Rhizome.org. (Voiceover).

GLORIA SUTTON is in the Ph.D. program of the Department of Art History at UCLA and has been on the Board of Directors of Rhizome.org since 1998.

If the discourse on new media art was condensed into a single body and hooked up to a monitor to get a read of its vitals, two sharply different lines would zip across the screen. One would be a rapid succession of peaks and valleys reflecting the frenetic activity of artists and curators generating an exponentially growing number of exhibitions, festivals and catalogs devoted to new media art that has largely determined the parameters of this burgeoning field. If the second line recorded the amount of sustained critical analysis brought to bear on new media art by historians and critics, it would practically flat line across the screen setting off a shrill, incessant alarm. [pi]

While these two lines rarely intersect, one point of convergence is the issue of digital preservation. Within museums, libraries, private collections and universities this has almost exclusively meant using scanning devices and database software to render existing artworks from a variety of distinct media (painting, sculpture, photography) into digital forms in order to extend the works' accessibility in terms of research, sales or instruction. The prevailing organization system for this activity is still ordered according to a typology of medium, with the intention that the digital database will merely mimic the analog system of classification. And while the efficacy of relying or insisting on a specific medium as a qualifier for art has been repeatedly contested, no other typology has come to replace this system. [pi]

Alternative models are being discussed within a closed circuit of select museums and organizations that focus on new media and net art. Perhaps what is most productive about the recent institutionalization of these practices is that their inherently ephemeral qualities may destabilize the current system of classification. The complications that arise from commissioning, exhibiting or collecting media formats and software that are subject to obsolescence at a relatively rapid rate have demanded that institutions define artwork independently from medium. Two significant models are found in the Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative (http://www.guggenheim.org/variablemedia/) and Rhizome.org's ArtBase (http://rhizome.org/artbase/). [pi]

The Variable Media Initiative was developed by a consortium of Guggenheim staff and outside consultants and is built around case studies ranging from Robert Morris's performance "Site" (1964) to Mark Napier's web-based "Net Flag" (2001). Each artwork Is analyzed in terms of "behaviors," identified as "performed, interactive, networked or encoded," intrinsic to the piece. Moreover, the initiative introduces specific "strategies" for preserving ephemeral work, including stock piling the current version of the hardware, or material used to make the work, emulating the project using related or updated versions, migrating the work to another format entirely or reinterpreting the work based on the intentions of the artist gleaned from a questionnaire submitted by the artist. [pi]

The Rhizome ArtBase also employs an artist questionnaire as the basis for entering projects into its online archive of new media art that includes net art, software art, computer games and documentation of new media performance and installation. Rather than functioning as an internal collection management tool, the ArtBase solicits entries from the public sphere of the net. And instead of "behaviors," the Rhizome ArtBase relies on "genre" and "type" as organizing qualifiers for works. In this case, type refers to the abstract media of the art object such as animation, audio or video. Genre ascribes a style, form or content to each work and may include keywords like abstract, anti-art, collaborative, database, documentary, generative, tactical or telematic. [pi]

If the material conditions define and often determine artistic production, new media art cannot be seen as separate or distinguishable from the cultural mechanisms that produce it. How realistic is it then to think that these two models may alter the current typology of medium? That is to say, does it even matter if museums or archives cease to rely on medium as a defining qualifier, when a typology by medium continues to provide the very structure for attendant institutions such as art history, MFA programs and perhaps most significantly the philanthropic foundations that underwrite all of these programs? [pi]

I also wonder if the terms or conditions expressed by the Variable Media Initiative or ArtBase allow for more overtly political or collaborative projects such as those generated by Trebor Scholz (http://www.molodiez.org/acc/) or Picture Projects (http://www.pictureprojects.org) that eschew singular authorship and rely on a decentralized mode of production as well as a distributed audience. Do these two models suggest a way to circumvent the tendency for art historians, critics or curators to normalize experimental practices by forcing them to fit within pre-existing art traditions and forms? If the institutionalization of new media art compels art institutions to address works in terms of variable qualifiers, it may become instrumental in altering the ways in which other modes of contemporary art production are historicized.