COLONIZED INTERNET

As a co-founder of one of the very first online art distribution platforms, ada web, how do you see today’s postinternet turn? The ada web project was conceived as a platform for the production and distribution of art. The idea was to encourage established artists whose work was conceptually Internet-friendly to work online, along with younger artists. At the time when we launched ada web, in 1995, there weren’t many web sites in existence anywhere. In using new media as both a means of distribution and a platform for thinking we were ahead of our time. The Web was subsequently colonized by business and no longer has any artistic identity. Ar- How do you feel about the closing of the new media department at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, which you once directed? My predecessor, Sholto Ramsay, identified a need. That’s why he founded the ICA new media department. The institute had set up a production studio in partnership with Sun Microsystems, a leading force in business computing at that time. The idea was that Sun’s hardware and software engineers could help artists carry out ambitious projects. The engineers saw it as a research and development lab, and artists saw it as an opportunity to access technology that wasn’t usually available to them in those days. So the department corresponded to a specific need at a specific moment. Today everyone has their own computer. You were the artistic director at Villette Numérique, which featured totally digital projects along with work that was hardly digital at all. I’ve always been interested in art, not technology. Technology interests me only insofar as artists use it to make work that allows a specific take on the world we live in. It’s no different than pencils,