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Artists have been playing
with the Web for as long as there's been one to play with. (For the record,
that's slightly less than three years.) The whole idea behind the Web-browsing
revolution, after all, was that eye-catching colors, friendly graphics, and a
certain amount of motion would bring a lot more people online. They have.
watching live feeds from cameras positioned in all sorts of strange
places, including a satellite in outer space, a microscope, and the producer's
own office.
But the ideas behind
computer art are not new. The work of art has been dissolving into reproducible
signals for more than a quarter-century now. Video art had its heyday in the
1970s. CD-ROM art, which is basically computer art on a disc, is about a decade
old. There are a few things Web art can do that other kinds of art can't,
however. It can enter the homes of people who might otherwise never have sought
it out (or bought the CD-ROM that contained it). It can host any number of
people logging on from any number of places at exactly the same time. It can
change--you can change it--and it can stay changed, a lasting if not indelible
record that you were there.
SLATE Gallery is meant to
be a place where artists try things out and people respond to them. Jenny
Holzer is our first artist. One of the world's better-known conceptual artists,
she's been testing out different media ever since she put her oddball "Truisms"
into bus stops in the 1970s. SLATE Gallery will host a new artist more or less
every two weeks. At first, we won't be able to show you every unusual feature
Web artists have at their disposal. But we'll be getting better at this as we
go along, and whatever we can't do ourselves, we can link you to. (For example,
you can jump from this page to a piece Holzer did
earlier this year,in which people got to create and post their very own
Jenny Holzer truisms.) Along with the artwork, we'll be posting articles or
essays about the artist or about the ideas behind the art. We hope you find it
interesting, or better yet, fun.
