Comment posted to Rhizome.org re: the restoration of Agatha Appears, a net art work by Olia Lialina:
I am proud to be a part of the new webring for Agatha.
In a talk at Bryce Wolkowitz gallery a while back Olia Lialina discussed the context of this work when it was made [1997] versus the present context.
Everything on the Web loaded slowly and you never knew what was coming up or when.
Consumers had more patience because they were accustomed to this.
Her art played with the uncertainties of this new vehicle.
To consume the site now you should know you are meant to keep clicking somewhere on the page in a state of semi-frustration. You don't get to the globe hopping web ring without navigating a series of popups and new pages that you have to keep clicking, clicking.
I raised a point in the new media vs artists with computers discussion that no one responded to. For proles like me who use Windows at home because it is the workplace default, there has been a certain loss of innocence about clicking pop ups, or clicking a lot of unknown places on a web page. IE is called Internet Exploder for a reason. Even with Firefox 3 we still get trojans pushed onto our computers (and Firefox 3 wouldn't allow certain popups on Agatha).
So, because of this menace, clicking around websites is not viewed with pleasure but with trepidation. Isn't this a fundamental change in the work and should restorers be taking this into consideration? Should critics and curators of web art?
Update: Just to clarify--not saying Lialina's project is infected, merely that it was made before infection became an everyday occurrence.