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Recently in Salon Technology

Why I'm still scribbling for a living
When a stock trade cost me my job writing about Silicon Valley, everyone assumed I would join a dot-com and get rich. But I'm a newspaper journalist.
By Chris Nolan
[03/14/00]

Technology: View from the top
The privacy police?
TRUSTe CEO Bob Lewin explains how even sites selling personal data can get the nonprofit's privacy seal of approval.
By Lydia Lee
[03/13/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 31 Results
"Pez Dispens'd" and other couplets in praise of tech gadgets.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[03/11/00]

Column
Their names are legion
The Verisign-Network Solutions deal shows how the scramble for domain-name turf has gone from frenzy to insanity.
By Scott Rosenberg
[03/10/00]

Books
Maybe the Net doesn't change everything
In "The Social Life of Information," John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid send technology futurists back to reexamine their crystal ball.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
[03/09/00]

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"It didn't get picked up by the literary scene in the most positive ways," admits Amerika. To his surprise, he says, "it ended up that the art world found it kind of interesting and attractive as new media art." And, as a result, Amerika picked up some notoriety in the slowly burgeoning digital art world as one of the pioneers of Net art. His online zine Alt-X became a center for experimental online writing and art; and although the National Endowment for the Arts didn't offer to support his work, he picked up a grant from the Australian Art Council. Last June, Amerika produced a project for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis called phon:e:me, an audio soundscape with Shockwave animations that riffs off the concept of phonemes. A few months later, the Whitney Biennial curators approached him; for the show, he will be exhibiting "Grammatron."

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Ironically, only three years after it launched, "Grammatron" feels like a relic. Its relatively simplistic hypertext-and-gifs format recalls the early days of the Web. Says Amerika, "You're becoming obsolete in a flash. How do you show a project created for Netscape 3.0 six years from now?" But, he points out, "Video art had to deal with that too, had a hard time and now it's the trendy art form in all the hip galleries."

These days, Amerika lives a quiet life in Boulder, Colo., playing with a local band and spending his time making art. Amerika is one of the fortunate few to already be making a living off his digital artwork: "It's been surprisingly easy. I'm having to turn a lot of work away now," he says. He's producing three to four pieces a year for collectors, as well as consulting with Web sites looking for conceptual art pieces or content advice.

As he's worked online, he says he's observed a bizarre merging of commercial and non-commercial art and design, making it easier for artists like himself to survive -- and even become famous -- by the merits of their Web sites. "The dot-com mania is more than ever strictly focused on profiteering. All of a sudden the skills you have are more valuable than you ever imagined them to be," he explains.

Survival as a digital artist, he believes, means learning how to play the same game the dot-coms play -- you're competing for attention, after all, with millions of other beautiful, bizarre and utilitarian Web sites, both commercial and noncommercial. "The more attention you get on your site, the more you're branding it, and therefore as an artist you're doing the same thing that Yahoo or Amazon does. The only difference is that you're branding yourself as an artist, not as a company."

Other Net artists are coming to the same conclusion. The infamous Swiss art collective Etoy, in the most obvious example, recently held a public stock offering; shares in their collective have raised over $400,000 and the stock price is rising along with the groups notoriety. @rtmark has a similar scheme: the group puts together "mutual funds" which link "investors" who donate time, skills or money together for anti-corporate pranks; one of the groups' most famous exploits included switching the voice boxes of GI Joe and Barbie dolls sitting on the shelves in toy stores.

These creative schemes are being adopted partly out of necessity. Grants are rare for Net artists, and the traditional artist route of selling commissioned works to collectors and museums is even more daunting. If your Web site is online, free and public (and, therefore, available for anyone to copy at their will) why would someone pay a small fortune to "own" it?

In the first half of this century, the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin argued that mechanically reproducible art like photography gets divorced from its "aura," and devalued by the art-seeking public. On the Net, this is played out to the extreme -- not only is the work reproducible, but anyone with a browser and a little Net know-how can make a perfect copy of their own.

Some artists, like Amerika, are instead attempting to produce stand-alone digital works that can be sold to collectors. Biennial artist Lew Baldwin, creator of the site Redsmoke is producing CD-ROMs of his work, which he hopes to sell at the exhibition. It's not a particularly lucrative way to make money, he admits, so he's also pondering other strategies: selling molded-plastic objects, for example, that interact with a computer via infrared signals and control images on the screen, or even selling the computers that he's used to work on as art pieces in their own right. "I could just do some shit on it and then auction it off somewhere. Sell the hard drive," he laughs, only semi-serious.

Next page | I never really thought of it as art, says one Whitney exhibitor