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LS: How about the connection between the Internet and the art market—is that of interest to you at all?

CJ: It is. But what’s more of interest to me is how art is represented on the Internet. There’s so much documentation of physical artworks on the Internet now that in a sense those images are stand-ins for the work itself. We see so much more contemporary art now because we see so many more images of it on the web. And I think that sets up a really interesting dynamic in terms of the differences between art made specifically for the Internet and art of which images are distributed over the Internet.

There’s actually a number of really interesting artists who are working in that area right now. One in particular is called VVORK. They do a contemporary art blog and show conceptual art, installation, painting, whatever that they like. And the way they display it is with very little contextual information, which kind of levels everything out to just “images on the web.” It doesn’t matter what medium it is. I think that levelling that happens on the web is a significant change of the last five years.

Besides VVORK—which is by artists Oliver Laric and Aleksandra Domanovik as well as Christoph Priglinger and Georg Schnitzer—there’s a number of other artists working in this field today that I think are of particular note: Guthrie Lonergan (theageofmammals.com) is one. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied (art.teleportacia.org) is another duo—Olia is of the early net.art generation and still producing excellent and engaging work about the Internet.

LS: What are you hoping for in terms of Western Front’s web activities, then?

CJ: Given the role the web now plays in contemporary culture, my expectation is that any arts organization or curator should be including art made on, by or with the web as an integral part of its program.

Personally, I’m very interested in working with Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied on an interdisciplinary project within the Western Front, a project that could include a symposium and exhibition and possibly a residency. Currently they are working on a big project based on digital folklore. “Digital folklore” is the term they use for looking at the history of the web and actual users of the web—not artists, but people who embraced the whole “welcome to my homepage” movement, putting up images of their cats and animated gifs and all those kinds of things.

Of course, Internet art isn’t my only interest—I just wanted to stress that I think it is really important to bring this type of work into a broader contemporary-art context. Rhizome is doing an excellent job of linking the potentially ghettoizing context of Internet art to this larger discussion.

Also, I appreciate that each of the departments here—like Front magazine, the new music department, the exhibitions department and the media department—all have their own specific lines of inquiry that they're interested in taking on.

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