M.River (Tim Whidden) — MTAA — Simple Net Art Diagram

1997

Artists: M.River (Tim Whidden), T.Whid (Michael Sarff) · Year: 1997 · Medium: Diagrammatic web artwork — simple visual document showing two computers connected by a line labeled "art" · Substrate: Small HTML document containing one SVG-like diagram: two boxes connected by a line, with arrows indicating "art" happening between them · Place: New York, USA · Institution: M.River & T.Whid Art Associates (MTAA) M.River & T.Whid Art Associates (MTAA) — the working collaborative of M. River (Tim Whidden) and T. Whid (Michael Sarff) — posted a single image file to their website in 1997: a stick-figure diagram showing two computers connected by a cable, with a small cartoon lightning bolt traveling along the wire between them, labeled simply "The Art Happens Here." The image was 640 pixels wide, rendered in the kind of deliberately crude style that Microsoft Paint encouraged. It had no title bar, no frame, no context. It was, by every conventional measure, almost nothing. It has since become one of the single most-reproduced diagrams in new-media art theory. The Simple Net Art Diagram argued, in a single image, that net.art's substrate was the connection between machines, not the screens those machines displayed. Where the art criticism of 1997 was still struggling to locate where the artwork "was" in a network-distributed piece (was it on the artist's server? in the browser? in the network layer? on the client?) MTAA's diagram answered flatly: the art happens in the transmission. The image has been quoted in more than a hundred subsequent academic papers on net.art and is now regarded as the iconic shorthand for the medium's defining conceptual move. What makes the diagram work is its refusal of complexity. It is a one-frame cartoon. It could be drawn by a child. It looks like a technical-support infographic from a 1995 AOL manual. That specific register — mass-produced, unpretentious, almost dumb — is the argument. Net.art is not making rarefied intellectual objects for a museum. It is doing something that can be explained on a diagram a child could draw, between two computers that anyone could buy. MTAA's larger practice — 1 Year Performance Video (2004, their durational response to Tehching Hsieh), The Karaoke Text Project (2001), and dozens of smaller browser-based works — extends the argument the diagram established. They continued to work together from 1996 until Sarff's death in 2017. Whidden continues to maintain MTAA's archive online; the Simple Net Art Diagram remains available at the original URL at www.mteww.com. Lore Sarff and Whidden met at the School of Visual Arts in New York in the mid-1990s; the MTAA collaboration began in 1996. They chose the M. River / T. Whid pseudonyms partly for the comic formality and partly because those handles were easier to type than their real names in the era before email auto-complete. The Simple Net Art Diagram was drawn, according to Whidden, in perhaps fifteen minutes during a conversation about how to explain to a non-technical friend what their work was. They uploaded the image to MTAA's server, and it propagated through the small 1997 net.art mailing-list community within days, attached to posts and reused without permission (and, in MTAA's view, entirely appropriately — the diagram's circulation was its purpose). Sarff's death in 2017 was sudden and the community felt it sharply; Whidden's memorial post, at mteww.com, remains one of the more moving documents in the late-1990s net.art archive. Sources • M.River & T.Whid Art Associates — mteww.com (primary archive). • Greene, Rachel — Internet Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004). • Rhizome ArtBase — MTAA collection.