2001 seemed to be the year in which computer-based art finally got a foot in the door of the art world. Successful exhibitions featuring Net art, digital prints, and DVD installations shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City ensured mainstream recognition of an obscure art form made with emerging tools. Now, in a radically altered world, some are questioning the staying power of this new art that is expensive to produce and install, let alone maintain. With museums resorting to core programming in hopes of softening the blow of the "travel black-out," there is some fear that the door may be closing once again.

Many organizations devoted to promoting new media art are located in lower Manhattan, obviously the area that recently has been hardest hit both emotionally and financially. These non-profits are often dependent on money from grants and donations, money which was diverted to more immediate needs after the September 11 attacks. Though many foundations have made an effort to help out (in January, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts gave over $600,000 to arts organizations below 14th street), some foundations were already suffering the affects of a dragging stock market. Robert Byrd, a program officer who manages media arts at the Jerome Foundation, says that the foundation’s assets were hurting even before September 11. But he insists that new media art will not have to pay for the loss while more traditional art manages to find funding, and points out that Rhizome.org, a site that supports the Net art community, received a grant after the attacks. "We feel that new media is an important emerging field in the area of media arts," says Byrd. But he adds that, "We’re in the same sort of wait-and-see holding pattern that I think a lot of other funders are, waiting for our assets to improve and the economy in general, so we are not able to take on a lot of new grantees."

Harvestworks, a non-profit production facility that also offers courses in digital education, not only felt the absence of grant money, but also lost some production clients and experienced a 30% drop in enrollment. However, Executive Director Carol Parkinson notes that the most successful classes involve the teaching of computer programs meant for creative use, such as Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro. This would suggest that artists aren’t discouraged by costly equipment. Parkinson believes that the dotcom bust started winnowing the true devotees from those out to make a buck. Looking at the situation this way, it’s possible that if the recession endures it will only continue to improve the quality of the art. "True art," she says, "always has to come from grassroots experimentation. Now is an opportunity for artists to get serious without having to do some corporate website to hone their skills."

But serious skills don’t happen in a vacuum. They require support, and those in the media arts community felt a huge loss with the destruction of the offices of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which were in the World Trade Center complex. LMCC sponsored many artists through its celebrated World Views residency program as well as the new media initiative Thundergulch, run by director Kathy Brew. Shortly after the initial shock of the attacks had passed, Moukhtar Kocache, director of visual and media arts at LMCC, began receiving phone calls from other arts organizations and cultural producers offering partnering opportunities or other forms of assistance. Kocache welcomed the help, but slowly realized that his organization was ill-equipped to accept it. LMCC’s server was located in the WTC, and all digital files—databases, mailing lists, email programs—disappeared. "Kathy Brew lost five year’s worth of personal and professional files," says Kocache. "LMCC lost 30 years of archives. Exhibitions, residencies, presentations, performances—all of that is gone."

LMCC is slowly rebuilding its databases by recovering information from artists and funders, and was able to retrieve its mailing list, though in a raw state, from the mailing house it used to mail press releases. Kocache says that LMCC is also actively searching for a permanent space for the artist residency program. In the meantime, LMCC will set up short-term residencies around the city, and is currently exploring the World Financial Center and DUMBO, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that overlooks downtown Manhattan, as possible options for these sites.

Non-profits are not the only ones struggling. Galleries across the board—not just those who embrace new media art—have experienced plunging sales. Jeffrey Deitch opened a new gallery space in Williamsburg just days before September 11 with a show by the Net art collective Fakeshop. Though the opening was an overflowing smash, it was a sign of foreboding when the gallery abruptly closed just weeks later. Magdalena Sawon, co-owner of Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, says it was "rough sailing" from September to December. Postmasters received a great deal of attention in September due to an exhibition of Wolfgang Staehler’s Warhol-influenced live digital videos of a fixed site. By choosing to train a camera on the World Trade Center for one of the projections, Staehler’s work was tragically wrenched into a historical context over the duration of the show. The images are transmitted live through a cable connection, though amazingly on September 10th Staehler decided to create archived footage of three 24-hour days for each individual work.

Sawon had a mixed reaction to the publicity, sometimes viewing it as sensational; after a discussion with the artist the gallery decided not to sell the work commercially for fear that it would be exploited. "That was one of the decisions that prompted us to be incredibly careful in placing the work," says Sawon. "Because you can set up rules and they can all be broken, and then you can see this footage on eBay one day." She envisions the work in a prominent collection where it can continue to transmit live while perhaps broadcasting the tragic event on a small accompanying monitor.

It seems highly probable that the work will eventually find a home in an institution, since even museums that rarely venture into the experimental are finally breaking down. From Postmasters, the Jewish Museum recently acquired its first CD-ROM, a work titled Occupied Territory by Israeli artist Tirtza Even, and an upcoming show will include a Web-based artwork by Alan Schechner. Yet the Guggenheim, long a supporter of new media, withdrew its Guggenheim.com site before it even launched and has been forced to impose large budget cuts. The cuts affected a series of Internet commissions that were planned for this year and will now be released at a slower rate; those without an actual launch date are indefinitely postponed. But curator Jon Ippolito claims that the museum’s commitment has not wavered, revealing that two of the Internet commissions, by Mark Napier and John Simon, will be acquired into the permanent collection. "Internet art is a relatively cheap date and gives the museum a big bang for their buck," says Ippolito. "At the same time it is most unlike art forms dealt with in the past, but also the newest harbinger of the form that art may take in the 21st century."

The Museum of Modern Art seems to have abandoned its Internet projects after launching one by Tony Oursler, but other museums have fared better. The Whitney, which is not primarily dependent on tourist traffic, has not had to reduce budgets allocated months ago for exhibitions. This year, a number of works in the Biennial will be new media. Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts, confirms that "the Whitney is committed to digital art."

New media art will survive, though not without struggle. In the end, it will be most interesting to see how recent events change the tone of work made with emerging tools. François Bucher is a Colombian artist based in New York City who received a grant from the Jerome Foundation to create a video work before September 11. "Once 9/11 happened," he says, "I had a sense that it had to change direction, and all the images already collected were so powerful, it was as if I had a container and all these images fell in the right place." He wrote a letter to the foundation explaining that he could no longer make the piece for which he’d received the grant, and the program officer immediately accepted the change. The finished work, on display at Location 1, a non-profit gallery in SoHo that focuses on new media art, is a poignant medley of images taken from the news media interspliced with various shots of life, including people describing what the United States means to them. "A country like Colombia has acquired the ability to adapt to catastrophe after catastrophe, and people have gotten stronger in dealing with economic ups and downs," says Bucher, who has a unique perspective on the currently dismal situation. "But here in the States, when the system drops, the fall is experienced in a much more dramatic way."

Claire Barliant lives in New York City and is an associate editor at Art On Paper.