Until recently, interactive art on the Net amounted to museum and gallery sites where users could click through exhibitions. Visitors rarely interacted with the artists or with other online gallery-goers.
Pixel, a new interactive gallery showcasing digital art, is taking interactivity to a new level. This new feature of theglobe.com was developed as a "vehicle to get users to interact more, because an active dialogue -- be it a negative or positive debate -- on digital artwork is an effective means to get our online community more established," says Travis Sherer, executive producer of the Arts theme at theglobe.com.
"We only show digital art that elicits a strong emotional response -- that's our main criteria," explained Sherer, who said traffic to the Arts section of theglobe.com has quadrupled since Pixel launched earlier this month.
Sherer said that Pixel presents a different path from that of established museums with online virtual galleries, such as Minneapolis's Walker Art Center.
At Pixel, new site visitors are encouraged to post reactions to an ongoing forum about featured artwork, as well as emailing reactions directly to artists and engaging them in live online chat sessions.
The first artist chat session takes place at 6pm EST on 3 February, with Ebon Fisher. Fisher's Shockwave piece, The AlulA Dimension, a mysterious, meditative work that presents microscopic views of the bacteria found in a woman's saliva, is featured as Pixel's inaugural exhibition.
"People are more inclined to blame or be euphoric when they approach an artist via email," observed Fisher, an MIT Media Lab alumnus and instructor who currently teaches in the University of Iowa's Digital Worlds program.
Fisher prefers the immediate and honest criticism of viewer emails to the polite banter of art gallery openings. "When people meet an artist face to face at an opening, they tend to be more diplomatic," he said. "They provide less of the feedback that's important to help an artist grow, unlike the comments that appear in emails."
Sherer said he and Pixel staff curator Yael Kanarak analyzed existing online galleries, including the Walker Art Center's Gallery 9 and the online projects of Razorfish Studios, as well as physical exhibition spaces in New York City's SoHo arts district to help shape their concept of an online art gallery.
"We realized that the art world can be pretty intimidating," Sherer said. "And we wanted Pixel to appeal to both art aficionados and neophytes alike. So we decided to reach out to not only theglobe.com members, but any Web surfer who visits the site. We want to literally bring them into the world of digital art and make it accessible."
Artists and academics agree that Pixel's populist approach provides a fitting context for showcasing Internet art, which by its nature straddles the boundaries of the rarefied art world and mainstream communications technology.
Ken Goldberg, an internationally recognized Internet artist and an associate professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work will be featured next month at Pixel, points out that "access is one of the distinctive qualities of Net art. As with public art, the work in the Pixel gallery runs the risk of being misunderstood.... If it ruffles feathers in the art world, all the better."
Lynn Hershman Leeson, professor of electronic art at the University of California at Davis, agrees. "The whole idea of the Net is linkage," she said. "So wherever connections are appropriate, they should be used. The system should be open and fluid for audiences and audience participation."
