benefited in specific ways from technological advances — case in point, the website. What is more apt then watching moving images on a screen, a computer screen, on a website?

Video Data Bank and UbuWeb⁴ showcase clips of important contemporary artists as well as enshrined pieces of the analogue and digital movements. Seminal works like Rose Hobart⁵ by American Surrealist Joseph Cornell in the year 1936 shows that a significant and historical piece of celluloid can be made possible and convenient to be viewed and reviewed by the current generation and thereafter. The role of a website now functions as the channel for this particular art form to present its history, theory and artistry.

Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart

A website itself can be a derivation for artistry as well. Ian Gwilt argues that in the realms of digital art and design, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) can and is appropriate to elaborate itself in navigation and interaction with contemporary art methodologies and contexts — especially in today’s digital climate when artists and audiences both engage the computer and Internet to make and view art.⁶ The website of Singapore artist Choy Ka Fai contains documentations of his projects and video clips of collaborated performances. The GUI stated also reflects a parallel taste in design and disposition in the webpages.

Choy Ka Fai, http://ka5.info/

In this essay I’ll look at some examples of websites from different artists, including art collectives, and examine how the webpage design and navigation represent the aesthetic leanings and styles of the artists. My contention is that the presence of a website perpetuates the life span of the artist and the artwork. In periods of inactivity, the website takes over the role as an “artwork” and for the artist’s intentions in art. The website is the alternative window for the audience in experiencing the artwork, and how the website has assisted, influenced and altered artmaking, curatorship, participation and viewing.

1: Art Becomes Documentation
Documentation is the necessary task of archiving and prolonging passing art endeavours. Documentation is made electronic as well as the work of art.

1.1: Electronic Portfolio
Art as documentation stems from one of the ideological methods of the Conceptual Art movement, particularly during the American avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. Other methods, namely the use of readymades, texts and intervention, were also used by artists to champion ideas and contextual concerns as fundamental principles in artmaking, and to take a stand against autonomic art trends, the commoditisation of art, traditional aesthetics and material value.⁷

When art becomes documentation, it becomes a record that states the continuation of an artwork after an exhibition, performance, or exposition. It also states the position or role of the artist as the maker and practitioner of the work. Like a testimony, the act of artmaking is a living proof of existence itself. Documentation is also of course about the methods and processes of keeping archives for artworks and artists themselves.

A website as an electronic portfolio succeeds in saving and disseminating the artists’ works and shows this “testimony of artmaking”. Moreover, the extensiveness of implementation and functionality of the electronic pages in the Internet provides greater avenues for the portfolio to be forceful as its own entity.

1.2: Play / Replay
The issue of viewing a time-based work, and being able to appreciate it in full-fledged actuality, might suggest that the web is not an adequate substitute for real experience. The Singapore-based performance art festival, “Future of Imagination”, has brought together performances from different countries and has shown a diversity of performance art practitioners in a series of showcases. However, its website serves the primary function of archiving the programmes and details of the festivals, and represents the performances with still images.

Future of Imagination, http://www.foi.sg/

Exquisite Crisis & Encounters is web-based project presented in early 2007 and is conceived and organised by Yong Soon Min, a resident artist at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute of New York University. Over a hundred artists, including myself, and art collectives from many countries were involved. Interaction between the artists over the Internet makes the project feasible within a short period of time, and the website in turn features the artists’ works in videos and images after the event; an exhibition at the Institute has also resulted from the project.

Urich Lau, Videos on Exquisite Exhibit Blog, http://www.nyu-apastudies.org/gallery/exquisite/blog/?cat=6

The art website primarily functions as documentation but supplementary renditions of media and playfulness gives the user/viewer/audience an added platform with navigating and interactive capabilities through the webpages, as well as getting closer to experience art in its truest form in virtual space.

2: Art Becomes Digital
Inches X Inches. Metres X Metres. Length X Width X Depth. Dimensions of art are converted to kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes, and consequently converted for virtual space.

2.1: All Art Small and Flat
For documentation or for art itself, art can be made compact through digitisation which makes it convenient to save and send. New art forms like media arts can come in hard disks, high-density videodiscs (DVD), or broadband. In a world now driven by consciousness for the environment and economic efficiency, art may need to adapt to such trends, tastes and technologies.

In film and photography, the transition of image-making from celluloid to digital marks a progression in environmental and economical efficiency following the pace of computer advancements and the need of mobility of and accessibility to people. Celluloid takes up space and raw resources in manufacturing. Digitisation reduces, compacts and flattens the bulk and processes and can store more images in lesser space. The eradication in material size and matter (since digital images are just electronic pulses), widens the boundaries and possibilities of creating and distributing images: turning the traditional printed material into electronic, weightless images.

Real Estate — 100 Aerial Drawings by Singapore artist Heman Chong is a web-based work with pictograms drawn from aerial satellite captured images of Singaporean architectural landscapes.⁸ The opening webpage shows a stark white and red design representing the national colours and motifs. The downloadable artwork-wallpapers are downsized, flattened, abstracted parts of the city.

Heman Chong, Real Estate, http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/real_estate/

2.2: The Virtual Curator
Heman Chong is also one of the artists affiliated in Vitamin Creative Space, a web-featured collective of artists of Chinese descent, and an art space as well, which aspires to be an “alternative working mode” in the “contemporary Chinese context”.⁹ True to its name, a vitamin pill appears on the introductory webpage, and vitamins are as essential to life as art is derivative of life itself. The collective presents curatorial perspectives and directions promulgated from a virtual space. Of course in many cases, curators themselves are also focused on websites, or in this following example, a curatorial team.

Vitamin Creative Space, http://www.vitamincreativespace.com/

p-10 is such a team and an art space in Singapore which comprises a group of people who are diverse in their professions as artists, art teachers and curators. Their methods and past projects have showed that “more heads are better than one”. The website chronicles projects, exhibitions and artists’ talks that the team have curated, initiated and hosted. The p-10 blog, captioned as “p-10 from the Inside” reveals more of the team’s curatorial directions with writings and news, but what it also gives is an approachable context for both artists and audiences with a non-institutional, homely group picture.

p-10 website and blog
http://p-10.org/ … http://p10.blogspot.com/

The curator sometimes is practically the artist himself, when he or she chooses the artworks and a set of ideas and references to be included in the website. Here, the “artist” plays the dual role as the artist/curator. In a solo exhibition or exposition, the artist can be represented by a curator, who contextualises and executes the curatorial statement. In the virtual exposition, the artist is unobtrusively acting out the role of the curator. The capacity of website is not infinite and neither is the attention span of the “desktop audience”. The artist needs to scrutinise the necessary webpage contents for concision. If curatorship is a demonstration of selectivity and exposition in a mould built upon ideological factors, then the artist’s website is the mould.

3: Art Becomes Data
Art is data — and it becomes information, chronology and publicity for the artist and artwork.

3.1: The Desktop Audience
The gazing audience in front of the computer screen does not experience the truest form of the art that he is gazing, or does he? Viewing art has always been regarded to be experiential but audiences are still discouraged to touch or get too close to artworks. If the conventional gallery, museum or art space is built as a sterile box for containing art, then what is the difference between gazing at artworks physically and from a computer monitor? Can the monitor be a more personal and private experience when the user is visiting an art website? New experiences in contact with art may have to reconsider utilising one of the most ubiquitous spaces of information transmission and interaction: the computer screen.

“Figure 3”, www.osha.gov/Publications/videoDisplay/figure3.jpg.webloc

This last section suggests that art ultimately becomes a piece of information or reference for the discerning audience, since the basic function of the website is to store and spread data. It is atypical but not too uncommon when websites are devoid of any artistry or aesthetics that might denote the artists’s own sensibilities. Returning to a point made above, concerning the transferring art into documentation and back into art, I want to take these kinds of websites into account. While they show nothing more than just texts and links to other sites, they also shows the starkness in character and appearance, and thus the artists’ preferences “aesthetically”. The look of the electronic data fundamentally is straightforward and informative in the most efficient way. The following four samples by artists with works of art and artwriting may appear to contradicts my earlier examples.

Chong Li-Chuan, www.angelfire.com/electronic/phase/
Lim Kok Boon, http://boonscafe.wordpress.com/about/

Woon Tien Wei
http://www.server-foundation.org/WoonTienWei/
Benjamin Puah, http://www.playben.com/

Epilogue: The Analogue Revolution
The onset and influence of digital technology now is greater than before in many ways, but artists in different aspects still resort to more rudimentary attributes and characteristics of art or in resemblance of it, with websites that look non-graphical and non-electronic.

George Chua, http://www.georgechua.com/
Donna Ong, http://donnaong.com/donna.html

Art practices and works of art are already on the route to becoming documentation — digital and data. Have the artists let themselves be converted to data — documented in a digital output? It may not be that different or drastically diverted from normalcy when electronic profiling is essentially an implementation of efficacy. Artmaking and methodologies will still stand for an “analogue” positing in the digital disposition where art is still thought, made, criticised and appreciated in the most elementary fashion between the artist and the audience.

1. Catherine Elwes, Video Art — A Guided Tour, “The History of Video Art”, http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/videoart/. [↩]
2. Thomas Dreher, The Arts and Artists of Networking, http://www.aec.at/en/archiv_files/19951/E1995_054.pdf [↩]
3. Pocket Films Festival, http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=91 [↩]
4. http://www.vdb.org/ and http://www.ubu.com/film/ [↩]
5. Joseph Cornell (USA, 1913-1984), Rose Hobart, 1936, film montage, http://www.ubu.com/film/cornell.html [↩]
6. Ian Gwilt, Digital Art: A Brief History of the Graphical User Interface in Contemporary Art Practice, 1994-2004, (2005), IEEE Computer Society, Washington D.C. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=1509184 [↩]
7. Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press, London, 1998. [↩]
8. http://www.rhizome.org/art/exhibition/real_estate/ [↩]
9. http://www.vitamincreativespace.com/ [↩]