by Peter Lunenfeld

It's precisely because I was there at the beginning, and not at the end,that I feel I was the Whitneybiennial.com's perfect participant/spectator.

It started with a late night visit to the Electronic Orphanage, one of Miltos
Manetas's open-source, gift economy gestures that the art world finds so
hard to understand.

Why did he open a space on the emerging gallery strip of
LA's Chung King Road if he wasn't going to sell art? Why didn't he ever let anyone "in to" the gallery?

The shows centered around Flash-based
projections, and people watched from the sidewalk through the plate glass
windows of the gallery, often wondering at the expanse of space that was being "wasted" by not positioning other artworks, or even a bar, inside.

But for me, this potlatch of square footage was part of the confusion that a trickster spreads, and while Miltos is many things, he most certainly revels in his Pan/Loki/Brer Rabbit personae.

But the trickster also maintains an
expansive side, and for those of us who were let into the Orphanage, it
functioned as a meeting room cum play space, a ludic bubble surrounded on
all sides by the commercial miasma of art and tech.

So, it was after midnight, and we were just floating along, surfing Web
sites and drinking beer, when the topic of the Whitney Biennial came up.

One of the best things about being in LA is that New York's seasonal obsessions seem distant, like phantom limbs. Sure, there weren't enough LA artists represented, but then again, there never are. As for the net.art selection, by 2002 the very concept seemed so very self-important in a 1998 dot.com kind of way.

Almost simultaneously, Miltos and I started laughing about how funny it would be if the Whitney hadn't covered itself by purchasing all the domain names it could related to its big show. We dove for the keyboard, did
some "whois" searches and realized to our amazement that the museum hadn't
thought to pick up Whitneybiennial.com.

Miltos bought it immediately. Then, there was question of what to do with it.

From the start, I never felt that Manetas wanted to create some sort of lame, electronic salon de refusés from the net.art component of the show. He
started out by simply proposing a Flash show, in part because the critical and aesthetic establishment -- such as it is in the net.art world -- was made so unhappy by Flash's gentle learning curve.

I'd done a little probe, a "utility" rather than a manifesto, for Miltos on Flash as the new Pop-Tech for a show he'd put together in Albania of all places, so I was interested to see where he's take the project in a vastly more public arena. I had the sense that no matter what form it took, this little intervention was going to bear some interesting fruit.

When Miltos told me that he was going to have trucks outfitted with projectors circling the Whitney on Madison Avenue the night of the opening, I was impressed, but not exactly convinced. But then again, I had no interest in debunking him. Like the endless succession of dreary Whitney Biennials themselves, the idea of Whitneybiennial.com was the most
compelling part.

And it was that idea, that nothing that is something, that ignited people¹s imaginations. I was somewhere between bemused and shocked to see that in its promo piece published the day before the opening, the venerable New York Times gave Miltos's unknown, unseen, and frankly immaterial show a third of the coverage it gave the actual flesh and blood and paint and canvas "real" Biennial.

I answered questions from that same
paper about Whitneybiennial.com without knowing, or wanting to know, if it was "going to happen" or not.

Frankly by hitting the pages of America¹s newspaper of record, it did "happen." I wasn't in New York to see the disappointed faces of people who wanted trucks, and I wasn't in the newsroom to gauge the reaction of journalists who treated fantasy as promise, but then again, I didn't care.

I'm a fan of the phantasmagoric, the luftmenschen's delirium, the virtually
virtual.

I like it when nothing happening is something.