The Making of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology: Yael Kanarek's "World of Awe"

In 2016, Rhizome launched Net Art Anthology, a major online exhibition exploring the diversity of practices called "net art" through the research, restoration, and exhibition of 100 important works. On January 22, an exhibition of seventeen works from the Anthology premiered at the New Museum in NYC. This Google Arts & Culture exhibit is one of five discussing preservation challenges in bringing the Anthology to life and making net art accessible for years to come.

"World of Awe" is an ongoing multi-platform project by Yael Kanarek. Centered by three chapters created between 2000 and 2006, the work follows an unnamed character known as the Traveler through a desolate virtual world, Sunset/Sunrise, which is accessed through a portal in New York’s East Village. 'Chapter 1: Forever' was presented as part of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. It tells the story of how the Traveler searches for a lost treasure, while writing love letters and journal entries on a laptop that they have rebuilt from electronic scrap.

Entering "World of Awe," the user lands on a simulated computer desktop environment which houses a rendering of a desert landscape—the parallel world of Sunset/Sunrise, where the Traveler journeys. Visitors access the Traveler’s story by opening their files, reading accounts of their journey and their love letters. Kanarek's work brought a ubiquitous, utilitarian cultural interface—the computer desktop—to a timeless narrative genre, the travelogue, and to the enduring artists’ task of world-building.

To present "World of Awe," Rhizome utilized the Emulation as a Service (EaaS) framework pioneered with the University of Freiburg in Germany. Though the work only requires a browser with Adobe Flash, EaaS allows the piece to be shown via Internet Explore 4.5 running on Mac OS 9. As Kanarek's work so thoughtfully engages GUI vocabulary contemporaneous to its creation, its wholesale context is as crucial to accessing and understanding the work as the performance of objects created by the artist. True access to net art often requires a careful reconstruction of context.