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Subject: <nettime> Leading Art Site Suspended From: "Armin Medosch" <armin@mail.easynet.co.uk> Date: 3 Mar 1998 21:31:09 +0100 * * * * * Sender: owner-nettime-l@basis.Desk.nl Precedence: bulk >From www.nytimes.com: Leading Art Site Suspended By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL=20 The Ada'web Web site, one of the most dynamic destinations for original Web-based art, is being suspended. Benjamin Weil, the co-founder of Ada'web, announced on Monday in an e-mail message that Digital City Inc., the site's publisher, had canceled its financing and that Ada'web would cease producing new artistic content. Weil is now seeking a permanent home for its archives so that its material can remain accessible. In a telephone interview on Monday afternoon, Weil (pronounced "vial") said the five Ada'web employees were expected to leave their Manhattan office by the end of the week. "It's not the most rejoicing news," Weil said. "However, this was more or less doomed to happen. Obviously, the compatibility between what Digital City is planning to do on the Web and what we've been doing is not clear. When companies restructure and refine their focus, what is not within that beam of focus is going to be taken away." Since it was conceived in late 1994, Ada'web has become one of the premier destinations for online creativity. Ultimately, it presented about 15 Web-specific projects by such high-profile contributors as the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. The site's first offering, launched officially in May 1995, was Jenny Holzer's "Please Change Beliefs." In contrast, Digital City is assembling a nationwide network of online guides to metropolitan areas, including Digital City New York. The announcement of Ada'web's demise comes 13 months after John Borthwick, the new-media pioneer and Ada'web's co-founder, sold control of WP Studio to Digital City, owned primarily by America Online and the Tribune Company. Borthwick did not returned a call for comment. Weil said: "Two weeks ago, it started becoming clear that, within the restructuring that was taking place at Digital City, there would be a serious problem. Last week, they said, 'We don't have any more money to fund this,' and then it was our decision, more or less, to stop. You know, how could we do it without money?" In addition to =F5da'web, WP Studio published Total New York, an online city guide, and The Spanker, an electronic magazine with attitude. Both of those sites will also be shuttered, although some of their seven employees may find work elsewhere within the Digital City organization, according to Sean Elder, the executive producer of Total New York. Typically, Internet-art sites are personally paid for by their creators or subsidized by a cultural or educational institution. After Ada'web fell under the Digital City corporate umbrella, skeptics started to anticipate its closing, unable to reconcile the site's high-minded mission with the mass-market orientation of the metro guides. Nor, given the often-challenging nature of the material, was commercial sponsorship a likely option. Weil agreed, saying: "For one year, it's been very difficult. We've been trying to find ways for our corporate parent to understand that there was value in this for them. It seemed like the message didn't really get through. And then we tried to go non-profit to remain online, but we realized there was very little funding available." Weil is negotiating with a "prominent" American museum to acquire the Ada'web archives, although he declined to reveal its name. He said the institution would be outside Manhattan, ruling out the Museum of Modern Art, with which Ada'web has previously collaborated on several projects. He also excluded the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which last year asked the site to donate its digits to its graphics collection. "The institution that is probably going to end up with the site is very interested in using it as the basis for a very ambitious project in collecting online art," Weil disclosed, "and also as a research and educational instrument. They've got quite a lot of ideas around it, but they won't touch the site itself. The site is going to be sealed completely." Ada'web's name is a tribute to the Countess of Lovelace, Ada Byron King, who was Lord Byron's daughter and something of a Renaissance woman. In addition to being a poet and a musician, she was a scientist who collaborated with Charles Babbage on some early computing devices. If Babbage was the father of computing, King was the mother of software, the developer of what many consider to be the first operating system. Weil, 34 years old, said Digital City had agreed to maintain Ada'web until a new home for its archive was found. The Ada'web staff is completing its last project, "Dataspace," a collaboration with the artist Laura Kurgan. Two weeks ago, Ada'web employees held an opening reception for its most-recent exhibit, "Blindspot," the first Web project by the novelist Darcey Steinke. "Little did we know it was our last party," Weil said. ________________________________________________________ Telepolis - Magazine of NetCulture http://www.heise.de/tp Office London: 52B Andrews RD, London E8 4RL Phone: +44 171 923 88 30 Fax: +44 171 923 88 31 --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de