The Social Lives Of Online Art

Abstract

The pioneering artworks on the World Wide Web (created in the nineties) can now be approached with some historical distance. How are these artworks remembered over time? This research critically examines online artworks at various points in time and instead of zooming in on a single meaning, it will trace the artworks various legacies, each telling their own version of the past that can be examined and compared.

This paper will focus on the online artwork ‘Brandon’ by artist Shu Lea Cheang. Its title derived from the life and death of Teena Brandon, a Nebraska youth who was raped and murdered after his biological sex as a women came to light. The artwork released five years later, on June 30 1998, as a collaborative platform, still undefined, inviting guest curators to illuminate Brandon’s tragic story in their own way. Instead of a work of art that is determined by the artist, this active platform found its forms in interaction with recipients, constantly evolving. Within this paper I will unravel its social life by means of a detailed reconstruction of the networks in which it was embedded and how this developed over time. It includes the artworks production, as well as its reception by different audiences and circulation in different contexts. It will describe the artwork as a changing entity, how its meanings are fluctuating, constantly reshaped in different social contexts and under the changing pressures and perspectives of the present.