Email: computimes@irish-times.ie
Despite having a website, Irish artist Bernie Prendergast says that she would "definitely not" be interested in producing computer-generated work. Typically of the hundreds of Irish artists on the Web, she sees it terms of reproducing her work and making it available to a wide audience, and offering her commercial opportunities.
That Prendergast even has a website is more by accident than design. She was offered one in return for contributing work to a webmaster for his own site. Even a cursory trawl of a search engine for Irish artists throws up hundreds of sites by individuals and art galleries, who see the Internet, rightly, as a valuable means of generating sales.
The Irish Art Group (IAG) site, for example, attracts an average of 3,500 individual visitors a month, who between them view between 9,000 and 10,000 pages. According to Michael Hughes, one of the main forces behind the website, the venture is not entirely business-oriented. "It is not purely commercial, though we do hope to expand our customer base globally and promote our artists worldwide via it. Were it purely commercial we would be selling things other than art, such as books and giftware which do sell online, and we would have sought sponsorship and advertising on the site."
E-commerce is beginning to take off around the world, but it is still in relative infancy here. This is something that he is acutely aware of: "In truth, it rarely leads to direct sales. But it does offer massive international exposure for artists whose works are rarely seen outside of their parish. Others feel e-commerce is part of the future and that Irish artists need to be part of it."
The IAG site is a collaborative venture between six Northern Ireland galleries which represent some of Ireland's best-known artists. It is already successful and is poised to do even better as art on the Net becomes more popular.
Is the Internet solely a tool for artists to sell their work, however, or can it be used as a creative medium in itself? The many US and Japanese artists using the Net as their main medium show that it is certainly possible, but what about Irish artists? The answer here is less clear-cut.
There are now many multimedia courses available around the country, but many graduates tend to develop their careers in the more lucrative Web-design market rather than concentrate on creating Internet art. There are exceptions. The Waterford-based American artist Ernest Ruckle has taken to the Net as part of his battle against what he views as the Disneyfication of world culture. His site does involve representations of his figurative art, but by using the Internet, he extends his argument a stage further, thereby making the technology more than a passive form of expression.
Tony Patrickson is one of the country's keenest exponents of using computers and the Internet to generate art. Initially working in sculpture, he found himself progressing over a period of a decade towards exclusively using electronic media. The reason, he says "was based partly on the falling cost of computer equipment, and partly on a growing feeling that there was something ill-defined but important happening halfway between art and science that I wanted to investigate".
Patrickson is clear on what technology offers him. "The biggest creative window the Internet offers any artist is people - the ability to bypass the physical arts infrastructure and talk to people directly on a worldwide basis, regardless of geographical separation," he says. "An odd factor that crops up in this regard is the nature of feedback from an audience. I've found a surprising willingness on the part of people over the Internet to email you a response to the work, often at far greater length than happens during a physical encounter.
"Initially it surprised me a great deal that perfect strangers would take the time to sit down and reflect to you what they'd seen and thought, so there's a very satisfying give and take in forming those kinds of unexpected relationships." At present he is working on an interactive work using landscape to explore science and concepts of perspective.
His choice of medium may be a minority one, but he is enthusiastic about the Internet. "All that constitutes the Internet is just a bunch of computers linked to each other around the planet, but what it's created as an emergent phenomenon is this flickering composite of the human mind that changes second by second - albeit a mind as capable of a Kosovo as it is of a haiku."
noelgallagher@tinet.ie
Links
Bernie Prendergast: www.mayo-ireland.ie/mayo/bernie
Irish Art Group: www.irishart.demon.co.uk
Ernest Ruckle: www.wit.ie/art/disney/edt.htm
Tony Patrickson: www.project.ie www.pinkink.net/newart