SAN FRANCISCO -- Benjamin Weil is somewhat of a renegade art curator.
His art selections for upcoming shows are not packed in crates and shipped thousands of miles to a museum. The installations don't even require manual labor or heavy lifting.
That's because his exhibitions aren't in a museum -- they're online.
As curator for media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Weil has played a central role in the creation of the online component of "010101: Art in Technological Times." But linking it with the gallery exhibition that opens Saturday at the museum has been no easy task.
"This was very different from what I was doing before. I had to apply much more of a traditional curatorial approach to curating," Weil said.
Instead of commissioning individual online artists with original works not thematically related to one another, Weil chose online artists' work which corresponded to the premise of the show. How artists approach the notion of creating art in a world with high-speed communication and technology is the central theme of "010101."
"Technology has been in our lives for much longer than just a couple of years," Weil said. "But the pace in which technology has permeated every part of human activity is actually quite new."
The challenge facing online curators is that not only must they understand all of art's genres and forms, but this new technology as well.
"He or she who knows only online art knows nothing," Philip Dodd, director of The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, wrote in an e-mail.
"Benjamin has knowledge of the art as well as online art," wrote Dodd, who worked with Weil at the ICA before Weil moved to San Francisco.
Despite Weil's expertise, coordinating an online show with an offline show is a challenge because no tradition of online art exists through which curators can draw comparisons and agree on what constitutes good online art.
For "010101," incorporating an on- and offline element made perfect sense because the show is multilayered in every element, said Kathleen Forde, one of the curators for the gallery exhibition.
From a curatorial team with different backgrounds to the use of different mediums (digital and traditional paintings and sculpture, sound installations and interactive exhibits), to a staggered timeline between the openings of the online and offline components, the exhibit has many gradations.
"Benjamin brought great knowledge of both online and offline art," Forde said. "He was fantastic to work with."
Born in Paris, Weil graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. He was founding member of "The Thing," an interactive computer network that focused on contemporary art and cultural theory.
As curator and co-founder of äda'web, the experimental exhibition space for online art, Weil chose artists and organized project production for the website from 1994-1998. What made this website different was how it linked the technical expertise of Web producers to artists.
SFMOMA acquired a version of äda'web for its permanent collection of architecture and design, and the website's archive was donated to the Walker Art Center for its Digital Arts Study Center.
"010101"'s online art component has already received criticism. With a challenging interface and the need to download many components, an updated version of the website with easier navigation will be launching tomorrow.
"We're trying to define a vocabulary here," said Weil. "I would have been horrified if people were walking around saying this is the best thing, because that means we would have done a Yahoo or a CNN which is fine for what it is, but not for our mission here."
"This is not about mystifying people," Weil said. "This is about rethinking the way you access information and how you relate to information."
