Can’t find anything to watch on TV, and looking for something a little more stimulating than the usual fare on YouTube? Here’s a slightly off-piste suggestion: why not see some art instead? Don’t worry, I wouldn’t suggest leaving the house during February. But there’s plenty of art you can enjoy from your sofa or bed, as long as you have an internet connection and screen-based device (which you definitely do if you’re reading this newsletter).
Let’s leave aside all the dull, and often difficult to navigate, 3D virtual exhibitions that museums and galleries were churning out at the onset of the pandemic – when no one had a choice about whether to leave their homes. The experience of looking at art in a physical space is not something that can be replicated online very effectively. However, screens can be the perfect channel for other kinds of aesthetic experiences, especially those involving work made using what is known as “time-based media”: film, video, computers, etc.
Probably the best-known online repository of art is UbuWeb, a sprawling archive of avant-garde material which was created all the way back in 1996 by the American poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The contents – downloadable PDFs, streamable videos, and explanatory texts – are organised by category, from the more conventional “film and video” to “conceptual comics”. Nothing on there has been cleared for copyright but the site has never been sued (“never even come close”, apparently); everyone loves it too much. It could even be considered an avant-garde artwork in its own right. As of this year, the site is no longer active, but a text on its homepage assures us that “[t]he archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety”.
Several more polished – and legally above board – platforms have since cropped up. These include the Video Lounge, where you can stream about 220 works from the private collection of the Düsseldorf- and Berlin-based Julia Stoschek Foundation. The sleek platform design is modelled on Netflix, allowing you to scroll or search by keyword. Except instead of “Comedies” and “Romance” the keywords include “8mm film”, “Artificial lifeforms” and “Performance art”. One of my favourite works on there is The Woolworths Choir of 1979, the 20-minute digital video with which Elizabeth Price won the Turner prize in 2012.
MattFlix is an ongoing series of online projects initiated by the London-based Matt’s Gallery in April 2020. Following the template of temporary exhibitions, the works were initially screened for a set period of time, but most of them can happily still be accessed for free via a page on the gallery’s website. (The next project, with Scottish artist Graham Fagen, is set to launch in March.) Interestingly, the latest contribution to MattFlix was not a video but a game. Nepenthe Rifts (2023) was a specially commissioned text-based RPG adventure by Lawrence Lek. You can play the game, which involves a quest to find a magical power-generating dog after an electricity blackout, on your desktop browser.
I am barely scraping the surface here. There have been countless projects released by artists on the internet since the era of dial-up modems. Many of these are also produced independently, with their own websites or apps, so the older ones in particular can be difficult to find unless you know to look for them (and that’s before you even get into the problem of how ephemeral digital media can be, navigating expired domains and broken software).
So to round this off, I’ll mention one classic standalone work of online art, which has stuck with me since I first came across it. Passage is a video game released in 2007 by Jason Rohrer. Deceptively simple yet deeply moving, the game is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York – a clear testament to its artistic significance. Rohrer, who doesn’t believe in copyright, has also placed the game in the public domain: you can play it online here. I won’t say anything else though, as the less you know going into it the better.
