Like exclusive New Year's Eve parties, most museum openings that offer the art world's elite a sneak peak of an exhibition are invitation-only.
Yet the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art wants the unwashed masses to join them online in ringing in 2001 as the institution unveils the Web-based art included in "010101: Art in Technological Times" – a full two months before the physical exhibition opens in the museum's galleries.
At midnight on Jan. 1, SFMOMA's website presents five new Web-based works by some of the world's most-recognized digital artists.
Among them are San Francisco's Erik Adigard, Belgium-based Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn who are known as Entropy8Zuper!, British duo Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, New York's Mark Napier, and Matthew Ritchie, also from New York.
And unlike other recent major museums shows of online art – such as last year's "Net Condition" at Germany's ZKM, which featured a contraption of sliding screens meant to physically represent an Internet browser – SFMOMA plans on keeping these works framed in their proper context: on the viewer's PC.
Public computers on which to view the Web-based works will be available at SFMOMA when "010101" – which will include works by 35 international artists in various media exploring how digital technology is transforming society – opens on March 3.
But the museum is launching the Web portion early to place an effective focus on the online art and to encourage viewers to log on at home.
"We don't want the Web commissions to get lost in the larger show," says SFMOMA spokeswoman Lynne Kimura. "So the early launch helps establish these works as more than a mere complement to the physical works in the galleries."
None of the online pieces will be projected on screens in SFMOMA's galleries.
Viewers, critics, and artists found projections to be problematic when they were used by New York's Whitney Museum of American Art for its prestigious 2000 Biennial exhibition, which featured online art for the first time.
Another difference is that the Whitney's presentation didn't allow visitors to navigate the interactive websites on their own.
Though providing computers at a museum sounds logical, there are problems. When museums offer public computers for individual navigation of online art, visitors often use the free Internet access to check their e-mail or surf other sites.
"Most of the museum installations of Web-based projects have made for fairly unsatisfying viewing," says Jeff Kastner, a New York cultural critic who writes regularly for The New York Times.
"Showing Internet work well is a tough thing to pull off. There needs to be a balance between that highly individualized experience and the communal context."
SFMOMA's decision to keep the five online art pieces included in "010101" in their indigenous form seems wise.
Adigard's "Timelocator" allows users to literally watch time fly as they log online minutes.
The piece features random images – such as the back view of a nearly naked man and the outline of an atoll – that dance around the screen and mark the passage of time, as the background of the screen darkens and lightens with the hour of the day.
Both Ritchie and Entropy8Zuper! give a nod to computer game culture, although they use very different technology.
Ritchie's "Player" – which features portraits of characters that resemble heroes and villains in computer games – welcomes users with low-speed connections, which may provide more poetic effects.
"Hopefully it will seem like a kind of animated painting – even more so if you're on a slow connection," says Ritchie.
"Eden. Garden.1.0" from Entropy8Zuper!, on the other hand, requires that the user have a handful of plug-ins and "a fast computer."
The piece works like a browser. Data from URLs typed in by the viewer is interpreted into commands that cause an onscreen Adam and Eve to perform movements based on those in traditional 3-D computer games such as Quake 3 Arena.
The downloaded data also prompts a menagerie of Eden inhabitants, such as bunnies, elephants, and yes, a serpent, to appear and interact with Adam and Eve.
Both Napier and the Thomson and Craighead team use the browser effectively as a medium.
Napier's "Feed" deconstructs data from URLs, turning information into beautiful scatter charts and line graphs that recall both minimalist and abstract expressionist paintings.
Thomson and Craighead's "e-poltergeist" mimics the Yahoo interface but utilizes a hidden browser that opens multiple windows and launches alarming sounds, as if the user's Internet connection is possessed.
The inclusion of "e-poltergeist" in SFMOMA's online exhibition ultimately proved burdensome for the artists, however – raising yet another question about the limits of museum-sponsored shows of online art.
"'E-poltergeist' should ideally be encountered unwittingly as an intervention that takes control of your browser – something that is not particularly easy to integrate into an art museum Web-portal – where PC users are unable to stop the work without forcing their computer to shut down their browser," says Jon Thomson.
"We've had to re-think the way the work is going to function in relation to the other artists' projects and the '010101' site structure as a whole. In the end, what we've done is to make a 'demonstration' version of the work, which is easy to stop but still gives end-users some sense of the piece."
