In a tactical maneuver of another sort, this year's Whitney Biennial, which opened on April 23rd, "debuts" Internet artists for the first time (within its walls, concrete and virtual). The chosen method of presentation involves a single computer on a desk, where links to the works appear. A solitary user sitting at the desk in the darkened section of the gallery chooses a project to view and it is projected to large proportions on the wall for all to see. The projects can also be accessed via links on the Whitney's website and via a "bank of computers" in one of the museum's galleries. Such a presentation opens up an institution to many problems in regards to presentation. Among them, "virtual proximity" issues: virtual proximity online becomes physical proximity when a work of online art in inserted into a brick-and-mortar system of presentation.

Jenny Holzer, as Jon Ippolito points out, possibly exposes herself to "algorithmic liability" in her online work, Please Change Beliefs, in which her famous (and originally offline) "truisms" are opened up for public comment and distortion. For example, a person could change Holzer's truism "People who don't work with their hands are parasites" to say "Jews and blacks are parasites." Could such racist and abhorrent comments be linked to Holzer, as it is her project in which such statements appear? Ippolito claims that Napier (in reference to Shredder) and Holzer could hide behind "the moral shield of the First Amendment, since they have essentially created an alternative public space for others to express their views or target enemies" if content generated out of their work was deemed offensive.

Bring any of the above works or RIOT/RIOT 1.5 or any online project that utilizes outside web content, however, under the auspices of a museum for the purposes of an exhibition, and the notion of public space constructed in and around the online space shifts. Immunity from "algorithmic liability" online serves an artist like Napier well, for how can he be held liable for the content violations that the users of RIOT perform? Simply move them inside walls of a museum and the museum becomes liable for, say, anti-Semitic slogans or child pornography. The Whitney, for one, cannot take that chance. Institutions presenting works that have any sort of formal interrogation of online structures of which open an uninhibited access to content plays are critical role. For instance, if Napier's RIOT were allowed to happen, projected life-size on the walls of a museum there would be no one to point fingers at, no First Amendment to attach to a persona. Napier only set up the situation. Even demonizing the artist, as was done with Mapplethorpe and Serrano, will get you nowhere. Napier is behind the scenes.

The reliance on the object as something to which value can be attached, fosters a reliance on offline modes of presentation for online works, like large screen projections. Regardless of what one might think of the content being scrambled, a competition to shred computer pornography websites via the RIOT engine seems somehow conceptually strong when it is done on a computer screen, where the understanding of its distribution is at hand. Projecting RIOT on a large screen or piece of wall, disembodied from its context and relying old presentational tropes, robbing RIOT of its power to subvert and creating pure sensationalism within the gallery space.