The Web Biennial Project: Developing Distributed, Real-time, Multimedia Presentation Technologies to Develop Independent, Open, Collaborative, Exhibition Models.

Abstract

The Web Biennial (WB) is a large scale, non-national, bi-annual contemporary art exhibition created exclusively for the World Wide Web (W.W.W). Both of the Web Biennial’s in 2003 and 2005 has been announced, produced, exhibited and documented exclusively on the W.W.W. WB is an open non-curated, non-thematic exhibition and it does not have any sponsors. In the “distributed system” of the WB the participants host their own contents separately in their own servers but still exhibit together. Technically, navigation is based on a custom navigation: a specially developed search engine and a special head tag code for every participant. The collaborative model not only helps a different technical structure to function but also to prove that nonmonetary artistic cooperation can still exist in the 21st Century. As a result, the Web Biennial aims to offer an alternative approach to exhibiting online art and it brings an alternative method for exhibiting art online.