electric paper
PAPER ART 7, Düren 1998
Introduction
A walk through the exhibition
Vladimir Tarasov's Nocturne for Papier
Some comments
September 6, 1998, the 7th PAPER ART Exhibition opened at the Leopold - Hoesch - Museum in Dueren, Germany. PAPER ART, a biennale of paper, this time with the title electric paper.
Artists from many countries were invited, two of the winners of the Award of the Paper Industry came from the States.
The main topic of this year's exhibition is the Integration of the New Media.
But this topic was at least poor and badly realized.
The title of this Biennale is: electric paper. It's one of these titels which make it very difficult to find the meaning, but, as it is, they always found the way from electric to electronic.
What they mean with New Media? This can only be the Internet, and Internet? Internet is the WWW ...
This equation didn't work at the last Dokumenta X, but Dueren is far away from Kassel ...
So, the speaker of the Union of German Paper Industries spoke about the Coexistence of Paper and Internet, and the other honorable speaker, a Professor of Arts, talked about the medium Fax. He seens not to be infected until now, nearly a pre-digital state of mind...
But, where was the Internet? It was either unnoticable, it played a minor role or it was realized absolutely in a bad way, but everybody talked about it...
Michael Petry created a tornado of confetti (produced by electricity) for his installation "Twistor - Information Overload: Electronic Blizzard" and he projected an Internet Datastream into it: ok, I (a confessing asthmatician) lost my breath by the dust, which was turned around as well, 
but I am sure other visitors didn't detect this datastrom either, at least they did not recognize it as an Internet Datastream ... please tell me: what is an Internet Datastream?
A lonesome PC with an unheeded monitor, standing in a corner, and there were HTML - Pages on the monitor: missing graphic files, blue background, fonts unreadable, tables so wide that you had to scroll 200%, but no content... everything done following the adverts: "How to create a homepage whithout knowing what I am doing..." but it is Internet, and they say it was done by artists, so it must be Internet Art!
In front of the museum, on a green meadow, an installation was to found which was somehow related with the Internet as well and there were cardboards, which could be moved and closes and one of the installation was feeded by data from the Internet, they say, they also say that the data of the visitors are collected in an interactive way and feeded back to he Internet at the end of the exhibition....
More and more I find that the ignorance and the curator's fear to show his / her ignorance gets exploited and that the Internet is the pretext for art products which have no other pretext (except the artist's ignorance....)
So my gratulations go to the award winners, Dan Senn, Michael Petry and Han de Groot (he had to fight his fight with the curator's ignorance as well...). Senn and de Groot, they produced art without too much pretexts.
Let me ascertain, that again