ARTS WIRE

ARTS WIRE was the arts, online, a decade before that was an ordinary thing to be. A program of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), it ran from 1992 to 2002 as a social platform and Internet presence provider for the nonprofit arts: it began with a text interface—modems, commands, and patience—and moved to the web in 1996. By 2001 it hosted over 80 online conferences and more than 100 websites for artists and arts organizations, with a directory linking over 400 members. Judy Malloy, who joined its staff in 1993, edited its newsletter until 2004, and wrote its history, summarizes its decade as “creating networked community and presence for the non-profit arts”.

The idea predates the web. In 1988 a group of artists and arts workers met on Orcas Island, in a gathering organized by NYFA, to discuss new ways of supporting artists; Seattle artist and arts administrator Anne Focke proposed what became ARTS WIRE—a virtual place for the arts of all kinds—and NYFA’s executive director Ted Berger shared and backed the vision. ARTS WIRE was initially led by Focke and then by Michigan poet Joe Matuzak, who became its director in 1995. Its staff never shared a building: they met as a virtual office in a staff conference—New York, Ann Arbor, Norfolk, Detroit, Seattle, Northern California—and its steering committee met online too.

The conferences were the place itself. ARTISTS served artists generally; AIDSwire carried AIDS information; the Center for Safety in the Arts covered art hazards; WESTAF ran its ARTJOB listings there; the National Performance Network did its business there. NewMusNet, one of the first interest groups, began in the summer of 1992 as a virtual place for new music, coordinated by composers Pauline Oliveros, David Mahler, and Douglas Cohen—the same Doug Cohen who is one of Scibe’s eight writers (see the writers). Diversity was structural, not decorative: the Native Arts Network Association and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures were members, PROJECTARTNET brought schoolchildren from San Diego immigrant neighborhoods online to write a community history, and in 1996 ARTS WIRE hosted the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College.

One conference matters most to this site. INTERACTIVE—the Interactive Art Conference—was founded in 1993 by Anna Couey and Judy Malloy as, in its own words, “a laboratory for focussed discussion and production of interactive art”, defining interactive art as involving “exchange between its originator, work, and participants”. It ran a virtual artist-in-residence program—Tim Collins and Reiko Goto were among the residents—and its discussion ranged across computer-mediated literature, social sculpture, art telecommunications, electronic art, artists’ books, public art, installation, and performance. Its members, as its own page records, “collectively created my name is scibe”: the ARTS WIRE half of the work was written in this room.

ARTS WIRE also published. Its weekly electronic newsletter began as Hotwire under editors Anna Couey and Penny Boyer, became Arts Wire Current under David Green, and was edited by Malloy from 1996 to 2004—renamed NYFA Current in November 2002. It covered the arts information the major media did not carry: new music, alternative art spaces, performance art, censorship, diversity, arts advocacy, small companies—and, in the weeks after September 11, 2001, the New York arts community’s own losses, in some of the earliest sustained reporting of them.

The standing it earned was real: a 1997 ComputerWorld designation named ARTS WIRE one of the 100 most effective organizations at using Internet technology, and the Detroit Free Press called it “the poster child for Internet theory 101; that’s the one that says those who focus their attention on content will rule the Web.” ARTS WIRE ended in 2002; its newsletter ran on as NYFA Current until 2004. Malloy’s judgment on the decade is the right close: participation in ARTS WIRE gave a generation of artists and arts workers the confidence and experience that “greatly contributed to creating the rich and diverse presence of the arts in the contemporary Internet.”

Sources and further reading