What has the Internet ever done for art?

The Google Art Project and the Missing Net Art Movement

The Google Art Project launched this week, bringing the technology of Google street view indoors to internationally renowned gallery spaces. Viewers can now browse classic collections in hyper-real gigapixel quality, without having to leave the comfort of their computer chair.

The project creates a whole new world, perhaps even a Second Life and, soon, we’ll all stop visiting art galleries and encountering reality in virtual worlds. This all sounds very familiar. The future has arrived – again. Or has it?

There is no denying that the experience of Google Art is incredibly engaging or that it provides a unique art experience that most people could never enjoy. This is due largely to the fact that most highly valuable paintings always remain slightly out of our reach, positioned behind glass, wires or, in the case of the Mona Lisa, behind a beautifully carved wooden fence, a safe distance from the pollution of human touch or even breath.

Through the Google Art Project, browsers can zoom into every tiny millimeter of a painting and even see the cracks in the paint, perhaps discovering aspects of the work that were previously impossible to perceive. It brings a whole new layer of experience to art appreciation and this is its primary achievement. As well, there’s a good chance that this will improve the footfall at these galleries rather than lead people to stay at home.

Yet, what troubles me about the Google Art project is the massive disconnection between which art it delivers and what has taken place in the art world over the last two decades. One might have thought that a company that has been defined by the Internet era would place some value on the artists that have shaped its community. Admittedly, a lot of these people are not particularly enamored with the success of commercial web giants like Google. Still, an acknowledgement of the way that the Internet has been defined by such artists as Heath Bunting, Jodi or any number of new media artists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_art would have been an enterprising gesture.

Of course, Google may not want to celebrate the work of such artists as Steve Lambert, whose collaborative ‘AddArt‘ project replaces all advertisements in web browsers with art work. But it really should. Such interventions are what has made the Internet so engaging over the years. Indeed, time and again, its value is evidenced by such politically charged matters, as evidenced by WikiLeaks or the recent coverage of the Egyptian uprising.

In addition to simply championing classic art works, Google could bring the cutting edge of art innovation to art lovers, re-defining how people make sense of art and influencing what people are willing to identify as beauty.

Most new media art does not tend to reach the kinds of people that typically frequent the galleries assembled in the Google Art Project. One exception is taking place in Liverpool this month, a collaboration between the UK’s new media art institution FACT and TATE Liverpool. In a joint exhibition celebrating the pioneering media artist Nam June Paik, the two institutions are doing the kind of work that Google Art Project could be doing – bringing avant garde work into the mainstream art territory. These two institutions – at opposite ends of Liverpool, the host city for this year’s international Media Art History conference – are even connected by Peter Appleton’s green laser beam, which stretches high across the city, generating a powerful symbolic message about the need for art to work harder to foster new audiences.

The web is a wonderful medium through which boundaries collapse, not just physical, but also sociological, political and aesthetic. Google’s art project is out of sync with the values of the digital revolution. Moreover, the absence of new media artists means that it may not be long before hackers find a way to add graffiti to these digital collections or simply seek use them to make statements about what art experiences ought to offer in the 21st century. Certainly, it should include what the GAP presently offers, but it can go so much further at changing our relationship to art, in the way that Google’s Search Engine has changed our relationship to information.

Is @stephenfry a fake?

Yesterday, my friend Phil Drake and I were talking (again) about the merit of Twitter. For a change, the focus of the conversation was not about the social value of the tweet, or indeed whether Twitter reconstitutes the public sphere, but our ability to guarantee the authenticity of a tweet.

Mr Stephen Fry became one of our sample cases. As a prolific Tweeter, perhaps the most prolific UK user, Mr Fry dominated the top 10 twitter user accounts for many months, until mass media got on board and brought their audiences. He has also become an evangelist of new media in recent years, being both an ambassador of Twitter and an activist of social media, giving talks to crowds at iTunes festivals and giving evidence for the UK Government’s inquiries into the digital economy and being a general luvvy of the new media world. Indeed, it’s rare to see an interview with Mr Fry on television these days without mention of his Twitter community.

So it occurred to us, what if @stephenfry is, in fact, a fake. By this, we wondered not whether the account belonged to him; Twitter’s ‘Verified Account’ facility seems to guarantee this. Rather, we wondered whether his tweets were brought to us by Team Fry at Apple, or even some of his many groupies, rather than his nimble twexting fingers. After all, a national treasure of such stature – and he is very tall – surely has a team of likeminded groupies who are able to write jokes in the ilk of Mr Fry – actually, he should really be called Professor Fry, given his vast knowledge and many academic awards.

Now, I don’t mean to single out Professor Fry in this inquiry, especially since he and I are kindred spirits of Norwich. Indeed, so dedicated is Prof Fry to my home city that the Norwich City football club shield adorns his Twitter avatar. One of his recent tweets even pointed out, lovely that he is, that the dear Mr Robert Green of England vs USA goalkeeping infamy was pretty damn good when placed at NCFC, never fumbling with such great accomplishment. Nevertheless, Professor Fry is a useful case through which to ask these questions about Twitter. He is, after all, an individual – nobody expects an institutional Twitter account to belong to anyone other than the PR team within the organization. (Word of advice: If you are an institution, set up a twitter account and give the password to your whole team, not just your webmaster or marketing team. Review periodically). Stephen Fry is also surely too lovely to be a fake, which makes the matter all the more intriguing to pursue.

Thus, the question that eludes a clear answer is whether the people who claim to be posting to their personal twitter account are actually doing it themselves, or whether it is outsourced to public relations people, employed to work on their behalf. After all, we know that Twitter is already used as a public relations tool. Yet, its currency relies on its being a different kind of medium. It is the one medium that mediates where all other media have become distant systems of communication that operate beyond the individual and generally is an economy where publicists are the main currency. As such, if Twitter does not provide direct communication, if it does not break this structure, then its value is considerable diminished; it becomes another one of those bad old forms of media and nothing will have changed at all (this debate is also about change).

There are two questions that arise from this issue: can we be certain about authorship? And, does our lack of certainty – or indeed, does the fact of having Tweet surrogates, matter? If it transpired that Professor Fry was not responsible for his 5,903 tweets – or even that he was responsible for only part of them – would his followers feel cheated or, indeed, would they be justified in feeling cheated?

Having been a long time advocate of all that is digital, I suspect that the twitter community is reasonably capable of discerning a fake tweet from a PR tweet from an individual, even if we must admit that certainty about this escapes us. We cannot confirm that Professor Fry’s beautiful mind is behind each of his tweets, but we think it can be reasonably assumed. Indeed, our confidence in this judgement is reinforced when we see a twitter account that is designed for PR, of which there are many. Arguably, Professor Fry’s twitter stream is far too playful to be brought to us by a PR team, except of course that a very good PR team would know exactly how to create the online personality of Professor Fry.

So let us assume that @StephenFry is brought to us by Team SF, rather than just the individual. Does this matter? What we’re getting into here is the cult of personality and the expected special relationship that fans have with their idols. If Professor Fry is not reading my tweet and thus, it is not him that replies to @andymiah, then I will feel a sense of loss over our relationship. I will have to resign myself to the fact that new media is as incapable as old media at diminishing the gap between the ordinary tweeple and the celebrity. I may still find Prof Fry’s twitter stream entertaining and I may still follow, but my perception of our relationship will have been catastrophically damaged and we will have regressed by to the days of Web 1.0 or, more likely, Web 0.0. It would be rather like discovering that one’s favourite tv show, which began in Series 1 under the guidance of a genius, has been handed out to a team of writers for Series 2, 3, and 4. We all know what happens in such a scenario.

Of course, if we are right to be optimistic, then Professor Fry will have read this message and will now desperately seek to confirm that he is, indeed, there and that he is real. I could give him my phone number for him to call and confirm this to me, but I may subsequently decide that his publicist gave him my number and briefed him on what he needed to do to confirm his authenticity to his disciples. In any case, I would not insult Prof Fry’s intelligence by actually giving him my number, he would have no trouble finding it, if he really tried.

In the end, it would appear that nothing could confirm the existence of @StephenFry for me, unless I had the lovely Professor Fry by my side, day after day, while I watched him tweet his heart out. So, Phil was right, physical presence is the only confirmation of authenticity.

Yet, the fact that most of us tweeters don’t worry too much about this or, indeed, don’t feel the need to have Professor Fry by our sides in real space to confirm the authenticity of his tweets (much as each of his 1,566,746 would like the idea), confirms the fact that our faith in social media underpins our participation. There are also small measures that assist to reinforce this faith. For example, many people write to @stephenfry and receive replies from the account that adequately instils confidence – this transaction is enough to satisfy the fan.  It also confirms the fact that this system of ensuring authenticity can work perfectly well without the need for certainty. If we subsequently discover that we have been misled, then we will deal with it, but a couple of bad Apples ought not spoil the whole cart (this alludes to my iPad critique, which will follow on another day).

Of course, if what we really want to discuss is the idea of authenticity, then perhaps more than most other celebrities, Professor Fry is the kind of person for whom his celebrity identity may well be so far removed from the ‘authentic’ Stephen Fry that all talk of confirming identity by platforms like Twitter is completely meaningless. Followers, fans, whatever we call ourselves, will not ever know the real Stephen Fry and I suspect he is quite glad of this.

Our faith in social media

Who receives your tweets? Who actually reads your blog? Is there anybody out there at all? Answers to these questions elude most of us when we send something out into the ether, whether it is a photograph, video or written piece. Most bloggers and tweeters rely on an unfounded belief that there is an audience out there digesting their content. However, the reality is likely to be much less inspiring and our audiences are likely to be much smaller than we imagine. But does this matter?

Even if we have sophisticated statistic trackers that tell us we have thousands of viewers, the details of this engagement are unclear. The majority of visits to websites last less than a minute, suggesting that our audiences may have found us by mistake or that, once found, it took them a few seconds to realize we were not what they were looking for. We have to come to terms with the fact that many of our visitors may have found us by mistake.My own consumption of content leads me to this view, though I think the absence of an audience is not reason to feel disheartened. Before I explain why not, let me first outline the situation via my own use of social media.

I use Tweetdeck to visualize Twitter feeds on my laptop, Twitter application on my Android phone and access social media from Facebook and Flickr on both mobile and laptop. Each morning, I open up my Tweetdeck and have a few hundred tweets that are unread. If I were to scan through all of these – just reading and not clicking on links, etc – it would probably take me a couple of hours just to get through all of them. As the day progresses updates are shown to me in a pop up window on my screen from time to time. I follow approximately 400 people or institutions. Generally, when viewing tweets by Tweetdeck I skim scroll through the unread tweets, or, if time is short, I may just look at what is presently on view within my browser. On my mobile phone, I use my touch screen scroll facility rather like a one arm bandit at a casino – flick the scroll and see what ends up on the screen. To go through each one would just take up far too much time and I like the randomnesss of the quick skim.

However, in both cases, I would predict that I experience less than 30% of the tweets that I receive. This means that the majority of the tweets go unread and unnoticed. The same is true of Facebook. I have around 900 friends in Facebook, but feel like I receive updated from around only 100 people. I can think of people whose updates I rarely receive – perhaps because they do not publish them openly – but whose accounts are regularly updated with content. For Flickr, I receive notifications that friends have uploaded new photos, but rarely search through all the uploaded images, perhaps at best scrolling through the first few pages.

What does all this mean? First, it may mean you need to be more strategic with your social media. Consider when might be the most effective time to tweet, based on your expected audience. For example, if you live in the UK and expect your viewers are mostly from there, perhaps tweeting at 845am will allow you to reach more people, as workers check their new content on their way to work or perhaps once at work. Second, you may limit the amount of content that you tweet. While it appears that the more tweets one undertakes, the more likely one is to grow ‘followers’, if you are seeking deep engagement with your followers, then fewer and more focused tweets might work better. Third, it is already clear that the word ‘friends’ does not quite fit within places like Facebook. It is now standard practice to friend anyone who requests – and automated ‘suggested friends’ makes this concept of friendship even more inadequate. This changes how we use social media and how we feel about it. If you want Facebook to be a place where you can connect with just your closest friends then you may have to risk offending a colleague and just click ‘ignore’ to their friend request. What’s the worst that could happen?

Each of these actions may ensure that you send out content that is experienced by more people, but it is certainly no guarantee. Of course we should not worry too much about the imagined community of followers that surround our content. The possibility of an audience can inspire us to put out content and be productive creative people.

Yet, this is why I liken our productivity to a faith. We are required to believe that there is a good in itself with putting content out there, which, at some point, may be found by someone and be of interest to them for some reason. Whether somebody is listening or not may not matter at all. We have to believe that somebody has been touched by our content, which is why the ‘retweet’ is such a treasure.

To feel part of the public sphere and part of what people talked about when claiming that the internet democratizes communication can promote our own agency and engagement with the world around us. But, let’s not kid ourselves; that tweet or blog post we just wrote that seems to have captured the zeitgeist may just as easily be missed, especially if we forget to use the damn hashtag or, even worse, use the wrong one.