WHITNEYBIENNIAL.COM
It was February 2002, a month before the opening of the Whitney Biennial.
Miltos Manetas and Peter Lunenfeld
were at the
ElectronicOrphanage in
"It would be nice to make an Internet show that would challenge the Museum show. What about registering whitneywhitney.com, Manetas proposed.
"Why not whitneybiennial.com?" Lunenfeld suggested.
"Come on! Manetas said.
"It will definitely
be taken...they can't have not thought of this!"
"Don't be so sure, Lunenfeld replied: "Just check.
The domain Whitneybiennial.com was
available!
According to Manetas, it was one of those rare moments similar to when you
inherit the ownership of a business you never thought of owning.
He felt that by ignoring their domain name, the Museum was subconsciously commissioning him to put their show in trouble. "Damn, he thought, "now we really have to do it. The same night, he wrote an email to all the curators he knew, including ones involved with the Whitney Biennial, inviting them to propose artists for the whitneybiennial.com adventure.
The idea of the show was pretty simple:
Much art today is banal and academic. Nothing happening in galleries and museums is all that interesting and there is no way to create any "great" historical "art" exhibitions.
Meanwhile in the alternate universe known as the Internet, people are performing some amazing experiments. Not all of these experiments come from "artists". Web designers, illustrators, architects and everyday people have the same chances of creating something "new" because the computer screen is uncharted territory and there is a place for anyone who will approach it with no preconceptions.
Most Internet "things",
are of course in bad taste and
boring. In the best case scenario they just
contribute some "Telic" renovation, a technological gimmick that
surprises the viewer for a moment, and then expires shortly after. On the other
hand, there are a number of Neen pieces, "works" that resist the
infinite clicking of your mouse and offer a new view of the World. "
The intention of the Whitneybiennial.com adventure was to collect those Neen pieces but this could happen only by collecting everything available and selecting them a second time.
While the Whitney Biennial 2002
would complete its job the day of its opening, the Whitneybiennial.com,
is a work in progress: similar more to a situation than an exhibition. It would
generate discussion and criticism. The final version of the show was to be presented
a year later.
That's what this CD-Rom is about: a selection of the works and a step towards a "perfect internet exhibition."
The following people and
organizations accepted the invitation: Jan Aman,
Andreas Angelidakis,
archinect.com, Stefano Chiodi, Joshua Decter, Laurence Dreyfus, Alex Galloway, Paul Groot, Patrick Lichty, Peter
Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, Magda Sawon,
newstoday.com, Hans Ulrich Obrist ,Marisa Olson,
Michele Thursz, Roosavelt
Savage, Philippe Vergne, Olivier Zahm
and Purple magazine .
In the following 4 weeks, 122 creators submitted one to five animations each. The British composer Mark Tranmer, (GNAC) wrote a melody for the website and Carbonated Jazz prepared the design. It is the face of an old man, with his glasses breaking into pieces.
Raphael Rozendaal created a logo and a sticker. Artist Michael Rees offered a "Turntable", which is a flash application that you use to mix not only sound but also Flash movies. With this tool, all the pieces become samples and the user had the ability to visually "DJ", making his/her own composition online. The viewer can change the colors of the background; make the animation larger or smaller, transparent or opaque, etc. For the very first time, the artworks in an exhibition would function in two ways, as samples and as stand-alone pieces.
Finally, producer Michele Thursz agreed to help produce the Whitneybiennial.com. An
office was improvised and hosted by the headquarters of Rhizome.org and interns
started working on public relations. The budget for the show was zero and
everybody involved was working for free. At a certain point, Miltos Manetas
thought that it would be nice to rent many U-Haul trucks, transforming them
into moving
monitors which would display the various pieces of the show.
It was an unrealistic idea, but the
press seemed to love it, so the Whitneybiennial.com started to advertise that
this was exactly what they would do. The night of the Gala, they would surround
the Museum with 23 U-Hauls. Even if the Whitneybiennial.com is apparently in
"competition" with the Museum show, it is not an
"anti-show".
What happened next is history. On March 4th, (a day before the opening), the New York Times published an article by MATTHEW MIRAPAUL.
Most of the article, was dedicated to the Whitneybiennial.com. After that, press from all around the world was generated about the Whitneybiennial.com. The night of the opening, hundreds of the guests would leave the Museum and search for these fantomatic U-hauls, many of them returning later and saying to their friends: I've seen them: they are not big deal causing a performance that was never suppose to happen to actually register at the publics imagination and initiating an urban legend.
From an interview with Miltos
Manetas by John Glassie, published later at Salon.com
(http://www.salon.com/people/conv/2002/03/21/manetas/)
JG: All right. It's now Wednesday, March 6th and I just found out that the U-Hauls were a hoax! People who expected to see these trucks with screens driving around the Whitney were seriously fooled. I was fooled! Tell me what you have to say about it."
MM: It went great! The trucks were
not there of course. The U-Haul idea was only an advertisement for the online
show. They were invisible trucks. We would have never made them in real life
even without the greatest of sponsoring. I don't believe in such 80's and 90's
art. I believe in the Internet. The real U-Hauls are the Web sites where the
exhibition can be found. But people loved the trucks, so we
diffused [this] news to give them something to
visualize.
JG: And I assume you view this -- the evening, duping me and others -- as a success?
MM: The event went great. Many
people showed up at the
museum. We were there to explain to them that the
U-Hauls were invisible and I was helping them to enter the Gala, where you were
not welcome without an invitation. Inside the museum, many people were talking
about the U-Hauls as if they had seen them! It was amazing! People would walk
out to check for them. Also, most of the artists of the show liked the fact
that the U-Hauls where invisible.
But how do you "optimize" an experimental show such as the Whitneybiennial.com?
This job has been trusted to a group
of "Neenstars". They have been asked to choose the very best of the
pieces. The selection was not democratic: any of the Neenstars, had the right
to exclude all pieces he/she would not really like, even if somebody else would
happen to enjoy them. But if a Neenstar had a strong position for a piece, the
others were obliged to accept it. Twenty-two artists made it to the final
selection.
A year after it's opening, the Whitneybiennial.com, is finally completed but
the question it poses is still open.
Andreas Angelidakis designed
the virtual space and interface
Angelo Plessas made the flash
programming. This material, becomes the content a CD-ROM that.
Molly Von Hacker is a writer. She lives between
Neen, and Telic,
are created by Lexicon Branding,
after a commission by Miltos
Manetas and Art
Production Fund
. Neen, is today an International
art movement (http://www.neen.org)
Neenstar, is somebody who does Neen.
Whitneybiennial.com is dedicated to the Italian artist Gino De Dominicis (1947-1998).
Other inspirations:
"Forgotten Silver"
"When
We Were Kings", a 1996 Documentary on Muhammad Ali, directed by Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford