artport Brings 25 Years of Whitney Net Art to the Galleries

One of the commissions in artport: A History of Internet Art is Auriea Harvey's SITE1 (2023), a scroll-driven fly-through that starts at a spinning, machinic wheel and slowly turns into a cave. The wheel is an abstracted star chart built from L.O.C.K., an earlier work from Tale of Tales, the studio Harvey ran with Michaël Samyn. The cave holds pieces of the characters from Harvey's sculpture Ox, including Minoriea, a goddess who is half woman and half bull and has been the artist's avatar in virtual worlds since 2017. The Whitney calls the piece an archaeological dig into the "origin site" of Harvey's characters.

The exhibition marks 25 years of artport, the Whitney's online space for net art commissions, which launched in 2001, and gathers more than 100 works made for it, online and on the museum's sixth floor, where the open plan is meant to suggest "floating browser windows." Christiane Paul, the Whitney's curator of digital art, organized it with David Lisbon and Colin Brooks around artport's own categories: the Gate Pages of 2001 to 2006, the ongoing Commissions, and the Sunrise/Sunset series and its successor, On the Hour.

The other commissioned artists include Golan Levin, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Casey Reas, Morehshin Allahyari, Nancy Baker Cahill and Leo Castañeda, whose Camoflux Recall Grotto, made for this year's Whitney Biennial, is a browser game about tending "cyberflora" in a primordial garden. The timed Sunrise/Sunset and On the Hour pieces come from JODI, Rafaël Rozendaal, American Artist, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Peter Burr and Maya Man. The artist duo Operator premieres Human Unreadable Act III, the last part of its generative choreography work, and a 300-page catalogue edited by Paul is out Nov. 24. Jonah Brucker-Cohen, whose 2012 commission with Katherine Moriwaki is in the artport collection, announced the catalogue in October.