We have looked at the people who make and appreciate art. We have also explored some of the kinds of art found on the Internet. An important area of interest that bridges the gap between making and appreciating art is the critical evaluation of art.
I have found that one of the most challenging areas in the brave new world of the Net is any type of rational or critical evaluation. When I performed scientific research in a previous stage of my life, it was a fair guess that through the use of abstracts combined with diligence and scholarly analysis, one could come reasonably close to what one might call an educated theory about some issue. In the sciences, it is necessary to take the next step of proposing a hypothesis and then setting out to show that empirical cases where your hypotheses are contradicted are extremely rare, if not nonexistent. The humanities and the arts have equally stringent techniques for understanding and determining the critical or cultural validity of a work, although the process uses comparative reason rather than mathematics. On the Internet, even with high speed and high sophistication tools, it is difficult to assign a set of critical values to the information received. If I search, for example, a variety of online databases for causes of the Russian Revolution or even the cause of a thunderstorm, I have no way of determining if my search exhausted what is on the network in these areas or if the material retrieved has "true" validity.
Evaluating the arts is equally challenging. I will leave the issue of good art/bad art to others. What works are presented online. How they persist is, for the moment, based on individual initiative combined with either the willingness of an access system to devote space to what the artist is doing or by the artist paying for disk space. The most basic form of relatively nonjudgmental art critique or curation begins with the activity of cataloguing. I have not yet found any source on the network that attempts to organize and categorize styles of art work and types of media accessible throughout the Internet. This field is in its infancy. There are some galleries and even some museums, notably Reiff II (http://www.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Reiff2), that have repositories that accept images and proposals for consideration. The evaluation in this case is performed by the museum's curatorial staff. E-zines are online—theyfeature professional critique and news groups where popular critical dialogue takes place.
Every medium has its critics and the world of online business, pleasure, research, and culture has not escaped the critic's eye. In fact, the very public and shared nature of events, tools, and media on the Internet make it difficult for any well used tool or heavily visited site not to become a subject in and of itself for discussion, praise, or occasional ridicule. System administrators can be targets in much the same way our political leaders are lambasted and lampooned. Entire groups have formed around either appreciation, such as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan groups or deprecation, such as the Jihad Against Barney. Beyond the simple act of expressing one's momentary views about a system's service or a software's performance, there is an important contribution from the critic's corner. We are not only given some order and a preliminary filtering for our tastes, but some of the aspects that drive the creative process are sometimes revealed, and deeper questions about purposefulness, methodology, and ideology are raised.
Criticism almost always has a political stance beneath its surface. One of the more fascinating aspects of the Internet is the fact that we have a rather large and not so homogeneous grouping that extends well beyond physical and cultural boundaries getting by in a rather remarkable state of harmony. There is everything on the network from punk rock to philosophy. There are Christian groups, Islamic groups, Jewish groups, and so on. In my experience, the level of conflict is well below the expected norm, where all of these groups are physically as close as Cyberspace makes them appear to be. The explanation, I think, lies in the shared adventure of exploring and interacting on the Net and the protective layers of virtual space. Further, the mechanics of the multiuser environment make our interactions nondestructive to each other's virtual territory, and often we are able to enter a dialogue or some other form of contact within the safety of our own personal framework of time.
Earlier, I offered four major groupings in the online arts community, and I referred to the third as all of us, or the audience. We are the end users. As the era of interactivity emerges, we are the players as well. Interactive artists refer to participant—viewers or audience—participants. Now, not only do we, as an audience, influence the work by our paying attention to it, but further by acting upon it. It is an unusual predicament for many people. Often upon viewing a work of art, especially in the presence of others, we feel the need to understand or put a label on our experience. I have been to countless exhibitions where people attempted to express what they saw in an abstract work of art. Sometimes, however, the artist does not have a concrete figurative image hidden or contained in the work. This type of art forces the audience to reach deeper within for a less concrete and more emotional or spiritual, and sometimes even physical, reaction.
The responsibility of the audience in an interactive work can go beyond this internal experience. There are works that really do very little until a viewer-participant becomes more fully engaged. It is a little bit like that first time you go online on a UNIX system, and you have a blank screen with a sole prompt waiting for your input. Just as the creative process of the artist sometimes does not begin to flow until there is the direct working and manipulation of substance, a truly interactive work of art will derive its shape and ultimately its meaning as a result of user participation. The point is to enjoy and learn from the interaction. Whether we are discussing an esoteric virtual art environment or a presentation selling a new car, how the audience experiences the work and how the work then responds to the audience's actions will determine its ultimate success.
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