Internet art, net art, and networked art in relation Conversations and interviews with curators, artists, directors and academics In the context of thesis research during the academic year 2006-20071 Isabelle Arvers March 18, 2007 – Email questionnaire By Karen Verschooren Introduction Isabelle Arvers is a French new media curator, critic and author, specializing in video and computer games, web animation and digital cinema. She has coordinated ISEA 2000, Paris, and she has curated amongst others Video Cuts 2001 (Centre Pompidou), Gaming Room Villette Numérique 2002 (Paris), and Tour of the Web 2003 (Centre Pompidou), featuring French and international artists. In 2004, she organized a Gameboy music concert and she curated the wireless art event Wifiledefrance for la Region Ile de France. She was the net.art curator for the 2004 Banana RAM festival, Italy. She curated the exhibit Gametime, Experimedia, Melbourne in October 2004 and la Nuit Numérique for the November 2004 Bitfilms Festival in Hambourg, Germany. In an attempt to assess Centre Pompidou’s engagement with Internet art, I based my conclusions in first instance on an analysis of the information available on the Internet. I sent this conclusion to Ms. Arvers for her review, and asked a number of additional questions (cf. infra). My preliminary assessment “Although Centre Pompidou has three Internet artworks in their collection2, its engagement with Internet art until this day plateau-ed at the level of organizing conferences, debates and meetings that highlight the questions which surface in the digital society of the early 21st century. A first series of debates titled Les Plasticiens du Web were initiated on October 20, 2003 and ran to June 15, 2005. Over the course of 1,5 year, every third Thursday of the month, a group of artists were invited to present their work. The presentations and debates would each time culminate in a brief performance.3 A second round of eight debates took place between October 9, 2005 and June 18, 2006 and was devoted entirely to the electronic arts. The meetings explored different facets of the digital world, via discussions and debates on major themes linked to cyber culture and the way in which it nurtures and questions other artistic disciplines. More specifically targeted towards Internet art were the Tour du Monde du Web events organized in 2003 1
The complete records of this investigation titled “.art. Situating Internet Art in the Traditional Institution for Contemporary Art” can be found at http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php 2 In 2002, Herman Asselberghs & Johan Grimonprez donated their website Prends Garde! A jouer au fantôme on le deviant and the same year, Centre Pompidou bought Claude Closky”s Calendrier 2000 and Igor Stromajer”s sm.N-Sprinkling Menstrual Navigator. 3 Centre Pomipidou (2005). Les Plasticiens du Web. Retrieved July 2006 from the World Wide Web: Claude Closky’s Calendrier 2000 and Igor Stromajer’s sm.N-Sprinkling Menstrual Navigator
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