YOU ARE AN ART COLLECTOR: OWNING AND INTERACTING WITH INTERNET ART

Collections Corner | Jaime Meier 

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Photo courtesy of Jaime Meier

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of seeing "Age of You" at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The exhibition is a fantastic dive into our complicated relationship with technology and its inseparable presence in our lives. A quote by Liam Young has continued to haunt me, "Ideology rarely evolves at the pace of our technology. As we turn our gaze towards the machine landscapes, we need to radically embrace our uncomfortable place in a world where we are no longer at its center." As an ever dedicated Musing columnist, I began to ponder the implication of this for collecting.

Traditional art collecting is considered to be different than simply owning art because creating a collection requires a plan for acquisition and an overarching theme. Advice for collecting typically comes down to knowing your taste and purchasing art you like, not just investment pieces. This guidance has been applied to traditional art forms for centuries but has began to be called into question by evolving technology. New software and technological advances have rapidly produced an artistic medium that moves beyond canvas and clay, the machine landscapes of the internet.

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Internet artist, Rafael Rozendaal, displays his web-based works online and in galleries. His art, typically priced at $7,500 has been purchased by private collectors and museums such as the Museum of the Image in Breda and Borusan Collection in Istanbul. Since his works continue to exist on the internet after purchase, anyone with an internet connection is able to view the art an unlimited amount of times. With the art's eternal presence, the collection is no longer at the center of containing the art work, but rather it belongs to the internet itself and the people who utilize its spaces.

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Loren Schmidt and Katie Rose Pipkin are also internet artists who take the ownership of internet art a step further. Their twitter project, @mothgenerator, allows users to tweet a word at them that signals a software generator to create a personalized moth using that word. People are given this personalized artwork that remains on display for the public, creating an intersection of ownership between artist, moth requestor, and the public.

To understand the role of the internet in our lives, we must re-evaluate our definition of collecting. Our ideology about the internet and its ownership are far behind where the internet has taken us. Traditionally, a majority of art collections exist in the shadows and only re-appear for an exhibition or special request.  Someone who possess art is a guardian and the art becomes integrated into a personal canon that expresses interests, desires, and fears. The internet does not allow for its art forms to hide or disappear from sight, instead they become a permanently accessible feature.

Many web-based art forms rely on an interaction to set it a part. Going through a randomly generated art website, such as"My Boyfriend Came Back From War" by Olia Lialina. No one will ever will the exact same webpage nor experience it in the same way, it is not a static art form you can return to again and again for consistency. How can someone own your unique experience? They cannot, this is yours and you get to own it.

As the world continues to criticize, analyze, and relish in the presence of web-based media in our daily lives, one thing becomes clear - we cannot own art the same way we once did. Each person is able to add or refuse art work into their personal collections. I have imbedded 16 links in different letters for you to explore and to aid in the formation of your internet art collection,  are you able to collect them all?