Net Works

Ed Glaze of Port Mansfield, Texas, (population 800) never imagined that snapshots of his house, rental property and mother’s carwash business would make it onto a wall of the prestigious San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Glaze is not an artist. He’s a Realtor with a Web site. And he didn’t even know his pictures had been on display for the last several weeks in “Ed Glaze III,” a work that is part of the exhibit “010101: Art in Technological Times.”

“Well, how about that,” said Glaze, 46. “I’m thrilled. We don’t have much in the way of art in Port Mansfield.”

How Glaze’s otherwise mundane Internet images ended up in an art gallery says a lot about the evolution of electronic art. Since it gained widespread attention in the mid-1990s, the Internet has inspired artists--but with very mixed results. More than a few have suffered from the same sort of technological limitations that plague dial-up users trying to download a video file.

Recently, though, artists have started using images, sounds and live feeds from the Internet for pieces that are then installed in more traditional havens for exhibitions--museums and galleries. For these artists, the Internet is not just a tool, it’s subject matter.

In addition to the San Francisco exhibit, the Whitney Museum in New York is hosting its own tech art show, “Bitstreams.” Featured in both are artists who incorporate the Internet into their works.

“A relatively new development is that artists are combining the Internet with other media or modes of communication,” said Larry Rinder, curator of the Whitney show, which is on display through June 10. “It’s an outgrowth of the last six or seven years, when you had artists who created pieces that existed only online.

“Now you have artists who are exploring what happens when you combine the infinite reach of the Net with something that is tied to a specific time and place.”

The most traditional of the Internet-based pieces in “010101”--at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through July 8--are by “Ed Glaze III” creator Rebeca Bollinger. This is a surprise considering her past work, which often used raw online feeds. For example, her 1994 “Alphabetically Sorted” was a video showing the results of a text-related search while a woman read them off, one by one.

“I’m interested in the specific patterns created by databases and online searches,” said Bollinger, who lives in the Bay Area.

Her works for “010101” are derived from online searches, but this time she chose to represent them with small colored-pencil drawings. “I knew about her Internet works, but I had no idea she also did these beautiful drawings,” said John Weber, one of five curators of the show.

Bollinger used graphics-based search engines, such as Ditto.com, to come up with a grid of thumbnail images on topics such as “Ed Glaze.” Likewise, her search on “people communicating” produced several images of people at computers or on cell phones. “Important documents” unearthed a group that included the Declaration of Independence and a letter from Elvis Presley. And “need” generated images of a sports car, a tropical beach scene and Jesus.

Art: Internet Becomes the Subject Matter of Museum Exhibits

“I thought they were really poignant,” Bollinger said. “The drawings are kind of snapshots in time of these searches. I was interested to see what happens when the thumbnails become a handmade object.

“I can’t say how people will react to them, but I think being an artist is about the process of transformation, when you take something and show it in a different way.”

Weber was struck by how Bollinger’s drawings “heightened the peculiarity” of people putting parts of their personal lives on the Internet. “It’s like a family album that you put on the biggest billboard in the world. You have no idea who will drive by,” he said.

On a nearby balcony at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is an outdoor sound installation, “Ping,” by Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer that consists of a circle of eight towering speakers encased in aluminum. From the speakers come sounds--ranging from low-pitched tones to percussive clanks--that are otherworldly. “It’s kind of like Tibetan monks singing,” said a visitor standing in the middle of the work.

Actually, it’s the Internet singing. Chafe and Niemeyer made use of pings that are commonly used like radar to measure the speed at which information travels through the Internet and then back to the originating point. Putting those pings to musical sounds was an outgrowth of a National Science Foundation-supported project at Stanford University, where Chafe and Niemeyer are on the faculty.

They set up the piece so that the longer a ping signal takes to make its journey, the lower the tone it generates and vice versa. The NSF was interested in practical applications. “Because of our musical perceptions, this allows us to listen to a network in a fine-grained way,” Chafe said. “It’s different from just looking at a meter.”

But Chafe and Niemeyer also saw the artistic possibilities. Niemeyer designed the 8-foot-tall speakers as a sculptural element--a computer inside the museum sends out a steady stream of pings to domain names that are randomly chosen from a list or typed in by visitors.

The constantly changing nature of the Internet makes the sounds coming from “Ping” unpredictable, but to Chafe that’s a lot different from random. “When we were developing the piece and using simulated computers, the information had no structure to it, no behavior or personality. But now that it’s hooked up to a real network, uncanny things happen. It’s like an original composition.

“We’re thinking of putting out a CD.”

Shanghai-based artist Hu Jie Ming produced his work--”The Fiction Between 1999 & 2000”--by digitally capturing thousands of Internet and TV images during a 24-hour period starting at midnight Jan. 31, 1999. The images were sent via CD to San Francisco, where they were printed on wide strips of Mylar film and hung in a floor-to-ceiling maze that visitors could walk through.

“One of the conditions of our technological society is that we are barraged with images,” Weber said. “The piece embodies this in a way that is visceral and beautiful.” At the Whitney exhibit, the visitor is first met by a giant video projection screen showing the animated “ecosystm” by Brooklynite John Klima. This is another live Internet piece--it shows 16 distinct computer-generated bird flocks, each of which represents the currency of a different country.

If a live Internet feed from CNN.com indicates that a country’s currency is increasing in value, that flock will get more birds. If the value falls, the flock gets smaller. The volatility of the market also affects the behavior of the flocks--as in real life, when financial matters get agitated, the flocks attack one another.

The piece originated as a commission from Randall Kau, CEO of Zurich Capital Markets, a global financial-products company. “He wanted a piece of interactive, technological art, which is what I do,” said Klima, whose pieces sometimes are controversial.

Recently, Klima stirred up a furor with his gallery exhibition “Go Fish,” which features a piece played like a video game. If a player is able to successfully guide a virtual fish through the piece, a real goldfish is released into a safe tank. If the player fails, the real fish goes into a tank with a predator.

The Whitney piece is far more benign. “Many people describe the currency markets in terms of sporting events or combat,” Klima said. “But Randall Kau likes to look at it in terms of natural phenomena. So I thought I’d make it an ecosystem.”

Klima had the technology background to pull off the piece. “I have a degree in fine art--that and $1.60 will get you on the subway,” he said. “When I needed work to support myself, I fell back on the fact that I had been fooling around with computers since I was 15 and could do some programming. I had done work for Dunn & Bradstreet, Turner Broadcasting and others.”

In the Whitney’s stairwell is Los Angeles artist Lew Baldwin’s “milkmilklemonade.net”--a live work that can be partly controlled by anyone who visits the site https://www.milkmilklemonade.net.

The piece makes use of three large video screens, mounted on the second- through fourth-floor landings, with motion detectors overhead to track people walking by. In general, the detectors pick one person at a time to represent on a screen as a dot or other shape. “It’s like you are moving through an embedded flash movie on a Web page,” Baldwin said. Additional geometric forms interact on the screen. On the second-floor screen, text in large letters sometimes appears.

The text is provided by visitors to the Web site, who also can change some of the geometric forms. The site, however, gives few hints on how this is done and does not indicate in any way that it can alter an artwork that happens to be in the Whitney Museum.

“The idea is that wherever there is a Net connection, someone can influence what a person is experiencing in the physical space,” Baldwin said, adding that he is continually working on the Web site to make it more explanatory and increase the variety of changes that can be made to the artwork.

Rinder expresses no regrets that the work is evolving. “This piece is somewhat about trial and error,” he said. “It’s got a fun-house feeling to it, and there’s nothing wrong with that in a museum.”

Ed Glaze is looking forward to taking part. “I have a stepsister in San Francisco I am planning on visiting next month,” he said. “I’ll have to go to the museum and see that art. I’ll bring my camera.”

*

How It Works

For a detailed look at the science behind this artwork, see the graphic on T10.

*

Times staff writer David Colker covers personal technology.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How Stuff Works

‘Ping’

“Ping” is an outdoor, live Internet art installation (see T1) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Created by Stanford faculty members Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer, it produces constantly changing musical sounds based on how efficiently the Net is sending and receiving signals. To hear a recording of it, go to www.latimes.com/ping.

*

Researched by DAVID COLKER/Los Angeles Times

Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art