Curating netart

The legal foundation of net-based art

2009-07-20T04:22:00.003-04:00

Dear Ursula,

quite some time has elapsed since our last blog entry.
Over the last months, I have been reflecting quite a lot about the actual CONDITIONS of net-based art creation, such as funding, the technological architecture of the medium and then, most interesting to me: the legal basis of online art.

I organised an Upgrade! Event on the beginning of June, which focused on the concept of unrestrained sharing and free culture. Together with the Transmediale festival, we have invited the Spanish activist group eXgae to give a workshop and a film screening of their outstanding annual event The Oxcars.

The preparation of this workshop inspired me to do a research on the topic, which I want to share with you. And then of course I have some specific questions about copyright and sharing for you and I am curious to hear your position as an artist.

Internet law is created by courts around the world right now. The commissions who work on the subject must do their best to derive the solution of legal disputes in the net from preexisting jurisdiction frameworks. This whole process is still in the making and until now the leading principles of intellectual property and commerce in the net are in a state of constant revision.

These issues are essential for everyone in the media art field, as future decisions might directly affect the work of artistic and cultural practitioners. This starts with service provider liability, copyright, commerce guidelines, content restrictions and ends with web site development legal issues in general. However, most people I know are generally not or only very little informed about the current development in this field.

What’s the situation in the U.S.? Is this discussed more often in your country?
"There has never been a time in history when more of our 'culture' was as 'owned' as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now," writes Lawrence Lessig in his famous book "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004)". The book is also available as a free online audio book here: http://www.archive.org/details/free-culture-audiobook

I think this statement by Lessig is really crucial not only for our work, but practically for everybody who uses the web as a resource for knowledge and contents of any kind. What do we have to know when we upload data or take contents from the web? What are our actual "rights" when we call ourselves "right owners"? Which instruments can we use as an alternative to proprietary software? Here is just a brief overview of possible sources which might be helpful in finding answers:

The Creative Commons
"The Creative Commons project was founded in 2001. In December 2002, Creative Commons released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public. Creative Commons developed its licenses - inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) — alongside a Web application platform to help you license your works freely for certain uses, on certain conditions; or dedicate your works to the public domain"(www.creativecommons.org)

Free Software Movement
"Free software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is available gratis (free of charge) in most cases.” Richard Stallmann started the free software movement in 1983 with the aim to satisfy the need for and to give the benefit of "software freedom" to computer users."
(source: Wikipedia / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software).

There is quite a number of collectives and groups who produce free software for various kinds of artistic use, such as:

GO TO 10 (a collective of international artists and programmers, dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and digital arts): http://www.goto10.org, or

Blender (a 3D graphics application released as free software under the GNU General Public License): http://www.blender.org/

FLOSS manuals: they make free software more accessible by providing clear documentation that accurately explains their purpose and use): http://en.flossmanuals.net

dyne.org: an independent software ateliert which provides free software for artistic use): http://www.dyne.org

For everybody who like to take found footage from the web and (re)use or sample it for their own artistic work, there are some really interesting free content databases for music and video:

http://www.netaudioberlin.de
http://www.starfrosch.ch
http://www.orange.at/Content.Node/
http://www.vdb.org/

Quite a number of artists is focussing on this topic as part of their artistic practice, for example the open music video project "music from the masses" by Matthias Fritsch / Germany. You can watch it directly at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxNaN79qsxU

Or the "copy it right-project", which was initiated by Phil Morton, now continued by jonCates / Chicago.
Phil Morton stated: "First, it’s okay to copy! Believe in the process of copying as much as you can; with all your heart is a good place to start - get into it as straight and honestly as possible. Copying is as good (I think better from this vector-view) as any other way of getting ‘there." Read the whole manifesto here: http://criticalartware.net/rsrc/dwnl/dS_DISTREL.dwnl/www_VR/
COPY-IT-RIGHT suggests that the availability of resources is, as jonCates puts it, "not simply for study, but also for creative cultural uses by artists." More infos here: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=335

But it's not just the artworld who deals with these topics: also the academia around the world starts to shift their attention to digital rights. The CC Monitor project for instance is an ever-growing online platform, which contains "automatically collected data, graphs, research and collectively written commentary on the global adoption of Creative Common licenses." The aim of the project is to establish a "valuable online resource for the Creative Commons community, for researchers, the press, and other third parties." (http://monitor.creativecommons.org/Main_Page)
On July 14th 2009, the initiator of CC Monitor, Giorgos Cheliotis, held an intersting lecture at Harvard University: Mapping the Global Commons: A Quantitative Perspective on Free Cultural Practice. More infos here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/07/cheliotis
Here are some of his key questions: Where in the world are people using Creative Commons licenses? How much content is licensed under Creative Commons and what are the individual, social and cultural factors that influence adoption? Also, what happens after content is made available for remixing under an open license? What kind of ‘cultural flows’ emerge from ad-hoc, large-scale remixing activity and how do these vary under different incentives for production?
I would be especially interested to hear more about the cultural flows which evolve out of remixing and reusing. I am not sure how much research has been done on this field so far, but I certainly think that this is a great topic for the cultural studies.
Since I wrote about art and science now, I would like to get back to the political dimension of this topic. Did you hear about the Pirate Party in more than 30 European countries? The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected. The party was founded by Rickard Falkvinge in Sweden in 2006 and since then spread out all over Europe. Since June 2009 the German pirate party even holds one parliament seat!
Is there anything similar going on in the U.S.?
If we consider all this, it gets clear that the place where net-based art actually resides is in a state of constant change. There is an increasing need for artists and curators to get more aware of the legal foundation of online plattforms and also about our rights. As a curator, I am asking myself: If I would exhibit a participatory work, say your HTML movement library, how can I make sure that the audience does not change, alter or manipulate your work without permission and do I maybe need an official permission to present such works in public? Honestly, I have no idea about that.
What I would like to hear from you, Ursula: it is quite a common assumption, that net art is based on a tradition of sharing and remixing. What is your opinion on that? Do you want others to re-use your work? If so, under what conditions? Have you ever published one of your works under a Creative Commons Licence?
Questions over questions here ;-)
At the end, I want to share a real inspiring movie about the first festival of free culture in Barcelona: The oXcars!
Have fun and I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Greetings from Berlin,
Ela

Enacting the Internet

2008-09-29T11:47:00.037-04:00

Dear Ela,

Thank you for your detailed description of our collaborative Blog/Theater piece "tabootheater 2.0" in Zürich! Now that several months have past since then, it is possible to step back, rethink and "relive" the experience. It was indeed a new way of working – to meet mostly online to prepare, discuss, and plan for the piece - and it showed that one can have inspiring communication on a virtual drafting board, create so to say a mental and virtual space for the piece before giving it its physical shape on location. To work with participants online and on location and let both worlds merge together right on stage was also unique indeed...

I always enjoy and I am always excited to find out more about the peculiarities happening in a confrontation of "real" space with the Internet, as this is the main topic in all of my work. How to fill an exhibition space or a theater space with Internet/Web-inherent qualities, or more: How to make the Web visible in physical space. How to feel/act/touch the Web!

This brings me to a topic, which we both recently addressed, in a dialogue we were invited to contribute for "Curediting–Translational Online Work", a new project by CONT3XT.NET, at Vague Terrain, the online journal for digital art/culture/technology. In our thoughts, which we let grow by emailing them back and forth a couple of times, we ended up addressing this topic: Curating as a performative event. And this describes pretty much what our experience in the theater was like: Organizing, directing, inviting, and redesigning the online Blog into a participatory intervention on stage.

By the way, the whole series of essays in Curediting – fourteen different approaches to this topic submitted by different artists and curators – is an amazing read!

One of the thoughts weaving through our dialogue was also – once again – the definitions of art on the Internet, net art, new media art, etc. Where and what each is. The easiest approach for me to define this, is to start describing my own work. My oeuvre includes net art - which is purely net-based work. And then there is "Web-driven" work. This is my favorite way of describing the work that expands from the Web into space while the Web is the "motor" – its properties, its code, and its architecture are coming to live in different media such as digital imagery, video, sound, text, performance and (physical) movement, and even fabric.

A brief moment of self-promotion: My performance series Website Impersonation carries out exactly this multi-layered structure of embodying the Web. Through the ongoing participatory project "html-movement-library" and through the source code of the website which drives it all: the sound we hear is html, the visuals we experience are html, and the movements that are carried out by performers are html. I will be showing a new part of the series in Vienna this December. I will share more about it then...

I also would like to answer your questions about my experience in regard to the live online pieces at the Theater in Zürich. It was hilarious and thought-stimulating to perform a live-web piece with Antoinette Lafarge and her students. They arrived at the performance space via video-skype, joining our event as the "Universal Translation Service" with their motto: "Our goal is perfection. We translate all languages with 100 percent accuracy, guaranteed".

The "translator" appearing on screen never seem to be the person we heard speaking, there was always a moment of a strange "disconnect" between the words, the texts, and the speakers. A definite play on how identity online still can trick us, and how the info we want is often not the info we get...

A (theatrical) role that the three organizers of the whole Internet/Theatre event - Anke Zimmermann, you, and me - also had, was to be a sort of Blog-Protocol Impersonation, or let's call it, the incarnation of the Blog-mechanism. While definitely resembling the three creatures in the logo of the piece, we, for instance, reacted with "mechanical work" on stage to the above mentioned translation efforts. And while they switched from one translator to the next, we changed the scenery by turing the revolving stage, scrolling from one entry to the next. In between we also commented on their performance, in a way only uncontrollable tabooblog-incarnations are allowed to behave... :-)

Scenes from the online/live performance "'Universal Translation Service' meets the Blog-Mechanism-Incarnations" in tabootheater 2.0.

This was also our real role in the theater event. We "turned the stage", decided when and which events took place; we organized, and somehow "directed" our participants, etc. So, clearly, our theatrical characters were a metaphor of showing our role as organizers of the whole event – in becoming the "protocols" and "mechanisms" of the blogs' organizational structure in space.

Wrapping up my entry, here is my closing thought/question - bringing up something totally different:

The new size of New Media Festivals.

It seems all festivals became larger lately, including as many sub-shows, threads, ideas, artists as possible. I heard and read this about this years ISEA in Singapore. Not to criticize this show in particular - I wasn't there to experience it - but it seems that New Media festivals in general become in themselves more and more a physical translation of the Internet. Sounds like a great plan, in the same time, it seem impossible for the visitor to see everything. As, on the Web, one picks, searches, bookmarks what one likes, one can only go through as much content as humanly possible. Maybe festivals are not meant to invite their audience to see everything any more, but more to show the diversity that's out there, the same notion the Web brought to us - a possibility of choice.

I'd be interested in your thougths about this and, also, about the emergence of so many new New Media festivals in the last years, and so I'd like to ask you about your experience with festivals in general...

And on that note, I'd like to hear from your visits to Ars Electronica, and your contribution to the Upgrade! Festival in Skopje...

Many warm autumn greetings from New York,

Ursula

Netart in the theater

2008-07-12T11:30:00.003-04:00

Dear Ursula,

it has been a while since we have last posted an entry in our blog.
I want to take this opportunity to write a bit about the experiences of our latest collaboration "How much taboo does art need?" - an internet theater project for the Theater am Neumarkt in Zurich / May 2008:
http://85.214.107.190/zblog/

We have been working on this project for more than a year. Due to the fact, that Anke, you and myself live in different parts of the world, we managed all the preparation work during regular skype conferences. This was really a unique experience, and I am suprised how productive this has been.

Our main idea was to transform a blog and its contents into a theater space - both in spatial structure and contentwise. We have launched the taboo blog by the end of 2007 and started to collect materials, comments and questions related to the topic "how much taboo does art need?"
By the beginning of May, we came together in Zurich at the Theater am Neumarkt and worked on the transformation of the theater space and the technology which we needed for the project.

May 19 was the beginning of two workshop sequences, during which the contents of this blog got staged in the real (theatre) space. We have invited different acteurs from the international theatre and art scene to work on the blog material with us: artists, theorists, dramatists, directors, stage designers, performers or curators.

On Saturday, the 24th, we have presented the various artistic approaches, which resulted from the workshops, in the form of a walkable installation and a live-performance. International artists and art professionals participated via skype, commented on the events and talked about their own experiences about art and taboo.

We have been particularly interested in the individual approaches towards the blog material.
And of course we wanted to find answers to the question: To what extend does the internet affect or alter the way we communicate? How does this influence the contemporary theatre?

So, what are the results of this experiment?
First of all, I have to say that it was just great to really experience the representation of the blog in the real theater space. Thanks to your wonderful space design concept (and the creativity of the stage designer Barbara Pulli) we have managed to give people an idea of how a blog actually works and what its dramaturgical structures are. I especially loved the shoutbox, a megaphon which automatically transformed the blog's shoutbox entries into speech - like that, people from all over the world could state their comments, audible for everybody in the theater space.

Most of our workshop participants took full advantage of the possibilities we have prepared in the space: the revolving stage for live acts, the video workstation, the text station, the shoutbox and the audio editing suite. For me it was extremely interesting to see the individual approaches towards the topic taboo, but also towards the space and the blog itself. The workshop groups have been heterogenous, some people who hardly ever use the internet, and others who have based their work on digital media.
As you can imagine, this led to a broad range of results - from audio files, to movies, objects, web conferences, theoretical work and live acts. However, I must say that we haven't focused so much on the results, but rather on the process itself. The involvement of different professions and backgrounds into a theatrical process, the way how technology challenged ways of communication and collaboration.

And there was this constant question of how to best mediate this process to the outside world (which is an all-time favourite question in this blog, by the way ;-)
And here, you and I had to experiment on a day-to-day basis. I think in the end we have found the right balance between involving ourselves without acting too much as a guide or director. But this took some time, I have to admit. In the beginning, I was kind of overwhelmed by the dynamics of the workshops and the presentation. But, that's the risk (and the beauty!) of a laboratory situation.

"Mediating this process to the outside world" - this does not only mean to the visitors in the actual space, but also to our online audience. This was to me one of the biggest challenges - to be present both in the real and the digital space. (And this led to strange and funny situations, especially when I think of our live streaming experiments or the skype interviews ;-)
Here it would be interesting if you could talk a bit about the live / online performance that you have organised together with Antoinette LaFarge and students from the University of California. This was an experiment on artistic collaborations over the net and I thought it would be worthwhile to follow up on these kinds of outputs, as they open new spaces for thoughts.

What I also think is important: despite the fact that the internet as a mass medium has been around for more than 10 years now, there is still a huge gap between online art and the classical notion of theater. And in a way I see that both concepts contradict each other: the internet as a "spaceless space" with a "timeless time" (Manuel Castells) and the theater, which is all rooted in the presence in time and space. Nevertheless, I believe that it is extremely interesting to place both art forms next to each other to see what their specific qualities are and to what extend they can inspire each other.
Ursula, it would be great to hear your thoughts on that.

Best regards from Berlin,
Ela

The rise of the net art market...

2008-04-18T13:17:00.028-04:00

Dear Ela,

Thank you for your thougths about the Transmediale. I really appreciate it, as I wasn't able to come to Berlin and see it. As a matter of fact for the last few months I have been immersed into the production of my own work for several upcoming shows and projects – I just gave three new performances (of my "Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited" series) here in New York – and, there will also be new work to see in Europe! I am actually looking forward to digest, take time to think through, and share with you all the feedback I have received so far to my new work... but that's for another time...

This work mode of mine has made it quite difficult to let me step away from it (I love it though, don't get me wrong!) and go and "physically" see other shows... So I have been at least trying to follow shows and blogs and lists online to see what else is going on...

A very passionate discussion has developed on rhizome's discussion list about a show that is about to open tonight at the iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels. "Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age", curated by Yves Bernard and Domenico Quaranta, featuring New Media artists, who show their work in galleries and/or whose work is part of collections around the globe. (The show also runs during Art Brussels.)

What an engaging idea to address the question of net art and New Media Art, and its stand in the art market, in a show! And, also, to ask the question of how and what to collect when collecting New Media Art. A topic we came across several times in our discussion, Ela!?

Fascinating, that the announcement and press release of this exhibition has already triggered a fiery discussion online before the show has even opened! So we are having a hot topic here!

While reading through quite a lot of the above mentioned discussion thread I noticed several times statements of how weak of a concept this is for a show, to organize an exhibition around New Media Art and the art market. But it seems to hit the nerve and addresses important issues of how these are coming closer to each other. In a larger sense the show seems to be about the general development of New Media Art being "art", moving into the center of contemporary art, being it.

And there seems to be fear and confusion in regard to the art market, of course! But i think that as an artist you can, and have to also – along with the production of your work – create the terms of how your work is shown, and eventually how it is sold. And why not, why not try to "live" from your art? That's why I think an exhibition and a panel discussing net art and New Media Art – all this "immaterial" art that is therefore impossible to collect , but which is now after all moving into the contemporary art world and the market – is a fabulous fact to bring to everyone's attention! Why not make this development an open process – let's look how it works! This might trigger yet other models of how to show and produce and collect (net art and new media) works! So many new possibilities are on the horizon.

Maybe we are ready to understand now how to collect something immaterial. In my opinion the beauty and strength of web-driven art, is its "aliveness", that something is part of the art piece, something that can also change (that would be the web-component, the traffic, the code, etc.) This is new... Maybe an analogy to this would be investing into the stock market; well you do not exactly "know" what you get, you have to "tend" to it... (this is the only analogy). So why not collect something that has a "live" component? But maybe that's just me now fantasizing of the next step in the process...

Altogether, the idea of the show certainly gets you going... even before seeing it... Too bad though that "Holy Fire" only runs for ten days, that's a pity. April 18-30, 2008. I am currently trying to squeeze a visit to Brussels into my schedule... It looks tight though, as I am opening two shows of my own in the near future.

It would be great to have the upcoming panel discussion, which is part of the show, happening at Art Brussels this Saturday, April 19, from 11:30 - 13:30, streaming on the Web! (Is it maybe??)

Ela, BTW, I also just came across a blog asking the question: Is there such a thing as the new media market? This is a research project by the "HAMACA collective."

I am ending my post here today with some self promotion, why not. As I am wrapping up my work for Europe, I am happy to announce that I will be showing my work at Galerie Dana Charkasi in Vienna, "confirming" that new media and internet-driven works find its entry into Galleries worldwide! :-) And into the Theater! Looking forward to our new blog-inspired project at Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich...

Greetings from New York – see you on the other side of the Atlantic!

Ursula

Pssst! top secret...

2008-02-02T14:08:00.005-05:00

Dear Ursula,

compared to the last Transmediale , which was still meditating over the question whether there is such a thing as media art at all, the Transmediale 08 at least committed itself to a more contemporary approach to this topic:

In his introduction speech, Stephen commented on the question of a journalist ("but there's a painting in the exhibition. How can this be media art?") with a simple statement. He said, that the Transmediale commissions and selects works that reflect on the conditions of today's networked media, regardless of their materiality or mediality. And even the representative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, who normally need to "categorize" art forms in order to match them with the respective funding program, did her best to avoid the label "media art".
Yet still we discuss this question of how to curate digital art forms, especially netart, in this blog. And I think it is worthwhile to keep this discussion going. Because of a very simple reason: I still come across many media-based exhibitions which either leave the audience under- or overchallenged.

"Underchallenged" in that context means the mere reduction to media (re)presentation in an exhibition space, without a dedicated strategy to mediate the artworks.
And sometimes I feel "overchallenged" when I see curatorial approaches with ambition and spirit, but which nonetheless fail to provide an entry point for the viewer. And this brings me to the extreme tricky balance between the information about the work and the work itself (which should always speak for itself, of course).

The "Conspire"-exhibition of this year's Trandmediale was discussed very controversely among the people I know. Most of them agreed that the general approach was conspirative indeed, introverted, maybe even a statement of separatism. And the motto of course reflects on the conspirative scene of digital art connaisseurs, too.
Others objected that most of the visitors had no chance to understand the works, as there was a significant lack of background information. Not even the catalogue, which accompagnied the exhibition as an independent publication, provided much insight into the works of art.

And for some of the works this was simply a pity. My friend Alice Miceli, an artist from Rio de Janeiro, showed some photos of her ongoing "Chernobyl project". The problem was that the photos were presented like x-rays in a doctor's cabinet, thus suggesting a specific context which in my opinion did not match the aims of her project. There was possibly no chance to fully provide an idea of her really complex and intelligent research by just displaying some photos.
Apart from that, there have been other artistic contributions which really provoked the question a) what they were all about and b) in what way they refered to "conspiracy" at all.

I can't see what's wrong with presenting background information as an addition to the artist's work. In my opinion, this brings a new dimension to the work: creating a platform for discourse, questions and exchange should be part of an exhibition, too.
I think that a clever mediation strategy also increases the visibility of the curator's work. For me, the essentials of curating lie not only in the selection of art pieces within a certain thematic framework, but also in sharing the passion and interest one has for a specific issue.

Somebody once suggested, that curators have the role of "meta-artists"...well, I am not sure about this. Whether this makes sense or not: what is a meta-artist anyways, do we want or need that?

By the way, I want to take this opportunity to make some cross-promotion to our latest collaboration, the Tabu project at the Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich / Switzerland. Dear blog readers, please check the tabu blog and make your contributions - in whatever language you like...

Greetings from Berlin,
Ela

Souvenir from Munich

2007-12-30T14:44:00.000-05:00

Dear Ursula,

just before this year comes to its end, I want to send you a souvenir from Munich, where I spent christmas this year. This photo shows the ZKMax, a public media art space situated in a former pedestrian underpass in the city of Munich. ZKMax is a collaboration between the ZKM and the Kulturreferat of Munich. I like their approach to use the public space to show international media art works - it's free and accessible for everybody. People can look at it on their daily walks through the city and whenever they find something inspiring they just stop and take their time to look at the work. In that sense, it's a part of the city and it represents some key qualities of media art: movement, change, flexibility...
I think it's a nice model for a public media art showcase. Do you know if there is anything like that in New York?

Ela

Net Art Spaces

2007-10-27T09:23:00.000-04:00

Dear Ursula,

while I start to write this new entry, I am still staying with you in New York...
Thanks a lot for your last post, which inspired me to write about netart and its representation in the physical space. Your text touches upon this topic in many ways, starting from the fact that netart pieces are mostly constrained to computer screens up to the funny story of how we improvised the net into the Galerie Tristesse exhibition space last month in Berlin.

Many theoretical works that have been devoted to netart gravitate around its representation in space. Since the discussion on netart curating started something like 10 years ago, there was quite a range of topics of which netart curators have tried to come to terms with: be it bandwidth constraints, the issue of copy and original, questions of ownership of netart pieces or the challenge of how to survive as a net artist.
Until now, the question of how to present netart in a gallery space or a museum remains as fresh and challenging as it has been back in the origins of netart.
The question is if the very nature of netart rejects the traditional notion of a gallery space altogether? And, furthermore, if netart simply has no other choice than defying the traditional notion of a curator?
Netart curators, as we can read in the introduction of the catalogue "CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART" by CONT3XT.NET, are often deemed „cultural context providers’, ‚meta artists’, ‚power users’, ‚filter feeders’ or simply ‚proactive consumers’.“
Their task is not only the mediation of the artwork itself, but the handling of communication processes and methodologies surrounding each artwork, while addressing different audiences on different levels of knowledge. And on top of that, a netart curator faces manyfold technical and architectural challenges at the same time.
Sometimes, this reminds me of how Bill Viola described the role of media artists during his key note speech of ISEA in 2006: “they are jumping into a train for a high speed ride while they’re still laying the tracks ahead.“

If we look at video art, for instance, we can see that it has been ignored for more than two decades, until the video art hype emerged at the beginning of the Eighties. Is netart destined to sustain a similar period of marginalisation by traditional art institutions?
Or maybe we didn’t even realise that netart has died in the meantime? Different people mentioned different dates of netart's decease. Mostly, around the time of the dotcom crash in 1999.
But besides the speculation, let’s look at it from that angle:
Does netart really has a steady representation in my city, Berlin, today?
Well, we still have the Transmediale festival. It has appointed Stephen Kovats as its new artistic director, who comes up with the wonderful call to „conspire".
Besides this temporary institution, there is TESLA, the one and only venue in Berlin dedicated to media art. Due to a shortage of state fundings, TESLA will have to close its doors as of January 2008.
This means that there is no permanent, representative space for media art / net art in Berlin.
So - what's the perspective? Will netart continue to reside in places of conspiracy, appreciated by an inner circle of net art professionals and connaisseurs only?

Or maybe it is about time for us to reconfigure the way we perceive spaces (for example a gallery) more towards the reality of the „network society“? Maybe this would help us to see new perspectives for netart.

The Harvard sociologist Manuel Castells has coined the label of the network condition as a “spaceless space.” In one of his key findings he states: “The de-localization of communication and exchanges leads to the space of flows as the spatial dimension of instrumentality in the Information Age (...)“
Even though Castells has applied the space of flows mainly on global information networks, it is worthwhile to consider his theories for netart as well.
This dissolving of space, as described in Castell’s works, might be one of the reasons why we can’t look at the relation between netart and galleries from an art-historian point of view.
Netart in many ways escapes from being pinned down to what was formerly considered a „work of art“. Why is that? Here are some attempts of an answer: Because it is intangible, computer-based and networked, because it involves different methodologies and artistic practices such as the denial of the concept of authorship, because it very often provides its own methods of public-based curating – and because it generates its own public domain on the web.
And for sure there are many more reasons why we cannot approach netart from the „display“-angle.
Charlie Geere, in his essay „Network Art and the Network Gallery“ (2006) even declares netart representations in galleries a total failure: „Netart (...) has failed, for the moment at least, to make whatever adjustments are needed to make it a gallery-friendly practice.“

So what are the options? Christiane Paul sees the future of netart outside of gallery spaces or art institutions. She, like many other net activists and theorists, envisions a radical open-source use of netart: „the source-code of any art project made available to the public for further expansion outside of the proprietary concerns of curators or art institutions (...)“
I found this quote also in the CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART" by CONT3XT.NET catalogue, namely in the essay of Joasia Krysa, a curator and researcher. She is one of the initiators of the Kurator, an "open source software application designed as an online curatorial system and a platform for curating source code that can be further modified by users." It is really worthwhile to check their website., as they work with the question of how media art curators respond to new forms of self-organisation, collaboration and shared distribution outside of galleries or museums.
If we bring all these thoughts further, what does that mean for future netart places?

Will we soon witness how netart stumbles over its native qualities? Tilman Baumgärtel writes in The ZEIT, a weekly German magazine: "if so, then netart would be the only art form which would fail because it has met the key requirements of modernity, namely the dematerialisation of the artwork (Lucy Lippard) and the total independence from the art market(...)." I would maybe add another quality, which also has a downside to it: its ubiquitous access.

Personally, I believe in two things (which I know can be contradictionary in a way):

1. The art world has always managed to integrate even art forms which aimed at the decomposition of the "traditional" art system. Baumgärtel names for example Dada, Fluxus, the Happening movement or video art. All these experimental artistic expressions have finally been embraced by art institutions - and found their place in the art market, too.

2. I think, we are facing the beginning of a radical shift of art institutions towards the conditions of the networked society. Instead of worrying too much of how to bring netart into galleries, we should simply rely on the fact that the galleries and museums will transform according to the requirements of a networked world, which has been shaped significantly by the internet. As an example, I want to mention Charlie Greere's essay on the Tate Gallery's net art commissions. There he writes: "In becoming a network Tate ceased to be primarily a physical entity, a building, and became instead a sign or brand that could be applied to different places, processes and activities. In this it mirrors the paradigmatic post-industrial company, for which the means and location of actual production are less important than the sustaining of the brand." I am curious to see if he will be right with his conclusion, stating that "the Tate is transforming itself from an institution concerned primarily with things to one concerned with information and knowledge."

Despite this massive cultural shifts which certainly happen around us, there are still enough challenges for us...I like to think back to your show last month in Berlin, at Galerie Tristesse in the Wallstrasse. No High Speed internet access in the whole street, my cellphone as a modem, which enabled us to present your work at all (well, at slow speed)...I can't help to find myself in a reminiscent mood, because it is so romantic in a way, isn't it?

All the best to you,
back in Berlin,
Ela

Another Planet Wide Web?

2007-09-30T17:11:00.000-04:00

Dear Ela,

Thank you so much for all your thoughts and research on the questions of net art and the art market.

This sets a very valuable basis for further discussions!

But as I have just recently returned from a six week "tour" through the European (net-) art scene -- I feel like sharing my observations with you before continuing with our previous thread.

On my travels I came across several Biennials and "Media Festivals" to find a variety of approaches towards art, net art and contemporary curatorial and artistic practice. And as much as I am always interested in finding multitudes of approaches towards art that happens right now -- specifially net art -- I found some of it very "niched" in its discourse.

Let's start with this year's Venice Biennial. I was disappointed. Don't get me wrong, there was great work presented and fabulous artists included in it, so I am not talking about singular art pieces or Pavillions. But one show really irritated me, the main show in the Arsenale "Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind". I had a hard time with its overall structure in terms of contemporaneity. In the press release I find statements by Robert Storr, the curator, such as: "While this show looks forward it does not look back" and a description of what the show intends, it "hint[s] at what the emerging patterns might be without presuming to map them entirely", and so i understand that this show does not intend to present a complete picture of our time. And what a task this would be...! But I wonder, why, in this glimpse into the future and it's emerging artistic developments, the Internet is completly blocked out? I find no conceptual trace of the Web in this show, and of its influence it has on all of us on a daily basis, and this since more than ten years now. No trace of the changes the Internet has induced in how we produce art, in how we communicate with each other, the way we think about and build communities online and offline, and the way we question and react to current topics, the way news are made now! And where are the artists working within these topics and within this medium since more then a decade?! He further states "Since the early 20th century the development of modern art has been world wide". So I wonder, why do Biennials have such a problem addressing the actual "web of the wide world", especially that we are living now in the 21th Century? The Internet with its groundbreaking changes seems to have been totally overseen. And again, I am not critizising the artists and the art work in the show. What saved the show in my mind, is the inclusion of two art works that refer to the Web, more as a quote, a hint, that on a different planet called Web there might be something else to see and feel.

My second, in part, positive observation comes from finding that several Media Art Festivals are refreshingly rephrasing their scope about their program and intentions. The Transmediale in Berlin calls itself now a "Festival for art and digital culture" which I find fantastic. Which means to me: Let's branch out and not bind art per se onto a medium, but let's keep the variety of media in sight! And, then there was, for the second time, the Paraflows Festival in Vienna, "A festival for Digital Art and Cultures", which, this year, was exploring "inaccessible, invisible, theoretical, and immaterial spaces" in media art, net art and net culture. While being happy to be a participant in this year's festival -- and the exhibition in the MAK art-tower showed an interesting interplay of how the dark and unmovable architecture of a WWII bunker adds an additional conceptual dimension of space and (mental and physical) reflection towards any work that was projected onto its walls -- I was a bit bummed though that net art works were not given more "space", or "spatial" consideration within the conceptual framework. Net art was, once again, forced into the "office space" scenario -- constrained into a monitor, while there are uncountable ways of how to bring the web into space and make it part of a larger disussion about art.

What are you expecting?, some colleagues and friends ask me. And what am I expecting?

Has nothing changed to -- let's say to a year ago? Is net art still the inconvenient stepchild in a "grown-up" art world ?

But then again I just came accross two exhibitions which present themselves in a wider conceptual understanding in how technology has influenced art making in the last decade till now and how it influences even our daily behaviour:

One show that sounds intriguing to me is called "Vertigo. The century of off-media art, from Futurism to the web" currently at the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. The website states: "The event documents the crossovers and contaminations that have occurred from the historic avant-gardes onwards ...[]... affirming the demise of the artistically “specific” such as painting and sculpture to be supplanted by a blend of multimedia art." The show talks about the becoming of "linguistic interdisciplinarity" in art over the last century -- the term "off-media" standing for the multiplicity in media. (not offline versus online, what my Web-infested mind read into it at first ;-) It would be interesting to see how much of the Web's influence, and cross-polinating approaches and media, were considered for this show. How far into "now" is this show going? Maybe we get some feedback from one of our readers, that would be fantastic. The show will end November 04.

A show that strikes me as one that address contemporary behavior with and around technology, including the Web, is "Multitasking. Synchronicity as a cultural practice" at the NGBK, Berlin. It states in the introduction that "[ ].. synchronicity of today's media-backed daily life means that multitasking penetrates into almost spheres of life and has a particular influence on our perception, communication and interaction. The exhibition presents the multitasking phenomenon as a metaphor to describe the profound changes currently taking place in the economy, the media and society." I did unfortunalty not find much information about this show online. A catalog was produced, but I think only in German.

So, altogether, I guess I am looking for explanations why the Web is not included in exhibitions that claim to be on the pulse of the moment ...or why net art is not treated with the same "respect" like the "other" media.

Sometimes one still hears the argument, we don't have a connection here...

This reminds me of how we dealt with issues around that ourselves, Ela, when we "brought" the Web into an exhibition space in Berlin, a few weeks ago. The cellphone eventually served as the modem for my laptop...! Otherwise another part of my performance series "Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited" -- this time I impersonated "www.youtube.com" -- could not have been performed. Maybe you like to tell your part of the story... :-)

This cross section through a few exhibitions in Europe shows to me, nevertheless, that there is a multiplicity of possibilities (to come) how to "channel" this enormous world called the Web, including its art, into an exhibition.

I am looking forward to your thoughts!

Greetings from New York,

Yours,
Ursula

PS: I am very happy, Ela, that we collaborated on the contribution to a book about "extended curatorial practices on the Internet." On Monday, October 15, in Vienna, CONT3XT.NET will present "CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART" which discusses contemporary concepts of curating and displaying (New) Media Art. The introduction reads: "In contrast to the late 1990s when Net-based Art was celebrated as avant-garde spectacles, today Technology-based Art views for the attention of a broader public interested in art. Higher demands are made on curators to include these art forms in conventional exhibitions, which simultaneously poses several problems: "curating immateriality", a term postulated a few years ago, is faced with immense technological challenges and at present theoretical groundwork is being laid for providing ways of addressing Technology-based Art that extend beyond viewing them as "Techno Art" and the tacit implication that "The Medium is the Message". "
(More information can be found online at cont3xt.net.)

To sell or not to sell - thoughts on the net art market

2007-07-13T08:34:00.000-04:00

Dear Ursula,

you have brought up some challenging views in your last post. I especially want to come back to what you said about new strategies of capitalising netart. This is really an interesting issue: above all, the question remains if you can really “buy” net art – as it is originally designed for a computer network, thus accessible for everybody online.
Of course you can always restrict access to the artwork and ask people to pay for it – but honestly, who would ever do that? There have been several attempts to trade art over the net and they all have failed. If we look at the most popular net art galleries such as Rhizome or Turbulence we understand that accessibility and interaction are key elements of their success as online art institutions.
Then the next question is what you actually acquire when you purchase a net art work: the source code, the software instructions, the exclusive right to exhibit the piece? Even though there is a current vogue for treating net art just like any other category of contemporary art – if it comes to acquisitions we have to admit that we need to see things in a different light.
John Ippolito, the Guggenheim Museum’s curator of media arts, puts it like that: "The Holy Grail of selling a Web site is a red herring. To collect an artist Web site is less about owning property than stewarding heritage." (read the full article here).
What I find problematic with this view is the retrospect notion of art, evoked by the term “heritage”. In my opinion, it is a hopeless endeavour to try to safeguard net art pieces, which by their very nature undergo a continuous revision: they will keep on changing as long as online visitors will interact with them. Plus the technological infrastructure advances towards new generations of browsers, plug-ins, hardware etc.
Flux is the prime condition of net art works. And this is maybe one of our biggest challenges when it comes to developing models for a net art market. How can it be possible to safeguard the transient and turn it into a market value?
Another problem that comes into my mind, at least here in Germany, is the subvention policies of net art. Due to the lack of a market for net art, most of these art pieces are subsidized by governmental bodies. I don’t want to critize the state for investing money in net art., but if state institutions become the one and only addressees for net artists to make their living – then we might well end up with a problem.
Having said that, I agree with you that very slowly there is a fresh breeze starting to blow in the art market. Especially when I look back at the year 1999 and projects like the net.art consultants, a website where artists can donate net.art pieces to collectors worldwide – then things have changed indeed.
But still it seems to me that many net art projects rather twist knifes in the wounds of this consumptive market – instead of really making money with what they do. I think of projects like the online gallery teleportacia.org by Olia Lialina, or net-activism like Google will eat itself by Ubermorgen.com or the Google adword happening by Christophe Bruno. I think these projects are phantastic, because they reveal a number of things to us: for example Google’s monopoly of information or the fact that the web is not as public as we like to see it. But still the question remains of how these projects generate a basis for artists to make their living. I know that the ZKM for example has commissioned a large number of net art works over the last years – their exhibition “masterpieces of netart” is also a statement of how they want to see net art: as an artform of high standards and value, just as any other category of art, too.
Did you read Mark Amerika’s ebook How to be an internet artist? In chapter eight he states: “Use highly subversive marketing skills to attract attention to the fact that you are producing income from your narratological presence, and successfully transform that attention into its own media-virus or cultural meme that solidifies your brand-name as one of the industry leaders.” I think he is touching upon a very important aspect: maybe it is a precondition for net artists who want to be economically successful to create their own myth?
Look at Cornelia Sollfrank and how clever she did it:
She shows how “smart artists let the machine do the work” when she sold her net.art generator to the Sammlung Volksfürsorge in Hamburg in 2004. What was basically acquired was the software to generate the images, based on the input of users. I think this is a phantastic statement and it’s certainly the feuilleton’s darling when it comes to recent net art sales stories.
However, my web research brought up more results of which I haven’t been aware so far: Have you ever read www.netartreview.net, which later turned into newmediafix.net? In one of their netartreviews in 2004 they have posted a list of net art purchases of the year 2004. If this is all true, then what are we discussing about? I would be curious to have a look at more recent figures, but I could not find any sources for that on the web.
Finally, I want to mention that there are of course net artists who deliberately refrain from producing their art for any kind of market. Last week, I met Lucas Bambozzi, a net artist from Brasil, who presented his work at the Urban Media Salon, hosted by Mirjam Struppek. He pointed out the moment in his career when he decided to devote his art to other standards than economical ones. And obviously it works well for him…
On the netartreview-site Eduardo Navas asks: "How can the concept of property merge with the sharing one?" I think this is a very interesting question.
I am looking forward to your comments and ideas on that…
All the best from Berlin,
on this Friday 13th...

Ela

The Web versus Minimalism

2007-06-12T10:52:00.000-04:00

Dear Ela,

Thanks for your vivid descriptions about museums, tagging, and audience participation for defining classification systems of artworks. My threads of thoughts during the last weeks included the art market, digital and online art, “trends”, minimalism versus "complexitism,” and how information is collected, sorted, spread, and lost again...
Thank you for asking me also to talk about feedback in regard to my project "html_butoh" and the "html-movement-library", as it falls, how you described it, into the discussion of user-generated libraries.

So let me start with my observations of audience participation within my latest exhibition, which will also bring in more “personal” experiences, which will help me spin through the thread of topics I mentioned above.

As you know, the html-movement-library and its accompanying projects including html_butoh are web-based projects. They are accessible online, but I am also interested in transferring these projects into the gallery space. My interest lies in collecting user-based material not only through online submission by a “global” audience, but also on location, introducing the library -- as an installation in a gallery space -- to local and smaller communities. Both “worlds” bring in material that can be viewed online and in the gallery space. It is great to see that the database of user-submitted videos is constantly growing.
So for this library I am inviting a wide audience to define what (physical) movements or gestural representations of html could look like. There have been posts of carefully choreographed athletic dance movements on one side, and a gesture spontaneously performed by somebody who just walked into the gallery with several bags and a rain coat, on the other side... Again, the audience submits short video clips through which they are demonstrating their approach of how to translate html into movements and how to give a technological language a physical representation. Anyone who submits seems to get a kick out of seeing themselves appear in a constantly running Web-theater. :-)

During a discussion with a friend and colleague of mine at her visit to the installation/exhibition we touched upon the topic of the art market. She mentioned that she sees an obvious return to “minimalism” in the artworld, and works that touch on its philosophy and approach are doing well in the art market.
My installation now is, I would say, truly multi-media. It is a “translation” of the functionalities of a web-based piece into an architectural and interactive setting, which includes real-time, web-based information feeds, projections, a walk-in video recording station for instant movie making, and the ability to upload a movie on the spot to the library. The visitors to the gallery can instantly see themselves be part of "html-butoh", which is the synthesis of the installation, where all participants in the library – submitted online or right in the gallery – perform together on the Web. And, finally, there is a visual thread of some of the html-movement “hieroglyphics” as decals on the wall –- a visual representation of one movement combined with the according html tag -- kind of framing the whole installation with its visual language. It was these simple icons, which struck her fancy as a possible sellable product, maybe putting them on silkscreen, she said. And this was the point where the term minimalism came up.

But art that is fed by the Web can hardly ever be called minimalist!? Through its abundance in media, in composition, in the possibility of existing in virtual worlds and expand into RL, and especially through user participation, and through its longevity in terms of establishing user-based libraries that will carry on and evolve – how can this be ever compared to minimalism aka something that SELLS?

I have a hard time accepting that these graphical icons are the only thing in this installation that would serve as a sellable art piece. It is interesting to me though, that I am talking about selling art here today and within this context, and Ela, I do remember that we touched upon net art and new media art and the art market a long time ago. But recently this topic seems to have come back to me in many ways, as I have seen new approaches in galleries and artists alike to invent new models in terms of net art, "intangible” art, and its spin towards the art market. It seems that there is a fresh breeze starting to blow, and I am somewhat optimistic, that with new thoughts on saleability also a new discourse on the relation of net art and galleries, museums and collections will rise! Or maybe it is the other way around… Somehow I think, after more than ten years working with the Web and even longer with computer-generated work, I see a slight shift happening in acknowledging its own, new life as a new art form within the art market. “New”…Well it takes decades to accept all "new" media it seems…

Well, I ask you Ela, is there after all a gap between the “Fine Arts” and the media and Internet arts? Now that we all – philosophically -- try to get away from the term "new media" and call everything simply "contemporary art" are we running into even wider discrepancies?
And how about selling? Every artist needs to make a living, but I wonder how much we still give in to a "trend" in the arts, a trend to what’s sellable versus what we would like to sell. Again, I think that there are new models in the making, especially when it is about net-based art, and new media art, and I have the feeling that I will get back with more thoughts and information on this topic in future posts on our blog. (One important thing to add here: I am not talking about asking viewers to pay to view net art, this is not the model I am thinking of, I am actually totally against this, as it would determine what could be seen/read about/learned on the Web.)

Here, I would like to bring in a quote I came across last month reading a newsletter published by DAM (Digital art Museum), Berlin, referring to a statement in "art review" describing the efforts and development of the Museum and its director Wolf Lieser, and their take towards the future.

"But selling digital artworks remains a far from easy task. It takes a lot of patient explaining. Most people in the artworld still don't have much of an idea about digital art, the impact of computers in our culture, the way the medium is changing the artworld on every level or the amount of work involved in the creation of, say, the rendering of scenery in the three dimensions. Lieser sees DAM as a long-term project. He had to build everything from scratch and foresees that it will probably take another five years of hard work before the value of digital art is really recognized. So yes, there’s a market. It’s slowly coming to light, and as usual, the smart ones are already investing in it..."
(Regine Debatty, “Is there a market for Digital Fine Art?” in “art review magazine”, May 2007)

I find this quote really interesting, specially as a model for what's happening around all the digital arts…

Before I close my post today I would like to add another thought that brings me back to user-based libraries: The user versus the specialist.

What does this increase in self-organization mean to us? With the amount of information rising on the web on a daily basis, it is just clear that we all want and need to be part of indexing/structuring this information in a way we feel comfortable with it. So, the structure might be actually adhered to the “object” somehow -- fascinating thought also in terms of curating...Which systems and structures are applied when starting to put artwork - online artwork - in context? How do we all like to browse, view, search? Who makes the decisions for how to browse? The artist, the curator, the visitor, or all of them? So all these "roles" seem to shift as they all start sharing similar roles. Everyone involved is in search for a new shared vocabulary… and it seems to renew itself constantly.

So I guess the concern is to find an easy but complex way to browse and look at art on the Web (or any kind of knowledge, discussion or information) from a multitude of perspectives...
Getting back to the term “minimalism” -- it doesn't seem to be possible to mention it in the same breath while describing the capabilities of the Web...

Looking forward to hear your thoughts, Ela!

Many greetings from New York,
Ursula

Metadata by everybody

2007-04-19T05:51:00.000-04:00

Dear Ursula,

thanks so much for your remarks and thoughts about the terminological struggles surrounding media art, netart, digital art, digital culture, networked art...(ok, I'll stop here ;-)
I especially appreciated your remark about Rhizome's ArtBase, which allows people to create an individual terminology for their respective artworks.
This brings me to a related article I currently read in the Infotangle blog:
Ellyssa Kroski writes about the "Hive Mind: Folksonomies and user-based tagging." In this article she examines users, who "are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems." She has found an interesting conclusion for the evolving folksonomy platforms worldwide, I quote: "Metadata is now the realm of the everyman."
I think this observation is worthwile to place against the backdrop of the shifting roles of curators. Given the fact, that art institutions increasingly have to deal with digital or other types of intangible or ephemeral artworks these days, we can already witness a change of paradigms from the object towards the process surrounding an object. Furthermore, there are growing numbers of artworks which invite their audience to interact with them, edit them or even add new contents to them.
This development poses a fresh set of challenges to curators and apparently it triggers an additional, new notion of curatorial work, which I would describe as "enabling feedback processes". Does that make sense? I am especially refering to new initiatives such as the tagging prototype tests led by the ">Metropolitan Museum of Art: They invited their online audience to provide keywords and tags for their art collection. The New York Times reports of "staggering results" and quotes Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” The Archives and Museums Informatics Group supports initiatives like that and points out that contents are often hidden away from nonspecialists. “We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.” says Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto.
There is apparently a growing number of museums which start to rethink their online collections. Have you heard for example of the steve.museum tagging project? They call their project "the first experiment in social tagging of art museum collections." I was really striked when I read about their endeavour. The participants of this project (= everybody who is interested) are "building a tagging tool, collecting tags, analyzing data, and engaging in discussion." Their overall aim is to find new ways of improving access to works of art. Wow, I think this is quite an interesting approach.
Well, but it's not only the collections which tend to involve user-generated contents, tags and taxonomies. There is also a new trend to publish books as open-source wiki books, which invite everybody to add and comment on them. As an example, I want to mention the book "New Media Art" by Mike Tribe and Reena Jana. This Wiki book is published under the "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5" Creative Commons License.
I think this is an extraordinary interesting development. In my opinion, that's exactly what Manuel Castells describes as a process which "shapes culture and gets shaped by it at the same time."
And, last but not least, your latest work, the HTML-butoh fits perfectly in this framework. It encourages a worldwide audience to submit their visual vocabulary of the HTML-language. This user-generated library is actually the basis of the artwork. It would be great, by the way, if you could tell us a bit about the reactions of your audience to this project.
So, that was it from Berlin for today.
We will have an Upgrade! field trip later that day and visit the NewYorkRioTokyo gallery.
All the best,
Ela

Organizing "media" art...

2007-03-06T12:10:00.000-05:00

Dear Ela,
Thanks so much for this summary of thoughts about the Transmediale and the ongoing terminological struggles.
Several things came to mind lately, but first of all, I find it funny to hear again and again that we reached a level where we used up a lot of different terms to describe new media art, net art, or media art; I wonder if using “other” words would help, because we certainly produce a lot of different and new works, with different combinations of media, interactive or not, projected or on screen, web-driven or on a dvd-drive. So much is happening in a mutli-layered way, that it seems that the words which are trying to define these events and projects are “out of place” the moment they are used...
I started trying to describe my own work, or the work of others, with several words, so not one particular term, but a whole combination of influences and “locations” to describe what I am producing, or what the work I am talking about seems to come from…which sometimes might feel like a lot of information at once....

Which leads me to several recent observations:
I just came across a novice and smart approach of categorizing art works: rhizome’s ArtBase invites artists to define their own terminology to describe their work, and, after a while this terminology, when used actively and often by the community, will be included in a larger terminological context used by the whole organization.
http://www.rhizome.org/artbase

Language is in motion. One approach for getting out of the “new media ghetto”…?

Another example is this years’ Prix Ars Electronica categories: net art is gone it seems as first, just to be found submerged into Digital Communities. Hybrid Art is the new category. So Digital Communities seems to be a broader field this year. Interactive art includes per definition “network projects” now, but when it comes to submitting the work, only Digital Communites "allows" to submit a URL and to convey purely web-based pieces as what they are: they only way to “experience” and “navigate” web-based art is, yes, by going online. Putting a DVD together about a net-art piece, is in my mind one of the hardest tasks…
As these main categories seem to have many, many sub-categories, it makes it still difficult and tight matching a “mutlple-media” work into the “right” place for submissiom…
And so I wonder again, wouldn’t it be easier letting the artist define, or check several categories what their work is about, instead of offering a complex menu, that doesn’t match after all…I feel quite overwhelmed by procedures like this.

You were asking: is the distinction between old and new media still a relevant aspect of defining contemporary art practice?
I am noticing a convergence between “all” the media in all “new” art works, specially seen and exhibited in non-profit art places, where market-driven boundaries that define a sellable object are often left out. There, art can be a process, a trip to the desert or the north pole, (with a documentation to show afterwards maybe), an interview, a screening, a web-based collection of “objects” and/or “data”, which is collected via the web, but conveyed besides the Web also in the gallery/art space.

I’d say as an artist it’s the best idea to be inventive with describing your work with your own words and “categories”, which will change eventually the venues that showcase work….

Ok, here I stop for now. But not without posting a few links and projects, I came across in the last couple of weeks. Check out below.

Best,
Yours,
Ursula

1) An article in the NYSUN (from October 06) on the creation of a Department of “Media” at the MOMA:
http://www.nysun.com/article/40799
The article states, that “Nomenclature in emerging fields is often tricky. In choosing the term "media" over, say "new media" — a title that would instantly become dated — MoMA seems to be standing on firm ground.”
The article discusses of how next to museums also schools are rethinking of how to define their “new” institutes, which are based on digital media, time-based media, interactive media….

It seems that “new media” is “out” per definition, but found in more descriptive terminology of their practice, and not based on a “dated” term.

2) JOURNAL OF THE NEW MEDIA CAUCUS:
http://www.newmediacaucus.org/media-n/call.htm

Call for Papers
Please also check out the Call for Papers on the media-N website,
Bits, Bytes and the Rhetoric of Practice: New Media Artist
Statements.

New deadline for submissions: April 30 2007.

In this upcoming edition of media-N, we invite new media arts practitioners to submit personal artist statements and examples of their practice – we want to hear about you and your practice!

3) A new show based on an interesting curating model is happening in London at http Gallery: http://www.http.uk.net/
It’s called: “Do It With Others(DIWO):_E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour
An E-Mail-Art project on the NetBehaviour email list culminating in an exhibition at the HTTP Gallery in London.”

4) An amazing resource of new media curating; (I’ve came across this a while ago, but wanted to list it finally)
http://www.crumbweb.org/

Media Art Undone @ Transmediale Berlin

2007-02-04T15:55:00.000-05:00

Dear Ursula,

yesterday, I was at the Transmediale panel "Media Art Undone", with Inke Arns, Olia Lialina, Diedrich Driederichsen, Miguel Leal and Timothy Druckrey. It was a strange discussion, mainly about the question if it is time now to let go off the label "Media Art" altogether. I was wondering why they still discuss these questions in festival panels, as these terms have been negotiated for quite some years now. If they want to have some sort of "democratic" terminology, why don't they just go ahead and ask everybody in the WWW to submit their definitions, just as the New York-based artist Dan Phiffer does it with his Postnational Society? I like his approach, as it shows the arbitraryness of definitions and plays with our urge to put a terminology on everything.
And while this was discussed, the terms "new media art", "digital art", "netart", "media art" have all been mixed up, as usual. It just seems that those different terminologies are being used in different strategies and tactics for different communities.
Diedrich Diederichsen drew a line between "media artists" and "gallery artists", Olia Lialina went on further in subcategorizing the term into different categories like, for instance, blogart. Timothy Druckrey said that he mistrusts the label "new" in "new media", as it originates from the advertisement industry. Inke Arns proposed a definition of media art which I would probably refer to: "What defines Media Art today is not its range of media, but rather its specific form of contemporaneity, its content-related examination of our present, which is to a high degree typified by media."
Ironically, the term "media art" has emancipated itself from the use of digital media, which can be demonstrated by some of the artworks at the Transmediale exhibition: for example, "Random Screen" by Aram Bartholl, which is a mechanical project based on the use of thermodynamic candle lights and thus creating the illusion of digital pixels.
Another assumption from the panel was that media art does not manage to get out of its "self-defined getto", I think Inke Arns mentioned that, quoting a journalist`s remark about the Transmediale. What do you think about that, I mean as an artist? Is media art a self-referential system? Timothy Druckrey sees the problem here: "(...) too often this situation is reinforced by idiosyncratic and solipsistic approaches to the 'media arts' -- or worse 'new media arts' - as either a distinct field characterized by an autonomous development or as a marginal field only incidentally relevant to the histories of art."
Olia Lialina says, yes, media art has a history, but it lacks pride. According to Olia, there is no need to find substitutes for the term "media art" or to give it an official acknowledgement that the term has been matured, accepted and embraced by contemporary art.
What I missed in this discussion was the impact of the lack of art market structures in media art, plus the forms of presentation. For instance, it seems that festivals are still considered the only appropriate format to present media artworks.
When talking about festivals, I want to quote a funny remark by Diedrich Diederichsen at the end of the panel discussion: " I am wondering, as a non-regular visitor of this festival, how easy it is to say 'we' here." I found that an interesting point.
So, Ursula, what do you think about all those weighty topics: is the distinction between old and new media still a relevant aspect of defining contemporary art practice?
I am not sure yet...But do I need to have an opinion on that, anyway?

All the best from Berlin,
Ela

News from Upgrade! Berlin

2007-01-31T15:43:00.000-05:00

Dear Ursula,

while you are in Pittsburgh, at the opening of your latest show, we have been on another field trip with Upgrade! Berlin. Last Saturday, we went to the Digital Art Museum and had a public discussion with Wolfgang Lieser, the initiator of this project. This was a very interesting and inspiring afternoon. This museum, which is in fact a gallery, evolved from a digital archive which has been established in the year 2000. Interesting - because usually, it's the other way round. First, there is a museum or a gallery and the virtual representation of the space is established afterwards. In this case, there was an archive prior to the physical space.
When we asked Wolfgang about his thought on curating netart, he came up with something interesting: he suggested netart to be displayed in the public sphere, because the web itself is a public domain. If we extend netart pieces into the public space, the reception of these artworks might be much more diferent than looking at a digital piece of art at home on your computer. You can check the whole video interview here.
I found another resource about digital art: The Database of Virtual Art, have you checked this one? I found it quite useful.
Dear Ursula, I can't wait to hear back from you how everything went down there in Pittsburgh. However, I am convinced that all went well.
The Transmediale started here in Berlin yesterday. We are looking forward to hosting our Upgrade! gathering for our international Transmediale guests, on coming Friday at the Gallery Tristesse Deluxe.

Talk soon, Ela

Jeremy Strick about new media art

2006-12-20T15:51:00.000-05:00

neme.org:
"[New media art] questions everything, the most fundamental
assumptions: What is a work? How do you collect? What is
preservation? What is ownership? All of those things that museums are
based upon and structured upon are pretty much thrown open to
question."
Jeremy Strick, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

In this comment, Jeremy Strick is both correct and being rhetorical.
Lots of contemporary art raises these same questions. New media art,
particularly in its network-based incarnations, does so perhaps more
consistently, but none of the questions raised is radically new. In
fact, one of the results of institutions' early investigations of
collecting new media, the Variable Media Initiative, is significant
precisely because of its cross-medium applicability. Nevertheless,
there is a kind of crisis of collection - and hence cultural memory -
because of the paucity of work in museum collections and the nature
of new media art, which makes it difficult to recover adequately past
a certain point.
It is fair to say that even among the few museums that have
relatively active curatorial efforts in new media, none has a
collection that even approaches the scope of its holdings in other
media that its exhibits. At the same time, since at least 1997 when
Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz first presented their Satellite
Arts Project, and certainly since the invention of the World Wide Web
in the early 90s, there has been an explosion of artistic new media
activity, as is well documented on a website such as Rhizome or the
archives of the Ars Electronica Festival, which presented for its
25th year in 2004.
Why? What accounts for this discrepancy between artistic activity and
institutional collecting?

New article by Steve Dietz published in NeMe http://www.neme.org on
http://neme.org/main/524/collecting-new-media-art
Originally by neme.org from Rhizome.org Raw at November 11, 2006,
19:58, published by Pau Waelder
Type review
Genre theory
Keywords memory, exhibition, digital, art world, archive
Permalink

Art Mob: curate your own show

2006-10-05T03:04:00.000-04:00

Hi Ursula,

I came across the art mob project of a student group of the Marymount Manhattan College. They are creating, unofficially, audio guides for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"MoMA of course already offers audio guides (for a nominal fee), but we want to make our own, and to invite others to do so as well (...) we are democratizing the experience of touring an art museum; we are offering a way for anyone to "curate" their own little corner of MoMA. I'll give you a taste: One of our audio guides captures the smart, irreverent banter between a student and an art history professor as they view works by Chagall and Picasso. Others offer music composed and performed by student musicians inspired by several art works." (David Gilbert, member of the Art Mob group)
For more details check here: http://mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/
I think they are doing an interesting job. I like the idea of "remixing" shows with different opinions, soundtracks or even critical questions. This opens a new perspective on the role of art history and the general theoretical approach towards artworks. What's your idea on that?

Oh, and I still owe you a small report on our Upgrade! initial salon from Sept. 15th. Yes, I think the idea will work. We have planned some field trips in the upcoming months, where we will visit major media art institutions and small galleries alike. We will document the trips of the Berlin question caravan on a videoblog, so you'll be able to watch what's going on ;-)
We will start with a field trip to the c-base festival "the medium is the message" next week, where we will meet the organisers and interview them. http://c-base.org/

That's it for now from Berlin,
see you soon, Ela

Upgrade Berlin, Paraflows Vienna: how to curate netart?

2006-09-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

Hi Ursula,

we are starting the Upgrade! Berlin today and one of our most crucial points for the whole network of international media artists is how to present media art at all.
After having travelled on our Mobile Studios Eastern European tour this summer (http://www.mobile-studios.org), where we proudly hosted the Upgrade Sofia and cooperated also with the people from Upgrade Skopje and Belgrade, we decided that being on the move is just the right strategy for us, especially in Berlin.So we thought of Upgrade Berlin as a caravan of questions, which explores venues and institutions associated with media art in Berlin.We will re-visit the places which are already there and approach them with questions concerning their contemporary cultural practice and the future agenda of media art.We invite our audience, media artists and contributors here in Berlin to join us in this quest. It is an objective of Upgrade! Berlin to map the media art resources in the city and to create a horizontal network among institutions, artists, curators, scholars...With this approach we want to contribute to the international network and broaden the chances for media artists to access these structures.
Today is our inital meeting with guests, where we want to develop our question strategies for the future Upgrade meetings. Each of us will present a topic of particular interest to media art and a plan of how we could implement this topic into our question structure. We will also set up an agenda for the upcoming Upgrade field trips and nominate the hosts and the locations of the particular meetings.
I think back to Vienna last week, where we visited the Paraflows festival, Have a look: http://www.paraflows.atI like their idea of a horizontal festival concept which takes on the principles of a decentralized organisation and of participatory practices. The exhibition was held in 7 different locations all over the city and so we had a great day driving and walking around Vienna and visiting many different places, talking to different artists and curators. I always come back to the point what a difference it makes when the artists are present during an exhibition and can be approached by the audience for questions, remarks etc.I think they did this quite well at Paraflows. What has been your impression from this year's ars electronica?

best from berlin, ela

Invitation: e-discussion on digital art curators YASMIN

2006-07-03T03:46:00.000-04:00

LEONARDO/OLATS Announces Discussion of Mediterranean Region Digital Education Issues on YASMIN On YASMIN (www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin), Ricardo Mbarak of Beirut, Lebanon will organize an e-discussion during the month of July about the following topics: 1 - What are the needs (material, cultural, etc.) of digital art educators in Mediterranean Rim countries, especially in Northern Africa and in the Middle East? 2 - Discussion of the context of these countries--the differences compared to the situation in southern Europe (socio-political and technological environment, etc) 3 - The difficulties encountered when teaching digital art in these specific contexts (censorships, economy, religions, etc) A number of invited guests will be leading the discussion. If you would like to participate in the YASMIN discussion, please subscribe to the Yasmin list: www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin (go to "subscription" and follow instructions) YASMIN is a network of artists, scientists, engineers and scholars around the Mediterranean Region and is co-sponsored by Leonardo/OLATS. Leonardo Journal also invites texts for publication consideration on these topics: Author instructions are available at www.leonardo.info Discussants include: TAREK ATOUI: Electroacoustic/electronic musician; TEEMU LEINONEN: Researcher and developer of web-based learning; NAT MULLER: Independent curator, critic; AHMAD H. NASRI: Professor in computer graphics and chair of the computer science department, American University of Beirut, Lebanon; YASMINE TAAN: Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design program at the Lebanese American University

Summary of our webconference

2006-06-02T08:21:00.000-04:00

Summary of the Mobile Studio Web Conference, May 26, 2006. After several attempts to connect all four parties with the festoon video conferencing system, which seemed to run quite unstable as a beta version, we switched over to the skype audio conferencing module.
Helen Thorington from Turbulence.org in Boston opened the discussion with a quote by Steve Dietz: “Internet art projects are art projects for which the net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/ expressing/ participating.” This brought the talk immediately into the question of what net art actually is, versus new media versus contemporary art and what it means to all of us to work with this terminology.
Ela Kagel from Mobile Studios thereafter added another quote, stated by Kit Galloway in 1999: “Net art is dead! Net.art (the jodi-shulgin-bunting-vuk) style was a product of a particular technical constraint: low bandwidth, net art is low bandwidth through and through.”
Ursula Endlicher, initiator of the NY round table, questioned the definition of the term, in describing her art work, which in some cases exists only on the Internet, but other work of hers also extends into “physical” space while pulling in information from the Web. In as much as it may seem to be a contradiction, to bring the net outside the screen into space, it interests her to develop interfaces and performances that communicate between the net and the “physical” space.
Michele Thursz, independent curator, added her position: “I think of net art as a data-dynamic type of work which can be seen through and on the net, and on a specific platform. To create a multi-user performance would be another way to address the net versus being net art. Regarding limitations of bandwidth, I don’t think this is the case any longer.”
At this point, Petko Dourmana, director of InterSpace in Sofia, explained: “I do not believe that the term “net art” has a meaning any longer. My business card for example says: “New media artist.” I would rather like to call it new media art, as it seems to be a broader term to me.” He then suggested that the Internet is not just present on the computer, but is rather an overall phenomenon.
Ela Kagel gave examples of different art works, which have their starting point on the Internet and then get visible in the “outside”, in the city or in public space for example, such as the project “blinkenlights” at Berlin-Alexanderplatz, produced by Chaos Computer Club Hamburg. Susa Pop, initiator of the Mobile Studios, stressed her special interest in projects like these, which have an impact on the public space and could serve as model for other nomadic projects.
Ela Kagel added, that many of the projects produced within the framework of the Mobile Studios tour, use a similar approach with the city as a stage. For example, the project CT_BT_GRAFFITI|Mausoleum.2 by Petko Dourmana and Kyd Campbell. This project proposes to virtually recast the lost physical space of the Mausoleum to Georgi Dimitrov at its former site, where the Mobile Studios were temporarily located in Sofia. The Mausoleum to Georgi Dimitrov (Sofia, BG) used to be the most remarkable public symbol during the Communistic period in Bulgaria. Using Bluetooth technology embedded in many mobile communication devices, visitors to the exhibition who have this functionality on their mobile phones are invited to activate it and will receive a series of visual and audio fragments which recreate the space of the former Mausoleum.
Question-in-between by Ela: “Is the screen of a mobile phone an exhibition space? Can we still talk about exhibitions there?”
Petko Dourmana spoke about this project and stated, that net art works should not be presented in galleries or museums. From his point of view, net.art works best in its native environment, the Internet. He gave the example of the presentation of the Bluetooth graffiti project at Kunstverein in Stuttgart where they refused to provide a curatorial structure in terms of creating a space with devices for people to interact with, but they rather asked the audience to bring their own interfaces, so that they could access the works there.
The question was raised to what extend a curator is still needed when it comes to net art?
Ela then introduced Kyd Campell, who is the initiator of the Upgrade! Sofia Festival. Kyd brought up the issue of archiving net art and problems of inaccessibility of older net art works. Should net art undergo a continuous revision? Or do these artworks represent a certain state of art and technology at a certain time and should be left like that?
Helen Thorington responded that only three of turbulence’s commissioned work have been lost; and one of them may soon be available again. However they are trying to keep turbulence.org alive as an archive of older work and a place where new work can be seen. And this puts additional demands on the turbulence server.
At this moment Liz Slagus, director of the Education Department at Eyebeam, and Yael Kanarek, the founder of Upgrade, joined the discussion.
Liz Slagus summarized that the Education Department at Eyebeam, provides access points for a variety of audiences, also youth audiences; it hosts workshops in different media, and has public programs for adults and for artists. They also support artistic practice through workshops, programs such as The Upgrade!, which is hosted by Eyebeam, and deals with communication and community issues.
Yael Kanarek stated that the original promise of “The Upgrade!” was to provide, share and exchange ideas about technology, and build an environment for discussion, where else the different Upgrades around the world run depending on their locations and communities.
They create a place where people can come to, engage and learn.
From Sofia came the question about mediating net art and what it means to communicate net art to different audiences, and what it means to develop new audiences.
Michele Thursz answered that on the net there is no public in the same sense as there is in a Gallery space. She mentioned a new piece by Marisa Olson, “The Gif Show”, which is up in a gallery as well as at MySpace; both address a certain public space, MySapce being a semi-public space. She added that it is important to create a link between the work and the space.
At this moment, Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome and Marisa Olson, Curator at Large at Rhizome, joined the talk. Ela asked them about their specific approach towards net art curating, especially the question where to present net art and how to contextualize the art works in an exhibition space.
Marisa described the just mentioned “Gif show”, and pointed out that some of the show was offline and some was online, in MySpace, which received more visitors than the show in the San Francisco Gallery. Both Lauren and Marisa continued talking about their curatorial practice and described the MySpace-net art presence as a community tool for a broad audience, or as a way to reach a broader audience.
Stoycho from InterSpace Sofia took the microphone and asked Lauren and Marisa about the commercial aspect of “The Gif Show” since it is presented among quite a lot of advertisement on the MySpace site. Marisa answered to this, stating that those commercial aspects have to be taken into account, especially when presenting artworks in those kinds of “public spaces” on the Internet, as Petko puts it. “For me the internet is a public space” he says.
And he added that in his opinion the role of a net art curator is obsolete. People would access the artworks on their own interfaces and machines and they would not need extra mediation.
Lauren juxtaposed Petko’s opinion that it is indeed very important to bring the work out in the public and to show it in galleries, because the works need to be communicated on platforms other than the Internet.
Helen Thorington added that she really was interested in this show, because in 1996 gifs were what everyone had to work with. Helen suggested further that everyone could talk now about proposals to curate work on MySpace. She then further mentioned the explosion of “hybrid” work, produced for instance by programming savvy artists and art-interested computer scientist; she sees this explosion of hybrid work which may or may not use the Internet as the forerunner of what was predicted as the era of ubiquitous computing.
Here Lauren Cornell talked about Rhizome and how the work that has evolved on Rhizome, and how it has changed in the last 10 years. It is a different work now that the Internet has extended into space, onto bodies, and onto devices and off just only the Web – a terrain of hybrid works has opened up.
Ela asked Marisa and Lauren from Rhizome about their special approach with community tools for curating net art exhibitions and Lauren explained that those are important tools, because it is a goal for rhizome to encourage curating around net art and media art, and let people explore it in different ways.
Ela came in with the question, what all this meant for the role of the traditional curator, who organizes objects in space and puts them into a particular context? Could this be applied to net art?
Lauren answered that their exhibitions are set up right now so that people can organize works by linking to them; it is more about coming up with a theme and a concept, and exploring it through a choice of works. She added that the Web opens up the possibility to link to all sorts of objects, art and non-art, similar to blogs. Right now their shows have themes, which speaks to the way exhibitions are organized offline, but they also explore unique ways for exhibition online, through guest-curators and blog-formats.
Ela mentioned that she and Ursula discussed different art-shows, which dealt with net art in all different ways. When Ela visited New York they visited exhibitions were net art works were offline or put on a CD-Rom. What is the role of the curator there?
Lauren commented with a remark, that it is a common question, “Why one cannot look at net art at home?” Seeing net art on a screen in a museum doesn’t seem to live up to the promise, but at the same time net art shown in a museum like this, is a valid way of showing it.
Helen asked about Anne Barlow from the New Museum in NY, who tried joining via audio skype from San Juan. Due to technical difficulties the conversation was limited to chat functionality in skype. Ursula reminded and invited everyone to continue the conversation later in the blog, so all participants could share their opinion.
Lauren added that galleries and museums could pose a danger to net art; specifically because galleries are market driven and therefore compel net artist to transform an ephemeral piece of work into an object.
Lauren added another thought, that she thinks it is a fantastic idea for a curator, trying to mediate the art to the audience. She in her own practice as a curator is constantly working on making the audience understand the work and give context.
Liz from Eyebeam joined in and spoke about the editorial program of Eyebeam. About their offers and approaches.
Yael and Kyd said hello to each other and Kyd came closer to the web cam, because they have never met before in person. Big hello. Then they talked about the Upgrade! and the question came up: “Does The Upgrade! have an educational task as well?“
Yes, Helen said, as for her it is an essential part of those gatherings to see other artist’s work and learn from it.
Kyd talked about the local Upgrade!-meeting in Sofia, where media art centers from the countryside of Bulgaria have been invited to present themselves and their artworks. She also talked about the daily Upgrade!-talks that have been hosted by the Mobile Studios.
Lauren also asked Ela what her major concerns in net art curating were. What does net art curation mean to you? Can you tell us something about it?”
Ela talked about her experiences as a net art curator and her approach to communicate net art on a personal level, of creating a context, not just with arranging the artworks in space, but also by communicating with people and providing extra information. She then speaks about the Mobile Studios as mobile communication platform where the production, the display, but also the communication and reflection about the works of local artists all happen at the same time, or at least are a part of the same spatial and structural setting. So it all opens a new context…
Lauren added that this conversation is opening a new context.
Michele brought up that net artists or artists that are using technologies, are making use of a social structure. She then mentioned several examples, such as the Web Biennial with hack.art, and another piece, “Velvet Strike” by Anne-Marie Schleiner. a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter game “Counter-Strike.”
All of these were not necessarily “curatorial”, but apply a certain structure to the medium.
Ursula added that there were several net art projects out there that were dealing with including other artist’s work in the piece, so the artist becomes somewhat a curator.
Ela and Ursula started wrapping up the conversation. We reached the timeframe, and skype was running now over an hour without troubles.
Ela and Ursula were thanking everyone, and invited everyone to continue the conversation and to stay in touch. Everyone agreed.

Curating netart

2006-05-15T08:48:00.000-04:00

Hello Ursula,

I am curious to see the results of our webconference on Friday, 26th of May with you as our co-host in New York. It seems that we have touched upon some intersting subjects and I hope that this forum will be a lively discussion tool for everybody who is interested in the challenges of curating net art these days.
so- looking forward to hear from you!