Net.cromancy:
Creating Discursive Space & Functional Sites in Exhibitions of Networked Art
This essay is an excerpt from my Masters thesis, Net.cromancy: Methods for the Revival of Virtual Exhibitions.
Contact me if you are interested in obtaining a copy of the full text.
May 2012
i. virtual graveyards
The vista is looking bleak for the virtual exhibition[1]exhibition [disambiguation] In the context of curatorial practice, an exhibition is not only a public display of artworks, but also a carefully constructed presentation that incorporates interpretive devices such as the show's title, labels and panel texts, curatorial essays, interviews or auxillary programming that function to convey an overarching message, and to frame the works within a particular discourse. . Gone are the days of its novelty—when the combination of those words would garner a raised eyebrow or earn a featured review in an art publication. In our cybernetic society (Nichols par. 3) experiences of the virtual are quotidian, and a generational and ideological shift among net artists has all but dissolved the institutional critique and penchant toward the avant-garde that once typified the genre (Peralta par. 4)[2]This is speaking from a North American perspective and does not adequately address developing nations or regions where access to the Internet is difficult or impossible due to cost or infrastructure.. Accordingly, exhibitions of net art that are solely virtual are losing their appeal to users as innovative aesthetic experiences and to net artists as valuable sociopolitical projects[3]I am using the term "net art" to describe any artwork that is made on and disseminated through a network. The most common form of this today is art accessed through the World Wide Web—just one 'sector' of the larger network we call the Internet. Other forms of net art occur through smartphones, GPS tracking devices, web cams and e-mail.. Instead, they are being abandoned in favour of more traditional and embodied display strategies that utilize a physical venue as the locus of interaction. As a result, the [art]scape [4]The use of the suffix "scape" is an allusion to Arjun Appadurai's theory of the mediascape and four other dimensions of global cultural flow as discussed in his essay, "Disjuncture & Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," (1996). Appadurai illustrates scapes as discursive dimensions that are analogous to landscapes in their organic formations, and in which groups and individual agents 'move'. To extend his idea, I am bracketing the prefixes to suggest that they are relative and encompassed by the larger scape that is the totality of 'movement' through virtual space. of the Internet is increasingly a graveyard of virtual exhibitions—host to broken URLs and obsolete plugins that await potential users where collaborative online projects once 'stood' as nodes of aesthetic engagement [5]In the sense of a critical or committed interaction with art and its respective audience. and cultural expression. Without a revival of the virtual exhibition through curatorial innovation and experimentation, the critical social potential in non-physical, networked aesthetic experiences is doomed to an early grave.
This is not to say, however, that the [land]scape is bereft of net art. As a genre, its rate of production is at its most prolific. But 21st century net artists are of a different mindset than their predecessors when it comes to the means of disseminating their work. It can no longer be assumed that the interests of net artists lie in positioning themselves on the periphery of contemporary art and culture. The anti-canonical philosophy of net.art in the 1990s that sought to circumvent the established acculturation systems of galleries and museums through virtual exhibition practices has essentially vanished [6]net[dot]art indicates a historical period in net art practice that has yet to be concretely defined. Most practitioners and theorists agree on the relative dates of this period occurring between 1995 & 2000. During this time, individuals like Vuk Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, JODI and Olia Lialina became pioneers of Internet art through experimental websites and browser scripts. These works are largely characterized by a lack of traditional formal aesthetic qualities as well as subverted conventions of Internet use through tactics of graphical and navigational malfunction and intervention.. As early as 1997, with the inclusion of a net art section in that year's Documenta, net art pioneers such as Vuk Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting and the duo known as JODI all vocalized disenchantment with the progressively museological treatment of the artform by its curators. Egregious misconceptions were executed in the 1997 Documenta in regards to how the space of the Net was often negated as a conceptually integral premise to the artworks. Instances included storing files of each artwork on local hard-drives rather than linking to their existing URLs, and the documentation of Cosic's selected piece onto a CD-ROM that was made available for purchase. In a post-exhibition interview with Tilman Baumgartel published to Nettime.org, JODI said that they felt their work had been denied its "net-specific status," and that the way in which the works were installed felt dismissive in its office-like qualities (par. 13).
Increasing curatorial efforts to materialize the art, by superimposing qualities of origin and authenticity onto fundamentally distributed works, sparked a debate in the early 2000s amongst net artists and theorists. This discourse focused on the inevitability of the artform's museumification and questioned the merit of continuing to pursue extra-institutional ideals. These sentiments were edified seven years later when the sudden absence of a web art section at the Whitney Biennial [7]This is the terminology used by the Whitney for the artworks they presented in the biennial. However, it is unclear if they used the term correctly in the classification of the works. Technically, web art indicates a piece of networked art that is accessed through the World Wide Web (WWW). However, other forms of networked art use alternative server protocols such as FTP, TCP/IP, UDP and SMS. caused New York Times art critic Ben Sisario to write:
"Internet art may have little direct connection to the dot-com financial bubble, but its reputation has suffered as the Internet itself has lost cachet. Many who work in the Internet art world report a sense of digital exhaustion… There may be lots of Internet art out there, so it cannot be dead. But if it has lost its sense of novelty and excitement, is it really alive?" (par. 5)
Sisario's question is a valid one, as it highlights the importance of social interest and an invested public in the longevity of artistic movements. However, the logic of his interpretation is both consumerist and modernist in its equation of newness to progress and of entertainment to artistic expression. It was a logic that indicated a curatorial formalism had indeed taken hold—one that historicized net art at its best as a heroic period of dissent in the progression of new media art, and at its worst as a trendy blip on the timeline of the art market (Quaranta 11).
Consequently, throughout the last decade the integrity of net art curation has been subject to much scrutiny. Across online forums central to new media [8]I've chosen to strikethrough the "new" of "new media art" to indicate the passage of society into a post-convergent media epoch, and more so that this term is historically specific to a period of artistic experimentation in emergent technologies spanning from the mid 1960s to the early 2000s. Thus, the term "new media art" should not be perpetuated as accurate nomenclature for the contemporary exploration of technology in artistic production. This topic was the focus of the 2005 exhibition The Art Formerly Known as New Media, curated by Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz for the Banff New Media Institute. communities such as Nettime, The Thing and Turbulence, voices in the field have asserted that the institutional influence seen in contemporary net art practice and its exponential presence on the secondary art market have drained it of its dynamism (Lichty par.7). Cosic and Shulgin have even gone as far to say that net art is not just over, it's dead. Others, like Rhizome.org founder Mark Tribe and net artist and curator Olia Lialina have been more nuanced in their critiques, citing the emergence of a paradox. They note that while net art is still very much alive in terms of productivity, the cultivation of a politicized postmodernism—what Hal Foster has called an "anti-aesthetic", once considered essential to its conception, has certainly died (16). In this way, net art has become undead (Tribe in Sisario par. 11)—a manneristic shell of its radical potential (Cosic in Hustic par. 9) [9][disambiguation] I believe that Hustic uses "manneristic" to convey the exaggeration and theatricality of the Mannerist painting period in 16th century Europe. It describes a hollow gesture, or the feigning of appearances..
This precarious status of net art—its figurative undeath—is in turn complicated by other factors that are broader in their scope, and ones that reflect a generational shift within contemporary artists in general. In particular, there is a growing complicity among new media artists in the specularization of their work as well as a complacency of pastiche over thoughtful appropriation (Drucker 44,161). Thus, net art is gradually being pinned down and hollowed-out—chiseled into a determinate genre in a canonical typology and a proverbial victim of technology fetishism. Without the proposal of new curatorial methods that seek to revive and better align the curation and exhibition of net art with its virtual, networked environment it will continue to exist grotesquely—neither here nor there, inconsequential in its undeath. The distributed nature of the network in which net art is produced and virtually enacted presupposes a social and a public dimension that are foundational to the 'work' of art itself. Accordingly, these attributes demand to be equally reflected in the format of its exhibition. To use JODI's expression, the "net-ness" of networked art is compromised when experienced through the physical and conceptual enclosures of the institution. If this axiom goes unrecognized exhibitions of net art risk becoming exhibitions in vain and antithetical to the works.
ii. rise of the alchemists
Given the institutional character of contemporary net art, it would seem that the figure of the curator has been the proverbial undertaker of the artform's experimentalism. However, there are a number of unorthodox display strategies that have emerged in recent years seemingly positioned to dispel this notion. Since 2005, there has been a notable increase in the use of 'hybrid' exhibition models. These models combine virtual and physical exhibition strategies simultaneously, seeking to extend the artworks beyond the intimacy of a PC-to-single-user relationship into the publicized realm of the social. While these efforts are perhaps virtuous in their progressive aspirations, they are often still problematic to the work. From the traveling-net-exhibition-for-hire model used in Michael Takeo's Net:Reality (2006) to the most recent iteration of the Web Biennial, Regeneration .011 (2011) that merged a physical and virtual opening reception, the desire of net art curators to bridge gallery space and virtual space has become apparent. A critical question to be raised however, is what is motivating these curators to create such a bridging effect?
In lieu of the growing number of net artists making work that is more aesthetically driven and approachable to the average gallery-goer, the rise of hybrid exhibition models can simply (and uncritically) be interpreted as a strategic acknowledgement of a more formal aesthetic. Accordingly, an increase in the use of such exhibition models signals a direct response by curators to the primacy of visuality in contemporary net art production. Through simultaneous physical and virtual exhibition, so-called immaterial artworks are anchored and commoditized through their presentation in a material, and materialistic, site of value production that the gallery represents. Still, this reading neglects to take into account influential meta-discourses of democracy and relationality that have been thematically popular in contemporary art and curation since the mid 1990s. These discourses within artistic and curatorial practices are resurging in the heightened proletariat-focused political climate of the global economic downturn, and are helping to raise the profile of new media art as a form of cultural production already incorporating technologies and philosophies of decentralization and distribution. Such discourses highlight that true democracy occurs only through the absence of a foundation or a unified structure, and create a greater conceptual affinity between experiences of distributed types of new media art such as net art and democratic action (Deutsche 272). This has given more cultural currency to net art, and has equally opened up questions regarding its influence and possible role in the construction of a networked public sphere (Geiger par. 30). Looking at the relative success of large-scale tactical media initiatives such as those executed during the Arab Spring, in which virtual, immaterial public formations manifested as very much tangible, physical rallies and demonstrations, the net art community has been left to wonder: are similar congregations possible under the proposition of aesthetic engagement?
In turn, a methodology of curatorial alchemy in net art has come about, wherein conventional, physical terms of the exhibition are expanded through a philosophy of creating a simultaneous physical/virtual experience. The goal of this is to create a phenomenological fusion—a transcendent moment, perhaps—in which the distributed and translocal qualities of virtual art are juxtaposed with the experience of physical congregation and social interaction. In doing so, these exhibitions challenge preconceptions of virtual aesthetic experiences as immaterial and isolated. No longer rendered as an artifact-to-human interaction relegated to a physical exchange between person and personal computer, alchemic net art exhibitions revise this formula of interaction, interpolating it with multiple levels of social interaction and institutional navigation. Social and political processes inherent to networked forms of communication and production become visible in the activities of assembly and conversation that exhibitions encompass.
Strategies of curatorial alchemy are therefore symptomatic of a lacking visibility in experiences of virtual art, where evidence of a public space for social interaction within the nature of the work is often imperceptible to the single user experiencing it through a personal device. While the premise of a virtual exhibition allows for a translocal visitorship, it is rare that the design somehow graphs or measures the presence of other visitors to the site and even rarer that the exhibition interface allows (and subsequently encourages) visitors to directly interact with one another. In contrast, this visibility is easily satisfied in physical exhibitions of so-called plastic arts through the simple sight of other viewers, as well as the interactions between them and the physical boundaries of the space as a homogenizing force. Thus, alchemists in net art curation are looking to emulate this triangulation in the experience of virtual art by (for all intensive purposes) getting multiple bodies around a single computer screen. Strategies within alchemic models like the tandem virtual/physical opening of Regeneration.011 or the advent of Speedshow, a mobile net art exhibition kit developed in 2010 by Aram Bartholl, have both done well under this paradigm, attracting swathes of physical visitors to view net art in each other's presence. But is this sufficient or appropriate to the artform? The physical congregation of users around net art creates the image of a crowd and a literal space for interaction. It is unclear, however, whether this act of congregation actually generates and facilitates interactivity. In what ways do alchemic exhibition models enable and encourage acts of communication and collaboration, either through the interface of the artworks or their virtual environment? How are the strategies of alchemic models addressing the virtuality of net art and activating its exhibition as a site for critical social and aesthetic engagement?
While alchemic exhibition models may help to raise awareness of net art in their physicality, they also promote an ideology of social interaction around the work that is physically determined, and therefore antithetical to the unique properties of the artform. As digital and distributed artworks, their presentation in a physical venue wrongly binds them conceptually and culturally to a finite experience of time and space. This diminishes the social capacity of the virtual exhibition to act as a site for dialogue and exchange, and to become visible through communal use and activity. Instead, as the historical precedent of socialized art experience, the physical exhibition tends to remain the key signifier and interface of interaction for the majority of the viewing public. Perhaps on a subconscious level, but nonetheless within the minds of those viewers, the virtual exhibition is reduced to a form of documentation—functioning only as auxiliary content to the gallery experience in the form of an online archive or a digital catalogue.
Alchemic exhibition models tend to construct a simulation of net art, as exhibition-goers navigate and experience a distributed and decentralized artform through an institutional lexicon. At the same time, the physicality of the gallery works to edify the social dimension of virtuality. The space of the gallery becomes an illustration of a networked experience for gallery-goers. Through the act of physical assembly and interaction within the gallery, the 'image' of a place societally reserved for aesthetic experience is constructed. Gallery-goers begin to conflate the idea of a 'distributed' aesthetic experience that networked art represents with the geographic and ideological centralization of their institutional environment. This conflation produces an antiquated perception of networked art that is materialized and located; one that fails to challenge and destabilize those concepts within the social consciousness. This denies the artworks from their most radical proposition: the distilling of predetermined spaces and times in which participants can engage in aesthetic experiences.
Rather than working to create visibility through alchemic models, net art curators need to devise models that return to a studious and critical engagement with virtuality as an axiom for the exhibition's design and interface. A revival of the virtual exhibition is only possible if curators consider the unique properties of virtual space as a sociological territory—as a "tabulation" in which people and art are deterritorialized
(Deleuze in Negri par. 9).
It is in the act of exhibition that the subjective nature of aesthetic experiences is politicized through the intersubjective construction of operational and discursively determined spaces (Kwon 29). The non-physical terms of virtual exhibitions lend themselves to this discursivity to a greater degree than geographically specific exhibitions, because the 'movements' and expressions of their constituents are mediated through the highly textual, and thus largely linguistic, terms of the digital interface. Each step of the exhibition-experience in net.cromantic exhibitions is therefore a visualized and technologized procedure of reading and writing that again necessitates more than a passive consumption of the artworks. Instead, exhibition-users are required to constantly translate their subjective experience of the works through the terms of the textual and graphic elements present in the exhibition's interface. This concomitance of navigation and translation, which is present in the social codes of physical behaviours in physical exhibitions but foregrounded through the text-based protocols of the interface in virtual exhibitions, more closely aligns the aesthetic experiences of users in a virtual exhibition with the linguistic and discursive nature of publishing artistic content on the Net. In the interest of better understanding the significance and complexities of discourse and discursive space as essential properties of networked art production and communication, net art curators must move beyond visions of alchemy towards visions of futurity and dispersion in their exhibition frameworks and strategies. They must move towards a curatorial methodology evocative of necromancy.
iii. digging
The study of necromancy—often exoticized through images of medieval witchcraft and gypsy voodoo—actually contains many principles that relate to virtuality and disembodied notions of space and communication. It may seem macabre, but applying the metaphor of raising the dead when speaking of net art curation is salient for creating a curatorial methodology that addresses the not-quite-disembodied but surely non-physical experience of navigating and communicating in virtual space. Despite necromantic traditions being quite diverse, they span many ancient civilizations and are surprisingly unified in their philosophical pursuit of a greater, divine knowledge through studious engagement with the immaterial and the imperceptible. Dating back to ancient Greece, necromancers have believed that through a regiment of trance-like experiences it is possible to divorce the soul from the body in order to grasp the limitations of time and space, and essentially to exist liminally between states of life and death. The ultimate goal of this exercise was to establish non-physical pathways of communication—a porous connection and dialogue with 'the other side' that would allow for spiritual growth and eventual divination (Halliday 244).
In a similar fashion, the net art curator should recognize virtuality as an ethereal plane with capacities for generating aesthetic experiences otherwise impossible in physical terms. Accordingly, virtual exhibitions should be understood as primarily experimental endeavors in the definition of a virtual 'aesthetic' and as essential contributions to a branch of knowledge in curation still largely undeveloped. The fluid medium of virtuality presents opportunities for unprecedented and unique forms of communication and interaction to transpire with networked art as a driving force. The capacity for the convergence of not only various forms of media (graphic, photographic, textual, audial, cinematic) but also of communicative procedures and processes inherent to navigating the Internet, enables an overlap and integration of art and action to occur; a relationship that Jacques Rançière has described as a sentence image. In the sentence image, "the clash of heterogeneous elements provides a common measure," by which communities and connections are exhibited, "through a fraternity of metaphors." (55) This clashing effect of which Rançière speaks is also evocative of Benjamin's conception of dialectical montage—an unfamiliar juxtaposition of familiar elements that possesses the "liberating potential to pry art away from ritual and toward the arena of political engagement." (Nichols par. 15) Both of these concepts advance the understanding of image from passive consumption towards activity and a procedure. But the sentence image differs from Benjamin's dialectical montage in that its aesthetic qualities are not exclusive to the visible (Rançière 7). Its montaging consists of a considered unification of seemingly heterogeneous visual and procedural elements in which a noun and a verb assemble to create an operational image. It is the pairing of subject and action enacting image. Traditional conceptions of the image as an object and a stable entity become inextricable within its function and navigation.
If applied to virtual exhibitions, the concept of the sentence image implies that the transcendentalism of aesthetics traditionally relegated to the private, meaning that viewing or 'appreciating' art is experienced internally, is externalized by combining it with the publicized and contingent protocols of navigating and communicating on the Net. This intentional overlapping of art viewing, navigation and communication through virtual means forms the basis of net.cromancy, wherein the exhibition is conceived of and designed as an augmentation of networked art through networked communication and virtual interaction. As an experimental curatorial methodology, net.cromancy strives to generate new knowledge about the aesthetic dimension of virtuality, explored and implemented through integrations of networked communication, interaction and participation into the exhibition-experience.
However, it should not be mistaken that net.cromantic methods are solely technologically driven. Effective net.cromancy requires more than just including opportunities for communication and interaction by incorporating various plugins and widgets into the exhibition's interface. Net.cromancy also presupposes an agonistic framing of those interactions within the curatorial thesis of the exhibition, and a general interrogation of the theory of exhibitions that extends beyond modes of presentation into platforms for exchange, critique and collaboration. The inclusion of a video conferencing option in a virtual exhibition, for example, certainly creates the ability for networked communication and engagement between visitors to occur, but for what reason? How does the manner of interaction inform the experience of the exhibition as whole? A net.cromantic methodology demands that both the design and the interpretive content present something that is at stake to locate the exhibition discursively. Whether conveyed by the artworks or through the process of navigating them, a net.cromantic exhibition should offer a proposition that incites critical dialogue and participation on the part of its visitors. By doing so, net.cromantic models function site-specifically, presenting the artworks as a 'microcosm', or a series of positions within a social and relational matrix (Bourriaud 26).
Although traditional definitions of site-specificity have regarded virtual space as its antithesis, both concepts involve the construction of networks and relational forms that spatialize discourse and otherwise invisible social forces. Just as for centuries practitioners of necromancy—from the ancient Egyptians and Etruscans to modern day occultists—have sought to attain liminality through their work, so too have site-specific artists sought to position their work between recognizable locations in order to elucidate and excavate the hidden structure of their relationships.
A relational conception of the site can be traced back to the 1970s, present in the works of a number of European and American artists practicing institutional critique such as Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher. The performativity of their actions destabilized the conventions of their subject matter, and the works ceased, "to be a noun/object, but a verb/process, provoking the viewers' critical (not just physical) acuity." (Kwon 24) This evocation of the sentence image allowed a discursive dimension of the site to emerge and prevail as the most conceptually vital 'space' of the artwork. Dematerialization and deterritorialization of the site continued in the durational and relational art of the 1990s. Artists like Ritsuko Taho, Gillian Wearing and Christian Phillip Müller created works that were propositions to the viewer, inviting them to take action and become constituents in the formation of a temporary public—an ephemeral but invested group of participants tethered by an event and a discourse.
James Meyer has identified this phenomenon of a participative constituency within site-specific works of the past twenty years as instances of the functional site. Once again, this conception of site goes hand-in-hand with the liminal aspirations of necromancy, wherein 'space' is predicated on the sustained 'between-ness' of communication and exchange. The functional site is thus an essential framework for creating net.cromantic exhibitions in which the site of the exhibition is not experienced as a singularity but as, "an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive filiations and the bodies that move between them." (Meyer 25)
Commenting on Meyer's concept of the functional site, Miwon Kwon has also noted that this mapping is a process parallel to the series of "movements" that occur within electronic spaces such as the Internet, where navigation of content is entirely transitive (29). Meyer's illustration of a continuous series of movements also references Umberto Eco's scenario of the open work, in which the work is not open in the sense of incompleteness, but rather is open as a perpetual process of (re)interpretation that constitutes the meaning of the work itself (2,8). Therefore, the process-driven experience of virtual exhibitions innately lends itself to the formation of functional sites, provided that their conceptual frameworks integrate a temporary public as the catalyst for the realization of that exhibition. An exhibition operating as a functional site must provide some kind of interface for members of the temporary public to directly influence or even determine the exhibition-experience. This is an important point of difference in relation to the alchemic models of net art exhibition discussed earlier, where there is evidence of a temporary public in the form of a physical congregation of individuals interacting, but it is unclear how that public is in fact intended to actualize or direct the outcome of the exhibition. Even in the case of the Speedshow series, where exhibitions of net art 'pop up' in disparate Internet cafés, it could be said that there are instances of the functional site occurring. But, what is the dynamic effect that is produced upon and within the site if there is no direct means to participate in the act of presenting or contextualizing the artworks? The assembly of a physical audience for net art attains visibility, but generates little impact upon the reading of the artworks if elements of the exhibition are not conditional and subject to change. In contrast, the premise of transitive and collective actions in functional sites encourages indeterminacy through participation. The uncertainty of the outcome of the exhibition as an event expresses the highest power of democracy
(Deutsche 273) to manifest "openness" and instances of "revolutionary pedagogics," produced in the aggregate meanings that are collaboratively developed by its usership (Eco 7) [10]usership [disambiguation] The sum of individual acts of usage performed through a particular interface..
New media art curator Joasia Krysia takes up this line of thought in her explanation of software curating as a possible paradigm to reflect the shift from mechanical reproduction to distributed and cybernetic systems in cultural production (8). As new media art increasingly incorporates software philosophy through conceptual integrations of participatory systems and open-source development as well as software programs in its technical executions, Krysia proposes that curatorial methods should facilitate these processes in the exhibition of such works.
The rise of web platforms in the early 2000s re-envisioned the conditions and conceptions of cultural production as an ongoing communal activity, equally expanding the definition of net art to include these communal activities. Platforms such as the software art repository Runme.org or the 8-bit music peer-to-peer community Micromusic.net are prime examples of this era that continue to operate and grow today as functional sites. For nearly ten years, each has been maintained by an invested temporary public—moderated and updated through the collective management and open-source development of their respective usership. In both Runme.org and Micromusic.net the lateral system of file sharing that constitutes the basic function of the platform has been mimicked by its temporary public in its lateral functionality as a discursive site. This mimesis of the software platform by the site's temporary public demonstrates how practical and theoretical aspects of software align with open and decentralized paradigms of cultural authorship (Goriunova & Shulgin 261).
As an experience also constructed through digital and networked technologies, why not apply such a paradigm to virtual exhibitions? And furthermore, why not to those that strive for functionality? The net.cromantic exhibition, as a type of functional site that is already experienced through the vernacular of programs, systems, files and codes, must also be considered for the ways in which it emulates software. As constituted by a temporary public, the functional site of a net.cromantic exhibition is a process and a series of conditional statements—or algorithms, per say. Thus, like an open-source piece of software, the net.cromantic exhibition is never a stable body of actions or participants—its collective identity is continuously shifting in a nomadic narrative (Meyer 32).
As an exhibition that strives also to be a transitively navigated participatory system, the base of the net.cromantic exhibition's usership decentralizes and reorganizes as it repopulates. In turn, the particular interests of the temporary public shift as individual constituents 'come and go' from the exhibition. A net.cromantic exhibition can then be seen as a perpetually evolving and democratic entity. It is an exhibition model that figuratively grows its own internal mechanism for contextual renewal—a collective project folded into the entire experience of the artworks, resulting from and producing it simultaneously.
iv. spellwork
So far, the methodology of net.cromancy incorporates many theories—of the sentence image, of agonistic discourse, of the functional site—but what are the practical elements that will demonstrate and synthesize these ideas? What exactly would such an exhibition model look like?
First, it should be assumed that the net.cromantic exhibition will live on and be navigated through the Net. Under which server protocol the exhibition is accessed will vary. Most often virtual exhibitions take the form of websites. However, it is possible that a net.cromantic exhibition could exist as an app on a smartphone or as a whole program that is downloaded and run on a personal device. In any iteration, content of the exhibition would be experienced through a digitized, graphic interface. The layout of the content would produce a sentence image of networked art and networked communication, and the design of the interface would emulate software by allowing for user input as well as visible effects of that input altering or augmenting the exhibition-experience. This creates the conditions for a perpetually evolving discursive space, indexed through the exhibition. But, how can elements of the interface help to structure this process? How can the design encourage that user input to be channeled into critical engagement, or ensure that the engagement is agonistic?
This question again elicits Krysia's proposition for software curating; specifically how a distribution of production in exhibitions can examine and test the democracy of open-source environments. Through a methodology of distributed authority and cultural labour, software curation looks to reveal how power relations are expressed between curator, artist and audience in the context of network systems (8). Accordingly, interactivity within net.cromantic exhibitions, because it is predicated on a discursive space, should aim to reveal the power relations of such interactions within the exhibition by visualizing an equal 'playing field' within a discourse. Users of the exhibition should have equal access to features of the interface and equal privileges as contributors in a discourse. This leveling creates the potential for a democratic forum, and prevents the formation of hierarchies and cliques within that discourse through automated features of the interface. Instead, the plateauing of discursive space in net.cromantic exhibitions demands that any instances of collaboration or critique be arrived at collectively by a temporary public, and that the members of that public work productively through conflict to establish a community.
However, this ideal can only be accomplished if the discourse is envisioned as one that is not just critical, but a true critique—an immanent and highly subjective dialogue (Massumi 338). This is key to the formulation of the options and protocols available to users in the graphical and navigational interface of the site, because the contestability of the discursive space in the exhibition is a prerequisite for it to become functional and mutable. If there is no instability to the discourse—no sense of immediacy for defense and persuasion necessitated by the subject matter—then there is no force to sustain the interest and engagement of a temporary public within that site.
The most logical art-related activity that can be incorporated into the net.cromantic exhibition that satisfies these requirements is that of an art critique—the integration of virtual critique into virtual exhibition. As the direct subject matter of the critique, the artworks are poised to become visual, conceptual and navigational nodes of a discourse that is inevitably agonistic. The act of critiquing art is decisively an agonistic endeavor due to the subjective and irresolvable nature of experiencing, interpreting and communicating thoughts about art. The intense rhetorical exercise that critique involves in the task of expressing an aesthetic experience requires constituents to assume the possibility of conflicting viewpoints—the elucidation of which is the very point of engaging in critique. The many vantage points upon the artwork and a subsequently deeper and more communal understanding of it, gained through the collage of those perspectives, is the very point of discussing its possible readings and meanings. The subjective nature of critiquing art also drives what cannot be considered ethical concerns in the discourse (e.g., the labeling of particular perceptions of the artwork as right or wrong) into a more socially and culturally governed arena of thought that pivots on an exchange of ideas rather than a censoring. This move from a mode of dialectics into the spectrum of social and cultural variables that produce conditions and preconceptions of viewing art, propels those involved in the critique to engage the alternative perspectives of others in order to better understand and defend their own position in the discourse. In this light, the function of critique is akin to a type of sensor or exploratory operation in which intersubjective blockages, breaking points and fundamental obstacles between participants are identified. Conclusive moments are never sought after—consensus is the myth that agonistic discourse seeks to dispel. Instead, the constraints of intersubjective blockages serve to elucidate and delineate points of difference between experiences, which, "pass together through the generative filter of the enabling frame." (Massumi 340) This shared discursive space of unresolvable differences constitutes a true cultural or artistic exchange and best expresses the agonistic dimension of net.cromancy.
To facilitate this, the technical design and layout of the virtual critique should take the form of a pre-existing scheme for textual exchange that archives user input in a navigable sequence. Thus, the most effective format is one that is already 'indigenous' to the Net, both in terms of graphic design and navigation. A critique facilitated through a blog, message board or chatroom-type application would be ideal in this respect, because they propose the smallest learning curve in terms of the level of media literacy required to use them. The protocols of accessing and using these formats are already familiar to most users such as logins and the use of screennames, posting to comment threads, uploading files and discerning information using timestamps, subject lines and search functions. This presents a smoother transition from the daily networked communication protocols of most users into a contemplative, critical activity. This transition encourages users (on a subconscious level) to renew or reconsider their own relationship to art and partaking in creative endeavours. The familiar virtual environment that the blog, chatroom or message board presents has the potential to empower its users when employed for critique by converging protocols of critically artistic and casual social activity through networked communication. This convergence should also be reflected in the layout, visually reinforced through the sentence image. Users of the site should be able to view the artworks and the critique simultaneously as interrelated and active content in separate frames of a website, or as independent but adjacent windows. Confronted with the montage of interactive and participatory processes such as this, the User is introduced to a number of different signifiers, voices and individual interpretations that then become intertextually linked to the experience of viewing said artworks.
Consequently, the sentence image of the exhibition is no longer a single proposition, but a medium through which continual sentence images are constructed. In its most idyllic manifestation, the net.cromantic exhibition is a perpetual 'art machine', revealing the process of engaging in aesthetic discourse as the veritable 'work' of art. Conforming to user interest and participation, the net.cromantic exhibition could theoretically take on a life of its own—a dramatically public life in its utter distribution. It would become an exhibition of the act of exhibition, constantly reframing its original content through the newly generated content of social interaction, and reformatting its entire mandate contingent upon its temporary public. A particularly compelling possibility in this, of course, is the heightened politicization of the virtual. Depending on the interest of its users, the fully functional work of art could have overt political motivations, becoming an evolving mechanism of tactical media that would address the lag time of collective-action to respond to institutional action—the pitfall of an accelerated 'temporality of democracy' that plagues contemporary society (Hassan par.2). Alternately, the exhibition could amend its function to act as a virtual headquarters for activism, a laboratory for open-source projects, a theatre for performativity in virtual life and so on. Where the expanse of conceivable use for the exhibition as a social and performative, yet productive, act meets the manipulability of digital technologies and networked communication; this is the pinnacle of net.cromancy.
v. divination
The possibility for continuous renewal and eventual evolution in the functional site again evokes necromancy in the quest not only for divine knowledge, but also utter dissolution of the self. Although a mostly allegorical relationship, the guiding principles of futurity, perpetuity and fluidity common in the vernacular of necromancy are also present in the vernacular of new media artists. Net.cromantic exhibitions symbolize a conceptual synthesis of these vocabularies and ideas by the perpetual transformation and reorganization of interests and constituents in the functional site. A successful necromancer seeks liminality in order to become a conduit for communication with the dead, and as a result assumes the position of becoming a medium—a non-physical site in him/herself that is open and perpetually reinvented through the channeling of other voices and actions. Analogously, a successful net.cromancer, in the process of designing and facilitating a net.cromantic exhibition also becomes part of that functional site, working as the primary node from which all sentence images and discursive spaces emanate.
It is in this larger, metaphysical terrain of Art and Exhibition, that the pursuit of net.cromancy questions the role in society associated with the figure of the curator, who in the case of net.cromantic exhibitions must be the catalyst for the orchestration of critical social engagement through virtual means. While individual works of net art are catalysts for individual acts of critical engagement with the work themselves, the orchestration of socialized, communal acts of critical engagement simply cannot be accomplished without curatorial perspective. This is not to say that the specific title of "curator" is necessary to carry out net.cromancy, but rather that the methods undertaken in creating net.cromantic experiences are decidedly curatorial in their nature. And, as such, there are implied civic obligations—to audience, to providing accessible experiences (through technology, through language, etc.) and to creating relevancy by addressing salient social and cultural issues.
In net.cromancy the virtual exhibition has the opportunity to live again, but providing the tools does not equally produce committed curators to pick them up and make something of them. The rationalization of theories and conjectures does not guarantee that change will actually take place. Contemporary net art curation must be committed to experimentalism, and at the same time work harder than ever to consider the ethical implications of cultural authorship. The paradisiacal connotations of open-source are not derived from the complete liberation of authority, but rather the democratically shared responsibilities of maintaining flexible and functional cores that make open-source communities possible (Manovich par. 20). Therefore, the curation of experimental models does not end once the project goes live; it is an ongoing endeavor. The proceedings of those exhibitions need to be analyzed, further theorized, written about and disseminated as social and cultural research contributing to a broader understanding of virtuality in society. Until this attitude is adopted by net art curators, the gallery will continue to serve as the default site of subjective value production, and users will continue to perceive virtual exhibitions as dislocated experiences.
In a recent CBC interview with Nora Young, Mark Jeffrey, owner and key developer of the chatroom environment The Palace, gave a prediction for resurgence in the public desire for real-time networked communication. While there already exists a diverse range of networked modes for public interaction, nearly all—including the most popular of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+— happen in a delayed, flattened time-space. For Jeffrey, the emergence of alternative models that address phenomenological conundrums of networked communication like the 'temporality of democracy' is bound to occur within the next decade. And, while this prediction is certainly encouraging of net.cromancy as an attractive methodology, exactly who is paving the way, and for whom these alternatives are directed is a serious question—one that should occupy the minds of every invested net artist and net art curator. A successful revival of virtual exhibitions, while beneficial to the profile of networked art, equally presents new opportunities for institutionalization and commodification. New curatorial methods, no matter their level of innovation, create commodity in their novelty. In addition, the focus of net.cromantic methods to integrate participatory elements into the exhibition-experience is an appealing 'angle' of human-interest to would-be marketers and curators. As such, new opportunities for the dubious commoditization of the art and the exhibition-experience are created, including the troubling possibility of functional sites or of collective-action itself to become fetishized. The failure to critically consider why and how users are integrated into future virtual exhibition-experiences ignores these caveats, and undermines the possibility in cybernetic society for the emergence of what literary critic Peter Bürger has called 'new praxis' in reference to his theory of the avant-garde—a dissolving of the boundaries between life and artistic activity (101).
Although net.cromancy focuses on the revival of virtual exhibitions specifically, it is not a great conceptual leap to ask: What general experience of networked life cannot incorporate experiences of networked art? This is where the net.cromancer must go, bravely and faithfully. Surely, there are practical and conceptual hazards ahead. No amount of experimentation in art curation will ever produce an answer, per say—such is the nature of art, to provoke further thought and valuable questions. However, the introduction of experimental models for virtual exhibitions is the only way to ascertain whether it is a path worth pursuing, or truly a dead end. Subsequently, a critical perspective of curatorial formalism in virtual exhibitions, gained from the 'near-death experience' of the practice, can only be realized in the conscious effort of its revival. The theoretical and practical strategies outlined here are only one interpretation of how to go about accomplishing this, and thus do not promise a figurative panacea within critical issues of virtual exhibition practice. Yet, one thing is for certain: the dead will remain assuredly so until we as practitioners get our hands dirty, until we dig deeper.
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