< Women in New Media >
In late '94, Michael Govan came to Dia from the Guggenheim as our new Director. At that time, the Web had just moved out of the strictly university realm, and he had just seen the Andy Warhol Museum site. Their site, one the first art museum sites, was mostly just information about the Museum and its programs, but he was excited because he saw immediately that this was an art medium and he wanted to jump in and start commissioning projects.
It was a natural extension of Dia's programming because Dia's mission has always been to facilitate large scale projects that might not happen elsewhere. Another aspect of Dia's mission is to facilitate as direct of an experience between the audience and the artwork as possible.
The intimate scale of the web, usually one person sitting very near a monitor, facilitates a direct experience, and once you are in one of our artists projects, there is no institutional information at all, in fact, sometimes you wouldn't know where you are at all unless you looked at the URL.
I thought I'd talk about three of the projects we've done that were by women. These were done in '96 and '97-- we've done seven projects so far. These were back to back and I thought they were all interesting for different reasons.....
The way we work, is that our curator, Lynne Cooke picks the artists and then I work with them to produce the projects. Most of the artists have had absolutely no experience with computers let alone the Web. It seems like one logical role for institutions to facilitate projects by artists who have been working with ideas that are relevant to the medium, but who don't have the technical skills to do it on their own.
This project by Susan Hiller was done in the Fall of '96. She came with this big pile of material; she had an idea of what you could do on the web and we sat down and started looking at other sites. She decided that she didn't want to add any more images or text to the web because she felt that it is a barrage, an intimidating place. So at that point, the only real options if you were excluding text and image were sound and color -- she used "browser safe" colors and made a soundtrack done in six languages which is about mass media, memory, and dreaming. Part of the Net she was excited about was it's international scope -- she wanted to do something as inclusive as possible rather than just accepting English as the language of the Web.
Once you are in her project, you can click through a series of color screens while listening to whichever language you chose. All of the colors have names: Cinnabar, Sathgreen, Dragonsblood, and she researched the colors names and hues incredibly meticulously. This looks like a pretty simple project but it actually took a lot of time to put together.
The project after Susan's was Molissa Fenley. She saw the Web as an opportunity to overcome some of the limitations she felt in a conventional performance space which was the distance between her and the viewer and her lack of control over the viewers focus. So, after we spent some time talking about what was possible she decided to choreograph a dance for the screen.
She created a series of 17 phrases, as she called them. Behind each of the frames at the top of the screen, the first one always has her choreographers notes, and then the middle five are a combination of details of a part of her body that she felt were important in that moment of her dance, or sculptural objects that influence her choreography. And then the last one is always an animation.
Molissa spoke at Thundergulch recently and it was really fun to hear her talk about it. I was trying to think on the out way here, what is it about this work that might have a Feminist dimension to it? I think it is empowering for her to have control over the viewers sight because she is usually the object of it..... people are looking at her, they don't hear her, they don't know what she is thinking. Here she has reversed that and put herself in control of the way she is seen and understood and heard.
And the last project is Cheryl Donegan's. She is a video artist and painter who makes art about art, among other things. She carried over several of the motifs that she was in her physical work at that time into her Web project. She was actually the first artist who had some experience with Web production and that was really exciting to work with somebody who would bring stuff in on a Zip disk! And, she understood the issues about bandwidth and colors and animation.
Cherly wanted to make something really playful, to have the feel of palettes -- sort of like in photoshop, you can open up tools until there is no room to see your image. At a certain points in the project, you are sent off on completely new trajectories. She wanted to make something decidedly non-corporate, it's funny that that two of the motifs that she uses throughout here are about the most corporate of images you can get. One is the Newport Ad Campaign-- she loves the colors, and the other one is laundry detergent. Yet she succeeded in making something that has a very handmade feel to it.
Question: Who's idea was it to set it up in frames?
Sara: She talked about what she wanted to do and we found the right tool - in this case, frames. With every artist it is a process of working through different possibilities until the artist sees one that does what they want it to do.
I think part of what is interesting about working with artists who don't work in this medium primarily is that they think of things that people who understand the medium wouldn't. If you have seen RSUB they have really creative and fun stuff on there site, but they tend to have the same look as the corporate sites that they do in their day jobs but they just have different content. I think that's been an unexpected benefit from working with these artists who don't know the technology. That wasn't our primary objective initially, it was more to work with artists who were at a point in their careers where they had a body of work and had been working with certain ideas for a long time, artists for whom our curator thought this would be a good opportunity to see what they would do if they brought their ideas into a totally different medium.
One of the things we were asked to discuss is strategy -- our strategy has been to jump in and do it. I am sure we have made alot of mistakes along the way but the great thing about the web is that production is relatively quick and inexpensive compared to other new media forms. We just decided to take a chance and do it -- and it's been alot of fun.
Question: I am curious about the process-- it seems almost like a residency or are you commissioning the work?
Sara: It varies. I think more and more we'll do alot of the work electronically. The last project we did was by Claude Closky, a French artist, and he came over once for ten days where we figured out how to do the project and then when he went back to Paris we did alot of it by e-mail and then he came back, physically, for ten days to finish. Other artists like Cheryl came in over a six week period, coming in a couple days a week for a whole day. Molissa Fenley spent alot of time at the office too. Especially when we work with artists who don't have any production capabilities we have to do alot of it sitting there side by side in front of the computer-- which is really fun for me.
Question: Are people starting to bring in video and audio?
Sara: Everyone wants to use audio, but is still problematic. There is Real Audio which is pretty good now. Not in quality, but at least the way it works and alot of people have that plug-in. But, there is no other great audio solution that is cross-platform and cross-browser. We have tried to do projects that are as accessible as possible. Aside from making the decision to do most of them for the higher resolution monitors, we try to design to the lowest common denominator.
We have left these projects as they were, when they launched. The very first one is called Fantastic Prayers by Tony Oursler, Constance DeJong and Stephen Vitiello, and looks very much like a Netscape 1.0 project. We thought that since we do projects every 3-4 months that it would be interesting to leave the projects intact as markers in time of what artists did with the existing technology.