The big tadoo over the release of the Google Art Project faded fast.  The web project that operated like Google Maps, allowing users to navigate through a museum, and zoom in and an out on certain works, proved to be a bit glitchy, omitting some rooms, leaving others with terribly low res versions of work.

The function of the project that allows users to inspect the minute detail of a selected piece in a museum was spectacular; to see the globs of paint worked onto a Van Gogh canvas is pretty thrilling.  However, the project as a whole proved we have a long way to go before we can recreate the traditional museum experience online. It got me to thinking about the incredible online art databases I use on a regular basis. If you have any interest in art, new media, or art and cinema history these are invaluable resources.

UbuWeb is a project of poet Kenneth Goldsmith in which he diligently creating a vast archive of poetry, sound, film, and video art.  The database is full of undiscovered little gems and perfect for anyone interested in mining the depths of the avant-garde.

Rhizome.org is a web publication that keeps an online database of web and new media projects as well as commissioning new work.  The archives are fun and fascinating to peruse with some projects going back to 1999. These artists projects influence that nature of how we interact with the web, often times they are harbingers of movements in social media and information sharing.  It’s interesting to see the development of ideas through the projects of artists who push our engagement with technology to new heights.

A rather contentious site for a variety of reasons, it is also a great resource for experimental work of all kinds. Without wanting to delve into the myriad issues it brings up for people, at the very least I can say that among its negative aspects, the most irksome to me is the unbearably low-quality of some of the clearly bootlegged materials they have available. Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, one of my favorite films, is found on this site at half the actual length of the piece, and in such a low-grade video transfer as to be totally inexcusable — it’s not really doing anybody a favor to see the work in this state. On the other hand, the works that are up by permission of the artists, for instance Peter Gidal’s work (from the artist via Lux) or Peter Rose (who recently responded positively in an online debate about Ubuweb) are really wonderful to have access to 24 hours a day from your own home. And for someone like me, seeing these things online only whets my appetite to see the actual films. For better or for worse—depending on your point of view — Ubuweb is appearing to come back from its attack piecemeal.

Remember Geocities? Geocities was a site I, for rather selfish reasons, wished would disappear, when a site I had created during a period of youthful indiscretion continued to cause drama for me years after I had forgotten the password to either the site or its associated email. Much correspondence trying to retrieve the password even though I couldn’t remember my username or any of the information associated with the account (I always typed in random numbers for zip codes and birthdays) led nowhere. And then, one day, Geocities was gone. Imagine how I felt when I re-discovered my own website while perusing archived Geocities pages on http://geocities.ws/. It is nice though to take a trip back to the days before fancy websites, when we just had basic HTML and panels of animated gifs for backgrounds. Perhaps the most endearing part of the archival project is the inclusion of the innumerable placeholders for sites, which simply say “I haven’t started building my site yet. Please check back soon!” And not just there, but Internet Archives, and other sites, have apparently archived much of Geocities.