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Introduction
The research below humbly represents many, many hours spent on the internet over the course of many, many years. I’ve paused over the last few months, on this “online research editorship” as it were, to jot down my most prized surf flotsam, often harkening back to moments when I was first discovering internet art and new media. While some of these are new finds, such as Lean In’s stock photography database or the web-based Museum of Post Digital Cultures, others entries, such as the 1993 piece jodi.org or Harm van den Dorpel’s Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others, are well-known to those familiar with new media art history, but perhaps not to the more mainstream audience that Opening Times seeks to address.
Lean In Collection
Getty Images and LeanIn.org
I never thought this day would come: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg responds to the cringeworthy representations of women in stock photography (also see Women Laughing Alone with Salad http://womenlaughingalonewithsalad.tumblr.com/) and commissions her own series of stock photos depicting women via her philanthropic organization Lean In. While the Lean In stock photos improve characterizations of women to some extent, Michael Connor of Rhizome has written a balanced critique of the project, noting how class privilege has replaced sexism in the Lean In series. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/feb/11/getty-images-still-kinda-sexist/
1995 questionnaire on feminist practices
October Magazine
http://otdac.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/OT-OCTOBER-1995-feminist-response.pdf
This questionnaire was published by MIT Press journal October in 1995, so it doesn’t have the most direct relationship to new media art, however, given the recent renewed interest in feminist practices, I think it’s important to look back twenty years to see how far we’ve come. Unfortunately, many of the concerns women in the art world had in ’95—being essentialized as “bad” outsiders or “good girls,” being elided in group exhibitions, etc.—persist today. (Evidencing such, another fantastic resource I recently discovered, Gallery Tally, tracks the number of men and women represented by contemporary art galleries.) Be sure to check out Liz Kotz’s response. http://gallerytally.tumblr.com/
Archive of Polish film and video
Museum of Modern Art Warsaw
http://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka/artysci
This online archive of Polish film and video art should be a watermark for all museum website best practices. It makes available a litany of important full works mostly unseen by Western artists and curators. Be sure to check out the archive of KwieKulik, about whom I wrote a feature for the Winter 2014 issue of Spike Art Quarterly. (http://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka/praca/kwiekulik-gra-na-wzgorzu-morela-akcja-grupowa)
Artist website
Lutz Bacher
http://lutzbacher.com/
Bacher’s website is a somewhat cerebral, endlessly fascinating stream of collaged videos, self-leaked emails, and candid photography (my favorite is the pregnant mannequin caught in the trunk of a parked station wagon).
Artist website
Cynthia Plaster Caster
http://cynthiaplastercaster.com
Plaster Caster’s hilarious website needs no description.
Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others
Harm van den Dorpel
http://etherealself.comhttp://www.etherealothers.com
Whenever I introduce a colleague, friend, or relative to the conceptual merits of internet art, I show them these two pieces by Harm van den Dorpel. While “Ethereal Self” was launched in 2009, and quickly became viral within internet art and surf club communities and even in non-art contexts, it’s “Ethereal Others” that completes this most mind-blowingly creepy aesthetic experience. The first site offers a glimpse of one’s splintered visage via enacting their webcam functionality, and the second archives all visitors to “Ethereal Self,” with or without their knowledge. The two sites working together provide an understated take on vanity and internet privacy.
Jodi.org
Jodi
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
Jodi.org (1993) is one of the most archetypal works of net.art, and one that helped me understand the importance and scope of the genre many years later when I first encountered it in the mid-naughts. I won’t get into a heady analysis of the piece (check out Mark Tribe’s analysis here https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Jodi/ if you’re curious), but only tell newcomers to view the source code (Option-Command-U) to understand the method behind the madness of the garbled green-and-black text.
My delicious archive
Archive
https://delicious.com/karenarchey
This is kind of embarrassing, and I stopped updating it in 2012, but if you’re hankering for more links and outdated web platforms, here you go!
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
Dragan Espenschied & Olia Lialina
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s archive of Geocities websites that had been taken offline by Yahoo! in 2009. The title “One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age” refers to the size (one terabyte) of their Geocities archive (representative of the “Kilobyte age,” when bandwidth was measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes). With this project, Lialina and Espenschied have saved the variably banal, dark, or awkward years of Web 1.0.
Online Museum
Museum of Post Digital Cultures
http://www.postdigitalcultures.ch/
This online “museum” was borne out of a symposium on post-digital cultures taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland in December 2013. It contains a collection of links, texts, and artworks, videos, etc., that are “donated” by friends of the museum. The collection is then expanded and rearranged by visiting curators, and is a great resource for discovering—or rediscovering—everything new media.