<nettime> an open letter about .museum

["Jon Ippolito" <JIppolito@guggenheim.org>]

4 December 2000

An open letter to Cary Karp (ck@nrm.se) 
President, Museum Domain Management Association
Director, Department of Information Technology, Swedish Museum of 
     National History

Dear Dr. Karp:

In a time of accelerated change, small decisions can have far-reaching
effects--and that fact compels me to voice a perspective, outside of my
official capacity as Assistant Curator of Media Arts and not necessarily
representing the position of my museum, that I have not seen aired in the
debate thus far. 

As you know, even as innocent a choice as how to name Web sites can gently
steer us toward a more open or closed society. Take the recent decision by
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to add
shiny new domain suffixes to dusty old ".org" and its peers--the first such
additions to the Internet's name space since the 1980s. As a driving force
behind the Museum Domain Management Association's proposal of a ".museum"
suffix, you must have been very pleased at ICANN's approval of .museum
along with ".info," ".coop," and four other generic Top Level Domains. By
proposing to reserve a sector of the Internet name space specifically to
museums, you and your colleagues have shown that you understand the
profound identity crisis facing museums at the dawn of the digital age. In
a world where artists, musicians, and other producers can tap into the
Internet to reach a far-flung audience instantaneously, it's understandable
that brick-and-mortar institutions would be anxious to redefine themselves
beyond their previous roles as centralized repositories of culture. From my
dual perspective as an online artist and a new media curator, I am
convinced that this redefinition is essential to the long-term livelihood
of both museums and the cultural heritage they are charged with preserving.

Of course, you can't redefine a plot of real estate--geographic or
virtual--without redefining your neighbors' estates. Yet one question that
I have not seen discussed in the public debate is how the addition of a
.museum suffix might affect online creativity that takes place *outside* a
museum setting. I personally believe that this issue should be critical to
anyone who cares about museums or the future of online culture. Although I
am writing from a visual arts perspective, I believe my concerns may
translate into other museological disciplines as well.

To understand the ways .museum might obscure online creativity, it's
important to understand why .org and company stimulated it. Before .museum,
all someone needed to try out a new curatorial paradigm was twenty-five
dollars for a domain name, a healthy dose of sweat equity, and some
interesting content. Armed with .orgs and .nets, creative people found new
ways to share culture outside of the constraints of the offline status quo.
For artists, this meant exhibiting on the Web's boundless frontier instead
of trying to get a foot in the door of a SoHo gallery. For critics, it
meant posting to unmoderated listserves instead of pining to be published
in _Art in America_. For viewers with a modem, it meant looking at art
anytime, anywhere--without paying MoMA's admission price. Art thrived in
this environment; in 1995 8% of all Web sites were made by artists. And
because there was no special naming convention to segregate artworks from
the rest of culture, many people stumbled upon art sites who might never
have stepped foot inside a museum.

Enter .museum. In contrast to generic suffixes like .org and .edu, .museum
represents a much more restricted criterion. For the first time, permission
to register a top-level domain will be determined by membership in a
private association, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the vast
majority of whose members--we must be honest here--have hitherto treated
the Internet primarily as an electronic billboard to advertise their
offline programs. (By comparison, academic institutions have a reasonable
claim to .edu given that they helped get the fledgling Internet on its
feet.) Leaving aside the question of whether the unprecedented specificity
of .museum opens the door to comparable domain suffixes like .travelservice
and .florist, I am curious about the effect you and your colleagues expect
.museum to have on online creativity.

In its October 3rd press release, ICOM stated that a major goal of the new
domain suffix was to bridge the digital divide:

"Many museums already have a presence on the Internet, while others, due
partly to financial and technical limitations, are moving into cyberspace
more slowly. Developing a clear cyberspace identity for the museum
community as a whole is expected to help bridge this digital divide.
Proponents believe that .museum, along with value-added services that can
be provided to its members, will give museums that have not yet
participated actively in the development of the Internet the support to do
so."

I am sure that this argument appealed to ICANN, which is charged with the
difficult task of expanding the Web's name space without undermining its
open architecture. (ICANN seems to take this mandate seriously enough to
have rejected suffixes like .union and .health as "insufficiently
democratic.") Your own arguments echo this egalitarian appeal to broaden
the representation of cultural institutions online; for example, you argued
that a .arts suffix would exclude museums devoted to science or history. So
let's assume for the sake of argument that .museum will encourage more
smaller museums to take the leap to cyberspace. What of the countless
offline alternative spaces and exhibition halls that do not maintain a
permanent collection of objects? Many have played critical roles in
nurturing contemporary artists and movements; you can't think of Cindy
Sherman without thinking of Artists Space or Robert Mapplethorpe without
Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. Yet once we museums have claimed the
best of the virtual real estate, what chance do these numerous alternative
spaces have of competing for hits from the lay public? In an attention
economy like the Web, small advantages can make big differences. Jane Doe
looks up the artist Bill Viola in a search engine and gets links for five
.orgs and one .museum. Which link is she going to follow?

The gap between .museum haves and have-nots looks even wider once I take
into account the countless virtual studios and exhibition spaces where
artists create and exhibit their work. There are a host of fascinating and
valuable museumlike resources online that would not qualify for the
International Council of Museum's definition of a museum--which at its root
requires institutions to collect *material*
(www.icom.org/release.museum.html). This definition would exclude all
online cultural archives, whether they collect Internet art projects,
digital videos of political conventions, or audio testimonies to the
Holocaust. I believe that many in the online community will view the
International Council of Museums' support for .museum as a smokescreen to
cover the embarrassing fact that artist collectives and online art sites,
from ada'web to Nicholas Pioche's WebLouvre, established important online
presences well before their brick-and-mortar equivalents. If the shoe were
on the other foot, wouldn't brick-and-mortar institutions balk at a rule
that forbade them from using the word "Museum" in their signage if they
didn't have a Web site?

If .museum doesn't exactly bridge the digital divide, then perhaps its true
benefit lies merely in convenience. I've seen arguments that .museum would
make it easier for people specifically in search of brick-and-mortar
museums. Doubtless this may be true to an extent, but studies indicate that
very few people actually look for things online by guessing the url; surely
these people could use search engines or the various category-oriented
directories online (like the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal's
excellent Mediatheque). Another convenience I've seen ascribed to .museum
would be the reduction in time-consuming cybersquatting litigation. Yet
registering "museumofmodernart.museum" will do nothing by itself to stop
others from registering such homonyms as "museum_of_modern_art.org" or
"museum-of-modern-art.org." (Memo to MoMA: you missed these.) Do these
marginal benefits to brick-and-mortar museums justify decreased attention
for Internet-based nonprofits? In answering this question, it's important
to keep in mind that our mandate as museums is not to compete with the
cultural production going on outside our walls, but to reflect and preserve
it. How unfortunate it would be for established museums to unwittingly
erase the heritage they are meant to preserve by gerrymandering the name
space!

Software engineers like Gene Kan predict that the rise of file-sharing
protocols, instant messenging, and other non-Web communication will
splinter the Internet's name space into enough competing protocols to
thwart the control of organizations like ICANN. Until that happens, how do
you propose to counteract the shadow that .museum might cast on the broader
cultural landscape? Do you believe the International Council of Museums
should drop the requirement that registrants of ".museum" fit its
definition of a museum? Or might it be better merely to require registrants
to supply new definitions to be uploaded to www.icom.org to stimulate
debate on the subject?

It would be especially misguided for institutions whose mandate is to
preserve history to condone a protocol that would encourage its erasure. I
am very interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject in the hopes
that a dialogue will help elucidate the proper function of a museum in the
21st century.

Jon Ippolito

Cc:
Valerie Jullien, Communications Officer
International Council of Museums
Jullien@icom.org

Kenneth Hamma, Assistant Director
The J. Paul Getty Museum
khamma@getty.edu

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