THE INTERNET: AN ART GALLERY WITH 25 MILLION POTENTIAL VIEWERS

October 26, 1993

Note: This report was written to address art faculty at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1993. It is being shown here for historical interest. Note that even the title is woefully out of date given the ubiquity of the Internet and the Web today.

The following is a description of an experimental electronic art show I created in the fall of 1993. Being both a visual artist and a physicist who works intensively with computers, this show was a bridge between two very different parts of my life. The results were quite surprising; enough so, I thought, to warrant communication to others, especially artists who might otherwise be unfamiliar with the technology I exploited to get my art seen by thousands of people, in over thirty countries throughout the world.

In the last two years I have worked generally in a small format, painting, drawing, and making prints. This coincidentally matched the size of digital image scanners quite well. Using a scanner on a NeXT computer, I obtained a digital library of twenty or so images of my recent work. The scans were high in quality, like video images. Although some of the surface, scale and color aspects of the work were slightly diminished, the work looked good enough to show. The task was then to display these images to interested people using a computer network known as Internet.

The Internet is a collection of computer networks which allows about 1 million computers (as of 1993) to share information. The information can be in the form of written text, scientific data, computer programs, even sound and images. This technology allows, for example, scientists to collaborate while writing software, to compare notes, and share data, with very little or no wait during the transmission of the information. Though I had seen Internet being used for transfer of art images, I hadn't seen individuals present their own high-quality art in an appealing manner, and wanted to try doing just that. The hope was to create a sort of "electronic gallery" which would bypass the "real" gallery scene completely, while reaching a potentially huge and diverse audience: the current guess is that there are about 25 million individuals connected to the Internet. It is noteworthy that the Internet *doubles* in activity roughly every five months, and is the precursor to the Clinton Administration's much-touted "information superhighway."

Based on a scientific workstation computer in the UW-Madison Physics Department, I set up the software to allow other people on Internet access to my image files. One simple program, a "standard" on Internet, was FTP (File Transfer Protocol). This simply allowed users on Internet to copy files from my machine to theirs, much like files are copied from one disk to another on a given computer. So people could simply copy the files I created with the scanner, and view the images on their computer, assuming they had the software to view pictures with.

Because FTP is somewhat unwieldy to use, I also set up the program called Gopher, from the University of Minnesota. Gopher allows people to look at information all over the Internet, very easily and with little or no computer skill. Basically, someone using Gopher would connect to my machine, see a list of titles of artworks (e.g. "The Millenium, lithograph"), and, upon selecting a title, would see the appropriate work appear on their computer screen. Theoretically, the procedure would be the same regardless of whether the viewer was in the Physics building in Madison, or somewhere in Singapore.

Getting Gopher to work was a question of getting the software from Minnesota over Internet, installing it, and organizing my files for Gopher users. In addition to the image files I added text files describing each work briefly, a copyright notice, an artists' statement, and a policy for sale of the original artworks. People would then be free to read my blurbs or just look at the images.

Once I had the artwork scanned into image files, and I had the software set up to make my "show," I needed to let people on Internet know about it. For this I used USENET news (or just net news). Net news is a service on Internet that allows people to write electronic articles and "post" them publicly so that all Internet users can read them. Net news is organized into hundreds of "newsgroups," each treating a different topic. Example newsgroups are sci.physics, rec.arts.fine, and alt.sex. I titled my show "Strange Interactions" and posted announcements to rec.arts.fine, comp.infosystems.gopher, misc.forsale, and alt.pictures.binaries.d. The announcement briefly described the artwork and how to view it.

In addition to the announcements on net news, I "registered" my computer with other computers connected by Gopher, so that people looking around in "Gopherspace" would run across my art show; also, people who performed electronic searches on words such as "fine art" or "strange interactions" would uncover my show. Finally, I sent electronic mail messages ("e-mail") announcing "Strange Interactions" to my friends, family and colleagues on Internet.

The Gopher software I installed kept a running log of network connections to my computer. Within minutes of posting my announcement for "Strange Interactions," I could see entries appearing in the log indicating that individuals were looking at my images. The log showed the time of the network transfer, the name of the computer getting the image, and the title of the artwork viewed. The computer name generally indicated the orgainization (i.e., university or company) and country of the person viewing the artwork. For example, my machine name amanda.physics.wisc.edu indicates a computer in the Physics Department of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, USA. In the first 24 hours I had people from 19 countries view my artwork. In the first week of "Strange Interactions" I had nearly 1000 people look the most popular piece, "The Lovers." During peak hours I could see several connections a minute, almost like standing near the doorway of a gallery and seeing people come in. Several people wrote me "electronic mail" messages praising my show concept, my artwork and encouraging me to make more work available. One person in Scotland asked for permission to reproduce one work for a publication, which he sent me a copy of. After about a month, nearly 2000 people had looked at "The Lovers" (no doubt popular because of the title-- unlike a conventional gallery, viewers of Strange Interactions would encounter the title of the work before the image). By that time people from a total of 35 countries (nearly every country on Internet) had at least glanced at my show. Needless to say, I was surprised and extremely pleased by the reaction to my first solo art exhibit.

There were also some snags. Originally, I billed the artwork "for sale" and posted prices for the work. This brought a reprimand from MACC, the UW Computing Center which administers the UW Internet connections. Apparently it's not ok to do this at UW-Madison, although I have seen quasi-commercial uses of Internet before. The conflict was solved when I removed references to sales from the documentation for the show. In addition, the question of copyright bothered me a bit. In order to create my show, I had to allow the copying of my images (that's how they are sent to other computers). I put a copyright notice in the show files, giving permission to copy the images for personal use, but not for commercial profit. Even so, it's fair to say that I lost some degree of control over my images. My feeling is that this has been offset by the thrill of getting my work seen in this way.

I feel there are several conclusions to be drawn from this show. The first is that the Internet can be used to get artwork seen in a totally new way. Were a University or public-access "Internet Art Gallery" to be set up, students, faculty, visiting artists and museums could display and disseminate their 2-d work to a rapidly growing audience. Though commercial use of the Internet is frowned upon, artists could at least achieve the goal of being seen, getting comments and soliciting inquiries about their work. It should be pointed out that while "Strange Interactions" was set up on a high-powered scientific workstation, the more advanced PCs or Macintosh computers should also be up to the task.

Another noteworthy aspect is that "Strange Interactions" utilized little of the computer's capacity for interactive, real-time, multimedia art. Computers hooked to networks provide a medium of expression that has barely been touched. Current trends in Internet software are already embracing the multimedia aspect (World Wide Web, Mosaic). Similarly, interactive, real-time fantasy simulations (MUDs) exist which allow people to play role-playing games with others far away from each other. The possibilities for performance art are endless. It is not hard to imagine dynamic, collaborative, interactive art projects on a global scale, combining still images, video, audio, and text with a world-wide set of participants and observers. Artists need to keep abreast of this technology if only because of the exciting creative possibilities of the new medium.

I would think that the UW Art Department, the Department of Art History, and the Elvehjem museum would take interest in the implications of this show. For example, the Elvehjem museum could put either the whole or a subset (say, Japanese prints) of its collection on CD-ROM, put it on a computer in the museum for the locals to view the collection with, and hook it up to Internet to allow other schools and museums to view the images. The Art Department could do the same with faculty and student work, and could pioneer explorations of the aesthetic potential of the technology discussed above. With a decent high-end personal computer, video camera, video capture card, CD-ROM, spacious disk drive and ethernet (network) card, along with some expertise, one could probe some of these exciting possibilities, and it could probably be done for under $15k+personnel costs. It should be noted that networking cables exist in most UW buildings, including Humanities.

If there are further questions (or new ideas!) about this concept, I can be reached at any of my addresses.