NETworking: Net Art from the Computer Fine Arts Collection

Notes

Exhibition catalogue, Haifa Museum of Art (Haifa Museums), for "NETworking", shown at the museum's Emergency Exit | New Media Center from 3 November 2007 to 23 February 2008. The catalogue calls it the first Israeli museum exhibition devoted to Net art. Curator: Ilana Tenenbaum, founding curator and director of the New Media Center. Texts by Tenenbaum and Christiane Paul (then adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney). Foreword by Nissim Tal, director general of Haifa Museums. Designed by Noam Fridman; ISBN 978-965-7067-83-3. The printed book is bilingual and paginated in Hebrew order (right to left); this file holds the English pages and the Hebrew–English plate entries. Every work came from Doron Golan's Computer Fine Arts Collection (computerfinearts.com). Golan is an Israeli artist who started it in 2001 as an online archive of Net art open to anyone. In 2003 Cornell University Library agreed to preserve and catalogue it, and by 2007 it held 170 projects. Some are well-known pieces; others were small "signature" works made for the collection. Tenenbaum's essay, "The Third Front: Constructing the Imagined Future in the Present Tense", names three "fronts" of the new. The first is the early-20th-century avant-garde (Futurism, Dada, Constructivism), the second is video in the 1960s–70s, and the third is Net art from the 1990s. She leans on Lev Manovich's "Avant-Garde as Software" and pairs video-era precedents with Net works: - Paik's Magnet TV (1965) with Mark Napier's moving paintings, and Paik's Random Access (1963) as a proto-browser. - Terry Fox's real-time Children's Tapes (1974) with John F. Simon Jr.'s Every Icon. - Baldessari's Inventory and David Rokeby's The Giver of Names. - Video collectives (Videofreex, Raindance, Global Village) with RSG and jodi.org. The essay then runs through the history of computer and communication art: - John Whitney's Catalog (1961), Jack Burnham's Software (1970), Robert Adrian's The World in 24 Hours (Ars Electronica 1982), Electra (Paris, 1983–84) and Lyotard's Les Immatériaux (1985). - 1990s net.art: Rhizome, The Thing, Nettime; jodi.org, irrational.org, äda'web; Heath Bunting's Kings Cross Phone-In (1994). - Vuk Ćosić's copy of the documenta X site and the "net.art" origin story; Mongrel's Heritage Gold (1998); VNS Matrix; Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996); Mouchette; Cao Fei's Second Life avatar China Tracy at the 2007 Venice Biennale. It covers the obstacles to collecting and preserving Net art, including the Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative. It closes with an Israeli lineage, from Yona Fischer's "Concept + Information" at the Israel Museum (1970) to the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon (2001). Christiane Paul's "Networked Collectibles" sorts Net art into kinds: browser art, telepresence, performance, hypertext, hacktivism, alternative browsers and game mods. She argues that the art market's "scarcity equals value" model doesn't fit a work anyone can open online, though owning and hosting a work's source code "constitutes a form of ownership". She calls Computer Fine Arts "the largest private collection of Net art to date". She discusses six works: Beckett's Bounce, Ascii Rock, Lia's 10, Every Icon, Beacon and RSG's Carnivore client. Plates (catalogue nos. 0.001–0.014, each with its computerfinearts.com URL, medium and a Hebrew/English text): - boredomresearch, Wish, Ed. 2 (2007) - Lia, 10 (2001) - Ed Burton, Stress (2002) - Yoshi Sodeoka, Ascii Rock (2003) - John F. Simon Jr., Every Icon, Ed. 92 (1997) - Elout de Kok, Zabnulvier v.08 (2004) - Stanza, The Mirella Variations (2000) - Alex Galloway (RSG), RSG-CPE0C-1, Carnivore Personal Edition Zero Client (2001) - Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Beckett's Bounce (2002) - Mark Napier, Skywhite (2005) - MTAA, onKawaraUpdate (v2), Ed. 1 of 3 (2007) - Andy Deck, Wildlife Offline (2007) - Mark Tribe, Revelation 2.0 (2002) - Thomson & Craighead, Beacon (2005) Pull quotes: "By undermining the principle of 'rarity' upon which the museal economy is based, these immaterial art works challenge the institutional art world." (Tenenbaum) "At the same time one could argue that owning and hosting the source code of a work on one's server constitutes a form of ownership." (Paul) "Computer Fine Arts is the largest private collection of Net art to date, a rarity that deserves to be exhibited widely and will hopefully set an example for institutions and private collectors around the world." (Paul) Noted errors in the catalogue: - "John Ippolito" should be Jon Ippolito, and "Mike Sarf" should be Michael Sarff (the plate credit spells it correctly). - Beckett's Bounce appears as "Becket's Bounce" in the essay, and RSG-CPE0C-1 as "GSG-CPEOC-1" in the plate text. - Robert Adrian (Robert Adrian X) is called Australian; he was a Canadian-born artist based in Vienna. - Lialina's title is given as "My Boyfriend Returned from the War". Provenance: born-digital PDF of the English edition (33 pages, with a text layer), downloaded on 30 October 2026 from Dmitri Cherniak's website, where it is hosted. © Haifa Museum of Art, 2007. File md5 7e78dbc6f3a25f69952c5c6ed1819c8c.