Art on the Internet

My involvement in interactive computer technology and art goes back to the early 1970s, in an experience that gives true meaning to the term "spaghetti code." Three weeks before Charlotte Moorman's Avant Garde Art Festival of 1972, sound artist Liz Phillips asked if I'd be willing to cook up 500 pounds of six-foot strands of spaghetti as part of her upcoming interactive/performance work on the Alexander Hamilton Ferry. "Electric Spaghetti" used capacitive fields to sense the audience's grabbing and handling of hundreds of six-foot-long strands of pasta pulled from a massive heap. Information from the sensing devices was translated into electronically generated sound. We did not know the word Internet. The word computer conjured up toting huge stacks of whole punched cards. For me, the allure of interactive electronic art has never disappeared.

Historically, art and invention tend to go hand-in-hand. Pythagoras derived his famous theorem while exploring the nature of music. The Greek architects made exquisite use of geometry. At the dawn of the twentieth century, as physicists explored the concept of relativity, artists underwent an abstract revolution. The underlying issues of art and science are more closely aligned than it might appear at first glance. Science seeks to observe nature and phenomena empirically, and then to propose a theory which explains the observation and reliably predicts future observations. An artist also observes nature. The artist seeks to create a structure or style that will convey the meaning of his or her observations. The work an artist produces must ring true for others if it is to survive. As the audience views a work of art, whether in one moment of immediate time or over centuries of cultural critique, people experience the artist's hypothesis. Each of us becomes the judge of the work's ultimate validity. There may be an idea presented as simple as "behold the beauty of the world around us" or ideas that are quite complex such as the movements within Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

Creativity has always existed in all of the realms of computer technology. Start delving under the hood of almost any well written code and you will find humor and personality—albeit often strange and esoteric. Program names such as BIFF, the mail-notification utility named for the dog who barked when the mail arrived; subroutine labels such as "should-patch-later"; or the Internet tools named "Archie," "Veronica," and "Jughead"; or the ever-present RTFM (Read "this fine" manual) are the markings left by the people behind the programs. These are the same markings of the soldiers who scrawled "Kilroy was here" or cave painters leaving vivid visual descriptions of their daily lives. These are the traces of that part of the human spirit that must express and create.

In the late 1970s, it wouldn't have been easy to predict the massive computer markets we see today. We are now poised on the moment of critical mass of the computer communications era. Internet, Multimedia, Virtual Reality, and Interactive TV are among the ideas being discussed on a daily basis across all disciplines. While art in its purest sense might have been confined to a few small special-interest groups on CompuServe or Delphi a few years back, the presence of people online today whose lives are intimately connected to the arts is impossible to measure. As the issues of presenting oneself or one's business to the world at large begin to emerge, we see the impact of artistic judgment and quality take on even greater significance.

My discussion of art will have a definite bias toward visual and technology-based art as these are my primary domains. However, most of the information here can be equally applied toward any number of areas in the arts. There may not yet be as many archives devoted to dance at the moment as there are to visual display, but there are, nonetheless, dancers not only interacting through words on the Net, but dancers whose performances are on the Net. Many of the issues, such as presenting and promoting ones work, are the same. Finally, the nature of the creative process cuts across all boundaries and is, in fact, not exclusive to the arts. The thought processes that created the Internet go beyond rote and routine.