The Internet as an Art Medium

Artists find it hard to resist any new medium. Even the most traditional painter can become interested and even quite enthused over a new kind of paint—as was the case when acrylics were introduced. Artists have been involved with the capabilities and technologies of computers ever since this medium became accessible. Many of the oldest SIGs on the earliest online systems are art interest groups. Sound artists use MIDI. Video artists edit on computers. Special effects on stage are computer controlled. The communications media have also been extensively exploited. An interesting precursor to the interactive era was video artist Nam Jun Paik's New Years' Eve piece in the 1980's. 24 locations around the earth separated by an hour's time zone difference and communicated real-time via interactive uplinked video. Internet based art has been initiated, or rather instigated, by people whose fields are not generally art. John Romkey's "Internet Toaster," driven by its two Internet based commands "push" and "pop" (which are assembler program instructions) has spawned a genre of Internetic art. A work that which went online in June 1994, "The File Room" (http://fileroom.aaup.uic.edu/FileRoom/documents/homepage.html) uses the Web to connect to and examine censored works of art in files created and stored by contributors in several countries throughout the world.

In the fall of 1994, The Electronic Cafe finds its U.S. home at New York's Kitchen (kitchen@panix.com), a venerable performance art and multimedia exhibition space that has survived since the early 1970's. The New York strong site, as it is called, joins several other cities around the world to create a setting where artists around the world can create and share interactive multidisciplined works. A dancer in California, for example, may perform in real-time with a musician in Austria. Cyber-culture blossoms here as local patrons of the cafe have access to the teleconferencing systems as well. Countless virtual pubs and cyber-collectives exist throughout the world where users meet to discuss and collaborate.