The Greek-born Miltos MANETAS and his cohorts had claimed to be getting 23 U-Hauls ready to display Flash animation pieces by 200 young designers, programmers and assorted digital artists. On the night of the Whitney's party, the trucks were to drive around and around the museum (which takes up a block on the Upper East Side of Manhattan), diverting the attention of the invitation-only guests. As it turned out, it was all a hoax. Or rather, "It went great!" as Manetas says. "The trucks were not there, of course. The U-Haul idea was only an advertisement" for what he calls a para-site exhibition of Flash works at www.whitneybiennial.com (not .org), a domain he registered for the purpose. "They were invisible trucks," he says. "We would have never made them in real life even with the most generous sponsorship." The Great Whitney U-Haul Scam is only part of what Manetas calls a "worldwide artistic movement" that has been a few years in the making. In 1999 Manetas was one of an increasing number of artists who used software, the Internet and other digital media to make and display, or provide the content for, their work. Manetas himself had produced traditional oil paintings of wires, cables and computer hardware, created short looped fragments of video games such as "Tomb Raider" and exhibited computer-generated "screen grabs," among other things. But he was impatient with critics and curators who had yet to come up with a really good "-ism" for this new generation of creativity. After securing financial assistance from a non-profit organisation called the Art Production Fund, Manetas went out and hired Lexicon Branding, a California firm responsible for creating such product names as Powerbook, Pentium, Zima, Swiffer and Dasani. Lexicon's assignment was to create a name for this new movement. The word Manetas wanted was "not exclusively about technology in art, but more about the style, about the psychological landscape," he has explained. "We have two kind of lives now -- a real life and a simulated one. I wanted to give a name to this psychology." In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan -- and a panel of people like Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker ready to provide (tongue-in-cheek) analysis of the term -- Manetas unveiled the new word. Actually, it was the squeaky, synthetic voice of a Sony Vaio that made the announcement.
www.manetas.com