The web was the answer to all that. Outside of the tired discourse surrounding the so-called high-art hierarchy’s internal critique of the white-walled gallery and beyond the bind of the printed book, web art can fit to a tee the poststructuralist criteria. If one wants it to, web art can “use theories of language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions to understand existing power relations and to identify areas and strategies for change.”3 For the installation artist’s conception of the relationships between discreet elements with in a space, for the collage artist’s lust for the hybrid, for the writer’s quest for the potential for the presentation of the non-linear narrative– the web provides the ultimate terrain.
The insurgence of visual artists into the digital domain harkens back to a number of other moments of nexus between art history and socio-political strategies utilized by artists in order to reach The Public. Kathe Kollowitz used drawing and printmaking to mass-produce antiwar posters. During the height of the Russian avant-garde, “The book itself was revolutionized; this traditional educational tool was ‘torn in separate pages, enlarged a hundred-fold, colored for greater intensity, and brought into the street as a poster… meant for people who would stand up quite close and read it over and make sense of it.”4 This description closely resembles the transition I made from the bookwork to the web. It also raises, however, the sticky issues of public access and techno-elitism. Granted, I made my first website at The Banff Centre for the Arts5 in ideal working conditions, but for years before and since, I operated with no computer whatsoever. Before I bought a machine of my own my affair with ‘my mistress the computer’ was an adulterous one, and non-monogamous– stolen moments with some girl’s scanner, another man’s printer, an afternoon in the empty apartment of a friend, away from prying eyes.
Learning HTML to create art work has had the unexpected side effect of giving me a marketable skill. It finally became possible to exchange favours, as it were. HTML is, in effect, the easiest was to crack into any so-called techno-elite, although, like all good things, it leads to harder stuff. There is a regenerative effect with HTML tied up in its reproducibility. Copy and Paste, and this time, not just the images but also the glue that holds them together. Not that I’m a stealer and a cheat, but being able to View Source and see how other people were doing things gave me the perfect Petrie-dish environment in which to let this work mutate, multiply and grow.
Over the past 10 years I have worked with the ever-expanding Internet, exploring in particular the web’s broad potential for interactivity, non-linear narrative and the integration of image and text. But during that time I have had to make a living. To this end I have undertaken an undercover operation or two, venturing deep into the technological inner-workings of Corporate America. I can safely say that nothing in my art school education could have prepared me for the life of the corporate webmaster and beyond the firewall, into the surreal realm of systems-management on a multinational scale. Apparently the tangled web of hypertextuality knows no bounds.
Sometimes I wonder if the lure of reproduction has taken me too far. I worry about being responsible for such large amounts of data– data that might get stolen, data that might mutate or disappear at anytime. Every now and then when I am doing server backups before migrating a new project database from a development server to a newly reconfigured test environment, I try to map out certain relationships. In a post-structuralist nightmare, I realize that there is no way that I could reproduce this massive mess on paper. I have flashbacks to those early days when I was courting the photocopier. Whatever I am doing I stop and write an extra copy to an external tape drive. Just in case.

Footnotes:

1George P. Landow, “What’s a critic to Do?: Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext”, essay in Hyper/ Text/ Theory, George P. Landow, editor; Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pg. 1.
2Helen Chadwick, Enfleshings, London, 1989. Someone borrowed this book and never returned it to me. I don’t know the publisher or the page number. All I have left is this quotation.
3Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Blackwell, 1987, page 40.
4Irena Zantovska Murray, “Affirming the New: Art and architecture in Soviet Avant-Garde Publicaations, 1918-1932”, catalog essay for the exhibit: “Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde Publications -1917-1935” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 19 June to 8 September, 1991.
5“Fishes & Flying Things”, J. R. Carpenter: www.luckysoap.com/butterflies/parasite.html

Pages: 1 2