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How do I get rich, someone googles. Why is television all about stars and celebrities, another twitters. Yet another puts their family photos on the web. All of it is happening now! The Gateways exhibition draws a line between the present and real time. By Alexandra Mangel

The first time you stroll across the cobblestones of Tallinn’s medieval Town Hall square, past quaint taprooms and little shops that are full to the gables with traditional arts and crafts, you can hardly believe it: is this the country that produces digital information technology like no other in Europe? Where 70 percent of the citizens are Internet users and all of the schools are online? Where an “electronic government” has reigned for over ten years?

If you go a few steps further in your search for answers towards Gothic St. Olav’s Church, you suddenly find yourself in front of bricked up basement windows of the former KGB headquarters of Tallinn. Allegedly, behind these walls state enemies were interrogated and tortured by the Soviet occupiers, sent to work camp in Siberia or simply shot. This sight gives you an idea why access to the Internet today, in independent Estonia, freed of suppression and censorship, is guaranteed in the constitution as a human right. The programme with which the new Estonia dared to make the jump in the 1990s from the other side of the former Iron Curtain into a free information society was called “Tiger Leap.”

In a darkened exhibition room in the Kumu, Tallinn’s art museum, the Estonian media artist Timo Toots slides his ID, a small plastic card with a computer chip, into the reading device on the dashboard of a blinking machine that looks something like the command bridge on a spaceship. He presses a button and the data of his life appear on the museum wall: the results of examinations he took at state school, drugs prescribed to him for his skin problems, his salary, calculated from his tax payments. If he were a member of a political party, the machine would show that too; Estonia has a web database of all party members.

In Berlin, viewers of this presentation would be standing with concerned faces in front of this “glass Estonian.” On the fifth floor of the Kumu, the visitors crowd around the switchboard fascinated and a queue of curious people quickly forms who want to illuminate their own IDs. “It is the pride of a small country in its rapid technological development, in its rapid economic upswing since the 1990s, which prevents any critical debate about data protection in Estonia,” according to Timo Toots.

“Help! Migraines!”

But the Gateways exhibition, organized jointly by the Goethe-Institut, the Kumu and the European Cultural Capital Tallinn, not only presents the state of the art, it treats visitors not just as monitored and manipulated objects, but as the subjects of a quite singular new experience of web culture – the experience of “real time.” The British artist duo Thomson and Craighead wrote software that links the museum’s computer live with the search engines AltaVista, Yahoo and Google. The flow of search queries glimmers unfiltered over the wall: “Hot Porn Pics” – “Help! Migraines!” – “How do I get rich?”

Somewhere in the world someone is searching for this and for that reason we are all standing so captivated in front of it. Because it’s now, it’s happening right now! And now, and now the next question! The Finnish artist Hanna Haaslahti is researching how this real time experience is changing our image culture. She makes images that are at this moment being posted on the Internet portal flickr float in the exhibition space. Each image only appears for a few seconds, and then it is overlaid with the next one. Strangers, bizarre scenes, unknown places; a stream of snapshots is taking the place of the photo album that used to be cared for by a family like a treasure. These images no longer serve to remind us, they are exhibited, exchanged and, most of all, consumed, according to Hanna Haaslahti.

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The present knows a past and a memory, but what does “real time” know? It is also a crucial question for the new, independent Estonia, which has for twenty years defined itself almost exclusively via a look forward into the promising future of a digitally networked world. The exhibition illustrates this, for many artists here are wrestling with the question of what dangers digital technology can hold for the newly found freedom. Click Democracy is what the Italian artist group Les Liens Invisibles calls it. Protests are replaced by mouse clicks from the domestic sofa – and thus with the illusion of participation. It is a daring thesis, after all digital networks are at this moment toppling dictatorships in the Arab regions. But this is precisely this exhibition’s strength: it brings up questions and enables communication – and that is exactly the function of a “gateway” in computer science.

The writer is a journalist for Deutschlandradio Kultur.