Shedding historical light on the fast-changing and increasingly commercialized process of online design, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will soon expand the archive of Web sites held by its department of Architecture & Design. Next month, the museum's acquisition committee is expected to add CD-ROMs containing Razorfish Subnetwork and at least one other site to its permanent collection.
For the past year, offline versions of the @tlas, Word, Speak, Funnel, Adaweb, and Posttool Web sites have been running in the SFMOMA gallery on an appropriate design object, the slick 20th Anniversary Macintosh. Acquisition of Razorfish Subnetwork will add a diverse handful of new Web sites from the New York Web publisher: Blue Dot, typoGRAPHIC, Bunko!, This Girl, TheNvelope, and Disinformation. Curators believe it will better document work made using Java technologies.
"Designers have moved into four dimensions; they've added the element of time," says SFMOMA's Thom Semper. "We want to get there before it becomes a commercial thing that reduces it to a simpler, less interesting form."
The museum is sounding the depths of the Web's artistic legitimacy, and seems to be setting a very preliminary aesthetic canon for Web development. Practitioners welcome the institutional seal of approval. After all, film existed for 50 years before post-war intellectuals like the editors of the French journal Cahiers du Cinema legitimized it as an art form. For a site like Word, which ceased operation in March, the recognition is especially welcome.
"Museums represent a different standard," says Marisa Bowe, Word's editor in chief. "The people doing the choosing have deeper and broader historical knowledge about the work they're looking at than most journalists do. They don't only compare Web sites with Web sites, but with all sorts of other well-designed objects from various periods in history."
Though the Whitney Museum in New York and others are also acquiring Internet-based work, the art world remains confused about how digital media will be collected and preserved over the long term. Before reaching the board approval stage, the SFMOMA exhibit is chosen by curator Aaron Betsky via a rather subjective selection process Sempere compares to "how you'd pick a good pair of shoes."
Documenting the Web's pervasive state of change – that elusive fourth dimension – has become an increasingly complicated subject. Something as seemingly insignificant as a video-compression codec might prove historically valuable. If cutting a site's links and impressing its contents on CD-ROM seems contrary to the fluid nature of the Web, consider that SFMOMA is collecting HTML as design objects, not as media. Once in the collection, the sites will not be continuously updated.
"We're interested in where [a site] is at a [certain] moment, and holding that moment," says Sempere.
In February, the Getty Information Institute launched an initiative to nurture and standardize record-keeping about the Internet. Syracuse University has received state funding for a similar project. Still, it's entirely possible that, rather than being preserved in a museum as art, this decentralized digital medium will emerge as its own best cultural historian.
"The very nature of the Web challenges the significance of this activity," says Carl Goodman of New York's Museum of the Moving Image, whose own collection of online artifacts includes an early one-page version of what is now Yahoo. "All we can do is stay informed, and keep surfing. What we're gathering may not be thought of today as art, but our audience isn't out there now. They haven't been born yet."
