Twenty websites, behaving themselves

This fall, twenty websites lived at 39 Great Jones Street. They weren’t screenshots or screen recordings. They were live websites, running in a gallery, every day of the show.

They behaved themselves all week long. If you’ve ever installed anything that depends on a browser, you know that’s not a small thing.

The show was WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!, and my favorite part of it was the door. People would walk in, look around and ask some version of: what the hell is this? That’s a great question. It’s the question the work is asking too.

Online, a website is something you pass through. You land, you scroll, you leave, usually in under a minute and usually while doing three other things. Nobody is standing next to you explaining what you’re looking at, or why it’s built the way it is. The context layer that makes this work legible just isn’t there.

In the gallery it was. We could walk people through the work slowly, one piece at a time, in a way that felt closer to a conversation in someone’s home than a museum tour. That slowness did something. People who came in skeptical ended up in a real dialogue about what counts as art and what doesn’t, which is exactly the conversation I want people to be having.

Opening night was buzzing. The room was full, the artists were there, and it was strange and lovely to watch a crowd gather around a browser window the way they’d gather around a painting.

Collectors showed up too, and that part is worth sitting with. Collecting a website is not a solved problem. What exactly do you own? Who keeps it running? What happens when the browser changes underneath it? The artists in the show didn’t all agree on the answers, and I loved that. Some had very different philosophies about what it means to sell, support or steward a piece of the web. Seeing artists and collectors willing to experiment with those answers, instead of forcing the work into a shape it doesn’t fit, was the real news of the week.

Then there’s the part that makes it last. Rhizome archived every work in the show, and each one now lives on a Rhizome subdomain. The conversation we had in that room doesn’t disappear when the lights go off. For an art form that is always one expired domain away from vanishing, that matters a lot.

I’ll write more about this. There’s a longer essay in here about showing the web offline, and what collecting looks like when the object is a URL. For now: twenty websites, one room, a lot of people asking good questions. It was a really special moment.