________________________________________________________________________________ A UK based artist has recently launched a series of sites with domain names remarkably similar to those of some well known London galleries. This interview was carried out by email in the second week of June, just after the launch of the sites, which are as follows, mf SERVICE 2000 29 Uncommissioned Web Sites Available Now From the Following Locations:- http://www.saatchigallery.org.uk http://www.thelissongallery.co.uk http://www.serpentinegallery.org.uk http://www.richardsalmon.co.uk http://www.gimpelfils.co.uk http://www.anthonyreynolds.co.uk http://www.anthonydoffay.co.uk http://www.annelyjuda.co.uk http://www.laurentdelaye.co.uk http://www.stephenfriedman.co.uk http://www.waddingtongalleries.org.uk http://www.michaelhue-williams.co.uk http://www.victoriamiro.co.uk http://www.sadiecoles.co.uk http://www.gagosian.co.uk http://www.whitecube.org.uk http://www.turnerprize.org.uk http://www.thenationalgallery.org.uk http://www.haywardgallery.org.uk http://www.tategallery.org.uk http://www.halesgallery.co.uk http://www.mattsgallery.org.uk http://www.interimart.co.uk http://www.anthonywilkinson.co.uk http://www.rhodesmann.co.uk http://www.vilmagold.co.uk http://www.luxgallery.org.uk http://www.lauregenillard.co.uk http://www.paulstolper.co.uk >>You've effectively constructed a 'false' web ring of some of the major private and publicly funded galleries in London. Do you expect them to notice? How did you choose which galleries to target? Is there any inter-relationship between them? >Well, I suppose its possible they'll notice - I mean eventually. When I first launched the sites (quietly) two weeks ago I was afraid it would all go nuclear very quickly and the sites wouldn't get much of a life. But I suspect that same lack of interest in the web that has meant galleries havent bothered to register the variants on their own names has also afforded the project a certain amount of protection. At one level they're just not that interested or informed about this emergent culture. Its more true of the commerial that the public spaces. But it tells you something about the way they are looking at the web and not really getting it. In terms of the galleries I chose to participate - well it was just a matter of availability and my credit card limit. The letters ICA can stand for many things and as a result there were no ICA domains left. So hence, theres no ICA site in the piece. The others, it was pretty much on the basis that they occured to me. If they were available, I registered them. In terms of the relationship to one another - its actually geographical, its a route that might be taken by someone wandering round from gallery to gallery. When I was building the sites I started at Euston Station, imagined myself going over the Saatchi Gallery and progressed round from there. Its a trudge round some London galleries. >>The sites on these domains have what must be some of the crappest design going. There's untold animated gifs of opening and closing envelopes, jumping bunnies, rainbow coloured horizontal rules, and the music... did I clock Tubular Bells against a background of dolphins for the Serpentine Gallery? Tasteful. Can you shame people into submission? >Actually the Serpentine has been given a cruel dose of Jean Michel Jarre. (the famous bit from Oxygen) I don't know if I want to shame the galleries. Just to make them aware of something. >>Christ, the granddaddy of all the bad love parade techno. painful. Do you consider that producing such top artwork on sites whose domains are remarkably similar to those of well- known galleries is a way of adding value to what is otherwise a straight act of domain squatting? Presumably if the galleries want to 'buy their names' back, they'll not just be coughing up for that, but for a bona fide piece of web-art? >I really dont consider this cybersquatting. It's outreach. It's an outreach project targetted at galleries to help them understand the significance of the internet as a communicative space. Hence the top artwork. The commercial galleries haven't really engaged with the web because they've failed to see how the web impacts on their business. And to an extent its also true of the public spaces. I was really suprised that the Tate hadnt registered Tategallery in the org.uk domain. I actually had about 60 hits on the name in the week before I even posted anything up. Just people typing in the name on the assumption that was where the site would be. People who wanted to find out about the Tate. I suppose the tate rebrand as TATE and then forget that everyone else in the country, the punters, think of them at 'The Tate Gallery'. That such a mismatch should occur between a gallery and its public - that it wouldn't occur to them to register that and other variants. It tells you something about how web-awareness stands in a gallery context as opposed to a political or commercial context. Except of course for the commercial gallery context - where there's even less of an engagement with the web. Even very developed sites are little more than catalogues. The Lisson has a go at something a bit more adventurous but I mean, have you been to http://www.doffay.com lately? The other thing that differentiates this project from cyber- squatting it that whilst all the sites are for sale the domain names themselves aren't. At the end of the piece I intend to give them to the galleries I've targeted. Its what they get to take home for participating. It really is an outreach project, on behalf of the internet. >>OK, so why the particular aesthetic for the sites? This is a level of web-design only often acheivable by scientists doing side-line home-pages for their other interests in speculative fiction and saddle sniffing. Could you not have done someting less knowingly dumb with the material on the domains if the precise point is to make this particular audience aware of the potential of this something? >Well, I suppose on one level it has to be this awful to really make that point clear. The point being - look, pay attention to the culture you are in because if you don't then something this awful can happen. Its a cautionary tale in that respect. A grey hat stategy, I suppose. Also I do have a great affection for low-fi html, for all the gifs and midi files on those physic students' home pages. It must be the digital naive or something but I loves its garishness. The idea that galleries, whose public image is so important to them in the way it aids them construct value around art objects, should have these crappy sites is I guess a way creating a somewhat entertaining contradiction. For those in the know who are directed to these sites by word of mouth its probably just that. But, of course there is another audience for this work. The 'genuine' surfers who reach my sites through search engines or just tapping in the address on the off-chance. And I'm sure for them the lo-fi design functions in a very different way - something approaching shocked disbelief. I've had a few complaints from art historians who, unaware of the status of the sites, complain that the quality of the design reflects very badly on the galley and on London. >>Do you hope this this functions in some arse-about-face way to land you a dealer? >No, I'll get that from my SFMOMA show. And the email drawings I'm doing next. Much more floggable than a gallery education project. >>Nice that an art career is still that predicatable... >I wish. >>How can you help people to find your sites, rather than the more boring ones that some of the galleries have already got online? >oh, check out alta vista or compuserve for names like Anthony Doffay, Sadie Coles or Saatchi Gallery. In a number of cases my sites score more highly than the official ones. Thus whilst I've had a fair bit of traffic from people getting emailouts about the project - I've also had a lot of hits from people using search engines. And since its a hermetic ring - once people are in....they can just surf on. >>Some of your previous work has been in part about applying art methodologies to the web - ie: the drawings of sites, the limited edition download, which in many ways revealed the procedural awkwardness of these approaches have in a networked context. This time you've switched it around - why? Or what relationships to the two modes of work have? >I take a lot of pleasure in bouncing things between online and offline modes - and you're right that this is in large part to do with exploring what happens if things are transferred or translated in different ways. Making limited editioned digital works or hand drawing web sites onto glass. But I'm not sure this project is such a reversal of these earlier stategies, except in that rather than using the net as a source of material it involves the creation of new content. Underlying all of this is an interest in the operative and presentational structures of the web and how it gets used by individuals and organisations. Thus when it comes to making a piece about domain name registration I can only think of ways in which I can pitch into that process. The sites are a lot of fun but in terms of what it tells you about how the web is being used its the fact of registering very well known gallery names that carries, if you like, the conceptual weight of the piece. It seems like a reversal - because its online not offline - but actually its just the most sensible mode for exploring the possiblitlities offered by the dns free for all we live in, >>How do you understand this work in relation to material by say, Luther Blisset, (the faking of the artist 'Harry Kipper') or by 1001010011.org (the invention of 'Darko Maver') and other hoaxes produced more internally to the art world? Following from these projects, it seems you're moving in a more gentle, as you say, 'educative' direction? >It depends on the audience and how they come to the work. The audience reading this, if they choose to look at the piece will read it as an art project. A web surfer who follows a badly formed link from artdaily.com (and there is one) will experience my serpentine gallery site as a hoax. Depending on who you are the work will appear very differently. >>Perhaps the way to pull gallerists along behind you is rather by producing something that generates the debris they require to feed on as an after effect of its own activity? >It's funny you should say that. One thing I didn't plan when I started this project was just how much extra email I was going to recieve. Every email address within the 30 or so gallery domains points to my private mailbox and I've had about 50 emails from people trying to contact the galleries. In some cases this is people who have made an assumption about an email address - or just added .uk to a .org address. In other cases its people whove followed email links off the actual sites. I'm turing them into a series of large pencil drawings - text translations of the actual emails. So for example one text drawing says "THE EMAIL FROM THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR ARTS AND CULTURE TO THE SAATCHI GALLERY ASKING ABOUT THE REPRINT RIGHTS FOR FIVE IMAGES FROM 'SENSATION'" whilst another reads "THE EMAIL FROM THE JOURNALIST AT THE NEW STATESMEN TO THE WOMAN AT THE SERPENTINE ASKING IF SMOKING IS PERMITTED ON THE PATIO". Little vignettes of art and life. I think they'll be all the nicer because people will probably be aware that I was never supposed to receive them. >>Perhaps the restrained and ironic nature of the sites you have put up under these names would not achieve the effects you seek so much as might the production of intense and vivid network cultures (which may or may not correspond at various moments with art modalitities) >I wonder. It would be fantastic to see galleries actually using their sites for cultural - rather than straight ecommerce - purposes. How much richer many of the official sites would be if they were engaging with those possibilites. In this instance, however, I probably feel my job is to get them looking at the web as a site that can have significance. Rather than be insignificant. And I note that over the last three days my sites have been getting hits from staff at the National Gallery, Royal Festival Hall, White Cube as well as the company that handle the south bank centres web presence. So maybe that process has already begun..... # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org