February 2005
www.calarts.edu
excerpt from 1996 issue.
Dirk Paesmans: We are only really excited when someone actually makes new surprising work on the net.The definitions and obsessional history-writing of net.art now, while it happens, is self-aggrandizing and manipulative. Net.art projects may be better criticized in a wider context, of art in general. But to cram it in the category, net.art is uninteresting, it's incestuous and limits future developments.
Alexei Shulgin (from the Moscow www artcentre),: I think that with net.art we have sort of a contradiction between the artistic approach and the critical approach, because as I said before it is very difficult for critics to define or contextualize net.art, but on the other hand we see very bright and wonderful examples of so-called net.art. Its like with any other media: you either feel this medium or not (talking about the artistic approach). If you feel these digits and networks and how the signal comes and how a modem works. You just have to feel it. And if you do, you are able to do some good work. If you come with some other ideas, with the same approach as gallery art, it doesn't work. I see very little people who really feel the net and understand how the net works and what its all about.
Joan: Thats about the medium. If you work with the net you have to understand the net, if you work with the medium radio you have to understand radio.
JB: Are there any collaborations coming, in future projects?
I know there are some future exhibitions of the net.art group. When
you meet I suppose you talk about that also. What is going to happen?.............. You were talking about you all being individuals and that you don't need to be a group and your all from different countries and blablabla...Now of course everybody that has seen the internet and the WorldWideWeb knows that you can loose your way quite easily, if you don't know where to look. Artists working there need good infrastructure. For them to get known and communicate their work, they have to use good infrastructures mostly offered by others, right? Or they have to set up their own spaces, but they still have to announce these spaces in Rhizome, in nettime, in Telepolis etc. To say that you can actually work without all this seems a bit untrue.
Alexei: Talking about group activity. We are in a way priviliged unlike artists from older generations. With the net we don't have to form any specific group to declare some specific manifesto and to do similar stuff or colaborative stuff. We all live in different cities in different countries. All we direct communication to each other, because we respect each other's work and we have something to discuss there. We'll have some shows together, but again I want to say we are priviliged that we can go on with our own work and not be dependent on other people, other artists' opinions, ideas or aesthetics. Everybody is going on with their own work. There will be situations in the future were we can meet and discuss things directly. Its nothing about working on joint projects, we don't need that. We are all individuals, we can just remain ourselves. Not form some artificial groupings or whatever. ................ For me it was important to stress this point.
Talking about the future: I am still working on this form-art project. In a way I sort of invented a new technology based artform. I am going to develop this site, to try to propose it as a new tool, a new medium for artists. For that I am going to set up a website, like form.org or form.ru. I want to organize an international competition, with a money prize for the best work made in this form of art. I have some other ideas which deal more with the overload of information we have now in this world.
If you look at the history of all art movements, it was always like this: you had some local initiatives, like Fluxus or NeoGeo or Trans-avandgardia or whatever with one leader, everybody would share certain ideas, do similar works, form a movement, usually with just one or two ideas behind it. People would join it. Then they would become recognisable as a group. It was important to be a group: to have a name, manifesto and whatever. But in the end, when you look what happened, it very soon becomes routine. Those artists become famous, recognised, but it very soon becomes a very boring routine. People just do what the system requires from them and it becomes totally uninteresting very soon. Artists become obliged to do certain kind of works to proof again and again that they belong to this group. They do something specific.
With the internet its a little bit different. Now we're sort of coming through the last stage of the early stage of net.art development. When insitutions start to pay attention to artists working on the net.., for instance I am just coming from Budapest where I am doing a residency as a net.artist. We got to know each other only because of the net. After that we met together and got acquainted. Its theoretically not possible for us to create some kind of movement. Its very different and I have no idea what can come out of it. ut talking about infrastructures and institutions and whatever.., maybe Dirk can say some words. If you work on the net, one of the most important things is your domain name, like some short name in your url, that you type in in Netscape and then you come to the place.
Dirk Paesmans: I think its very important, I think everyone should set up his or her own domain. Its not very expensive and its not so difficult. In the beginning of the net it was promoted to do so, because there were not so many domains, especially concerned with art or culture. Now there are, not so much, but 'enough' for every country almost. Its been nationalised a lot. The geographical location in the url, in the adress, is imposed almost. Its much more easy to get your nationality, like a sticker on your car, then to get the .com, .org, .nom or .art in url names. Its a bit more difficult. Little institutes who are grown on the net, if its galleries or workshops.., of course as an artist in America (I shift continents immediately), there are many young artists in America for sure who make HTML and Java, who want to do internet projects and they go to an institute nearby. They don't bother to set up their own domain. I disagree. The most important for me was to go on your own on the net. To get your own little boat, not jump on the big ferry. Have your little own domain. Its not difficult, but now they hide it more, they make it seem more difficult. There are laws that make it a bit more difficult. There are also the servers that are in position, that are in power, who make it seem more difficult. They do this with pricing or with availability of information how to do it. Its a do it yourself mentality and it's still easy.
Joan Heemskirk : Its for recognition. Can you say Alexei's worldwide artcentre url? No. So, if he would have had his own domain you would type it in just like that. A lot of people now because of the growth of the net are working this way. If you type in a domain and then you have to search for all the rest, you're just not visible anymore. I think its important for artists on the net to be visible.
.Dirk:...They should not join ljudmila.org or v2.nl or desk.nl or existing url's. I don't pin it on these examples, but they provide spaces for so-called experiments with html, from net.art. But one should neglect these existing institutions and go on one's own. It is also a total different approach to what projects you will do, a totally different feeling, its the independent feeling. No gallery, no in-between. The one level playing ground, John Perry Barlow calls it like that, the Californian Ideology (laughs), I mean, you can do it.
Alexei: Its true, now you see a lot of institutions that want to have artists stuff on their pages and collections of art projects. Since there is practically not any critical context for net.art, we have really a big mess in this kind of approach and selection. Look at the Documenta site. It has a very different quality and trend and base works promoted as art works, its just because of this mess, of the impossibility to contextualise net.art. Thats why I think this kind of independent activity is even more important. I am far from saying that if we can all be independent. We can create some independent or paralel infrastructure. What we do is set links from Jodi's site to heath buntings site to mine, thats kind of a paralel hyperlinked infrastructure of interesting artprojects. But to tell the truth I am not sure whether it is going to work very well, because people who are interested in art will go first to well promoted art institutions, to see their links, whats on their sites. Still the situation is kind of unresolved now. This ambiguous situation will remain for some time.
Dirk: There is a battle against virtual institutions from independent net.artists.
Alexei: Now there are a lot of virtual exhibitions curated, but it seems that for net.artists it really becomes not very interesting or important to participate in them for many reasons. If you go to Documenta to make an installation, its a big deal. You get a lot of money as honorarium, you get a big budget to produce the work, its really something serious. If we're talking about websites, small data, a few files, its very easy to get them and put them online and thats it. Artists don't get much from joining art institutions. They hope it will bring them something in the future, but it doesn't work. Institutions don't make real investments into it, because they don't have to.
URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner **at** icf.de
The individual in danger of vanishing under dependence on research linked to social science projects, a modern symposium:November 2004
e-Social Science Symposium at ANU
http://underthesun.anu.edu.au/weblogs/underthesun/.
from mathieu.....
The e-Social Science: Enabling Technologies and New
Research Symposium held on
12 November 2004 was organized by the ANU’s ACSPRI
Centre for Social Research (Research School of Social
Science) and National Institute of Social Sciences and
Law. It focused on two main areas: “Enabling
Technologies: The development of Internet Technologies to
facilitate innovative research using existing social
science datasets; and New Research and Methods: Using the
Internet to collect data for new social science
research.”Following is a brief account of this
event; you can also visit the symposium’s recently
established website.
The first plenary session, with Rob Procter, of the UK
National Centre for e-Social Science at the University of
Manchester and Ashley D Lloyd, of Curtin Business School
and the Univesity of Edinburgh, raised a number of
important issues and introduced the concept of Grid
computing, which as far as I understood means the use of
supercomputers to process huge quantities of data:
“There is now more computing power in higher
education than in banks” asserted Lloyd, whose
presentation dealt with the “Grid-enabled fusion of
global data and local knowledge”. I quote:“In
the INWA project, data quality issues are overcome by
using the Grid for secure aggregation of dispersed
commercial data and distribution of both the computing
power and local market expertise required to model and
predict the underlying ‘customer’ behaviour.
This provides the industry ‘value’ required to
justify access to proprietary data, and hence the
potential for combination with public data to provide a
picture of regional behaviour within the ‘e’
economy.”In other words, extremely precise profiles
of consumers can be established in massive quantities (he
mentioned the figure of 40,000 respondents for one part
of his survey on mobile phone
users).
Lloyd also gushed about the wonderful opportunities
created by the fusion of
a) planned supercomputer projects in Australia, fueled by
the needs of astrophysicians,
b) ever-finer market research techniques enabled by
increased data crunching capacities
c) the fact that Australia is in the same time zone and
region as the crucial Chinese market, which is to lead to
a collaboration withthe Chinese Academy of Sciences and
Sun Microsystems.
Bearing in mind Rob Procter’s allowance that there
might be a few privacy issues to be resolved, I
interjected that putting supercomputed population
analysis tools into the hands of the Chinese State might
not be everyone’s definition of a very good idea. I
was assured that “ethics committees” would make
sure that nothing untoward ever happened with the data
collected, and, moreover, that there was no way to link
the responses given in a survey to an actual living
individual…
Then came a panel session dealing with “the
development of an e-Social Science research agenda in
Australia”. George McLaughlin of AARNET talked about
infrastructure issues (did you know that all Internet
traffic to Australia currently goes through Seattle?).
Markus Buchhorn of the ANU’s Internet Futures
program described some of the resources available to
researchers at the ANU. It became apparent during the
discussion that not everyone working at the ANU is aware
of the resources available, in terms of data storage
capacities for example. The question of the scientific
legitimacy of online publications when seeking grants was
also raised by an audience member. Deborah Mitchell,
Director of the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research then
talked about how the new global environment of online
“paedophilia, cybercrime and terrorism” was
creating the need for “new social science
tools”. She also explained that new technologies
have induced behavioural changes which research should
take into account; and she frankly asserted that this
“new environment” and these “new
questions” would attract research funding. A
discussion of the ARC’s “e-agenda” ensued
anyway, as did one on the Australian Bureau of
Statistics’ output (a couple of government public
servants in the audience complained bitterly about its
format being unwieldy). Rachel Gibson, Deputy Director of
the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research, stood in for Mandy
Thomas and talked about her research project with Robert
Ackland, tracking political parties’ use of the
Internet with web-mining technology.
After lunch, the highlight of the day for me was the
plenary talk by political scientist Bruce Bimber, of
theCentre for Information Technology and Society,
University of California, Santa Barbara. Not
only did he begin his talk by quoting French
techno-skeptic Jacques Ellul, but his energetic delivery
was peppered with talk of overcoming traditional academic
obstacles such as“disciplinary
silos”(demarcations between disciplines)
and“languid publishing cycles”. He asserted
that researchers should adopt e-Social Science not just
because they can but as as way of exploring non-linear
models (“new approaches to causation and
structure”) and resolving“abrupt disjunctions
in society and culture”. Right on! Unfortunately I
had to leave after his talk so I missed Robert
Ackland’sUberLink, a software program designed to
facilitate quantitative research into the formation,
maintenance and impact of networks on the WWW. He has
used it to map the information that is available to
potential migrants to Australia via the web and also for
the abovementionned research project with Rachel Gibson.
The symposium was focused on practical issues so
it’s perhaps unfair to criticise it for not
addressing more fundamental questions such as the
ethical, socio-political and scientific implications for
social science, humanities and arts researchers when they
become dependent on massive technological projects. I
also wondered at the apparent fusion of research and
surveillance techniques… All in all, I found it very
interesting, both for what was explicitly stated and also
for what was implied about the current Australian
research - State - industry nexus.
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FURTHER COMMENT BY FIBRE CULTURE
MEMBER,T.WORTHINGTON
It was an interesting symposium. Essentially what is
happening is that a computer system built for the
"hard" sciences (physics, chemistry and such
like) is being adapted to social sciences and the
humanities.
The big science sector got a whole lot of money for
supercomputers, then a whole lot more money to hook them
together with a high speed network ("The Grid")
and then even more money to put high resolution screens
on the end of the networks (the "Access Grid").
This is funded beyond the dreams of the average
humanities or social science person, so it makes sense
for them to use the infrastructure.
What is needed (and what the symposium talked about in
part) was adding some social science software to adapt
the infrastructure to a new use. The equipment is fun to
play with (wall size high resolution video, video
conferences with thousands, split screen
presentations...) but needs some innovative users.
Otherwise we might end up with everything looking like a
chemistry experiment.
Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington@tomw.net.au