Jocelyn Taylor, Installation view of
"Something Private"
exhibited in "Voyeur's Delight,"
September 6 to October 12 1996.
Photo by Marty Heitner

Altogether, Franklin Furnace got in trouble four times with the forces of darkness in Congress and among conservative Christian right groups. In September, 1996, the Christian Action Network mounted a performance art spectacular on the steps of the Capitol Building to protest the $132,000 in federal dollars (not true) we were spending on our Voyeur's Delight exhibition, and to call for the death of the NEA. Their press release linked us with the virus eating away at the health of the body politic, and the performance included two coffins and a guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper. (I think it says something when the Christian conservatives recognize the power of performance art tactics in getting their point across.) But this time, Franklin Furnace was building its website as its public face, so I decided to put up a page called U-B-D-Judge, to collect public comment, both positive and negative, regarding the works in exhibition. We reprinted CAN's press release in its entirety, and ours; and asked permission of the artists to publish their work on our site, each piece accompanied by the artist's statement explaining why Jocelyn Taylor had a speculum up her vagina, for example. Sure enough, this page has generated both positive and negative comment, intelligent and stupid comment, all of it valid and important to the discourse that surrounds and emanates from contemporary art.

In 1996-97, I mounted a pair of 20th Anniversary exhibitions to go out of the physical space with a bang: Voyeur's Delight, organized by Barbara Rusin and Grace Roselli (discussed above) examined the power of looking; and In the Flow: Alternate Authoring Strategies, traced the evolution during the last two decades of art as flowing information rather than property, including works by Sol LeWitt, Group Material, Louise Lawler, Frank Gillette and David Ross, the Thing, X Art Foundation, Guerilla Girls and others. On February 1, 1997 this exhibition closed, and Franklin Furnace's website, www.franklinfurnace.org, was launched as the institution's public face.

Also during the fateful year of 1996 I developed a pilot tape to show to cable and broadcast television producers in what turned out to be a futile effort to get performance artists on television. It was called Untitled, and it showed a wide array of artists' approaches to the subject of sex - since the commonly-held belief is that that's all we think about anyway, I wanted to show approaches that were humorous, despairing, scary, satirical of corporate exploitation - a wide range of approach. Some members of my Board felt this represented a tactical error, and that I would never succeed in catching the interest of TV execs. And indeed, after meeting with Lorne Michaels, Tom Freston, Eileen Katz, Mary Salter, Susan Wittenberg, Sue West and a bunch more executive types, it became clear to me that broadcast and cable television represents an entrenched industry, one that has become highly regulated, developing "standards of conduct" and clear taboos in order to continue to blast content directly into our homes.

Meanwhile, I was being courted by Internet-based broadcast companies. Sensory Networks, Thinking Pictures, Pseudo Programs -- these start-up companies were broadcasting streaming video over the net. At first, I was put off by the tiny, jerky image and the cramped, smoke-filled facilities that Sensory Networks was proposing to use to mount a performance art program. Galinsky, spoken word artist and Executive Producer of ChannelP, the performance channel of Pseudo Programs, Inc., had proposed a performance program in collaboration with Franklin Furnace during the Summer of 1997, but I blew it off because their studio was not capacious, nor set up for visual artists -- Josh Harris, the founder of Pseudo, had established it as a radio network. But luckily at the same moment (Fall, 1997) Pseudo was preparing to become the largest producer of television-style broadcast over the Internet. Further, these guys wanted MORE Annie Sprinkle. They were not only not afraid of the tendency of artists to get naked, they embraced the challenging stuff wholeheartedly.

When the ink dried on the contract selling Franklin Furnace's loft in September, 1997, the Board went into a paroxysm of doubt about what a virtual institution was, what its programs should be and for whom, so we entered a soul-searching process that included a series of town meetings with artists and others within and without the artworld; I commenced an itinerary of travel and research, attending conferences such as Silicon Alley 98, Circuits@nys, and Museums and the Web; and commenced to meet and talk, to re-evaluate and re-imgine Franklin Furnace's role as an "alternative space" at the end of this century.

At this same dark time, we were mounting our first ever netcasting program, Franklin Furnace at Pseudo Programs, Inc., in the Spring of 1998. Ten artists selected from among proposals to the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art were invited to prepare performance works for netcasting to a worldwide audience. Galinsky and I winged a contract that gave artists six hours of production time for 50-minute shows uninterrupted by commercial breaks. Halona Hilbertz, Bingo Gazingo, Patricia Hoffbauer, Jon Keith, Jason Bowman, Anna Mosby Coleman, Kali Lela Colton, Lenora Champagne, Nora York and Alvin Eng toured Pseudo's facilities and began to loft their ideas to Galinsky, who could explain how ideas might look translated into the new art medium of netcasting.

By our second season, September 1998 to July, 1999, we revised the length of the show to 30 minutes because our experience had demonstrated that artists did not usually have enough material to fill nearly an hour of air time; further, as the season progressed, it became clear that the discourse we had hoped to engender would need some priming at the pump. Consequently, Franklin Furnace and the participating artists developed a format that was optional, but got used much of the time: I would introduce the work; the netcast would proceed; then the show would end with a question-and-answer period with the artist, the public communicating on the "chat" lines and invited guests of the artist and Franklin Furnace (such as Moira Roth, performance art critic; Jessica Chalmers, performance artist and critic for the Village Voice; Robert Atkins, cybercommentator). In this way, we successfully developed a dialogue about the work, performance art, the new art medium of netcasting, the body of the artist and the net, among other more mundane subjects like what foods New Yorkers like.

Our audience had fundamentally changed from 75 people sitting on hard folding chairs to an international audience of aficionados who view netcasts on their computer terminals: artists, art professionals, college students, office workers--and we think geeks and young folks, though we're not sure; we get statistical analyses of the number of .coms, .nets, .edus, .govs and have found that viewers in the United States are down the list after Japan, Australia, Eastern Europe, Western European countries! In gross numbers, we have seen our audience increase from an average of 500 "hits" a week in our first season, to 600 in our second, to 700 now.

With the change in the presentation of avant-garde art has come a fundamental shift in the relationship of the artist to audience as well. "Chat" allows the audience to interact with the artist, to ask questions about the work. Artists may utilize chat commentary by members of the audience as part and parcel of their performance, as Anna Mosby Coleman did in an non, during which she sang words that appeared on the computer terminal before her. Artists may also pre-record their performance entirely as did Alvin Eng, in order to fully respond to questions and comments during the live netcast. An artist may build an analysis of digital technology into the content of the work, as did Rae C. Wright in her piece entitled Art Thieves, a sendup of the notion of originality in Western art. Or the artist may utilize chance to allow audience members to experience different versions of a performance, as Kathy Westwater used Shockwave to randomize dance sequences so that no two audience members see the same presentation.