Re: RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.04.02

Janis Britland no longer works for Hull Time Based Arts. If you have
any enquiries regarding the Root X festival then please contact :
Ray McFee - [email protected].
If your enquiry is regarding the Speechless project then please contact
:
Walter van der Cruijsen - [email protected]
Please direct any other enquiries to :
[email protected]

Thank you for your compliance.

On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 07:52 pm, [email protected] (RHIZOME)
wrote:

> RHIZOME DIGEST: October 4, 2002
>
> Content:
>
> +editor's note+
> 1. Rachel Greene: Net Art Commissions + Community Campaign
>
> +announcement+
> 2. ISEA: ISEA General Meeting at ISEA2002
> 3. Anna Kindvall: Electrohype 2002
> 4. Rainer Warrol: CLICK STREAM ANALYSIS
>
> +work+
> 5. Jessica Irish: Columbus Day week
>
> +comment+
> 6. Ken Jordan, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid:
> Freeze
> Frame [Part 1]
>
> +feature+
> 7. matthew fuller: simon pope- art for networks
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 1.
>
> Date: 10.04.02
> From: Rachel Greene ([email protected])
> Subject: Net Art Commissions + Community Campaign
>
> Rhizome just launched its 2002 Net Art Commissions at
> http://rhizome.org/commissions! Find out about our Commissioning
> Program
> there, as well as about this year's premises, alt.interface and
> Tactical
> Response. Visit the projects from your CPU, or stop by the New Museum
> of
> Contemporary Art's Zenith Media Lounge through November 3, if you're in
> NYC.
>
> e're still plugging away with our annual Community Campaign. If you're
> loving Digest, Commissions, or other Rhizome resources, please make a
> contribution at any level. Small donations make a difference, and all
> donors are recognized for their support: $10 = an email address
> @rhizome.org; $25 = a Yael Kanarek mousepad; $50 = a Rhizome.org
> T-shirt
> (they're really cool – designed by Cary Peppermint), and $250 = a
> Rhizome.org laptop backpack. We gratefully accept secure online credit
> card contributions or donations via PayPal at
> http://rhizome.org/support/?dig10_04 . You can also send a check or
> money order to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York NY 10012. Money
> orders can be in any currency. Let's make the Rhizome network
> self-sustaining…
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> +ad+
>
> ARTMEDIA VIII CO-SPONSORED BY LEONARDO/OLATS in PARIS
> http:://www.olats.org From "Aesthetics of Communication" to Net Art
> November 29th - December 2nd 2002
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 2.
>
> Date: 10.2.02
> From: ISEA ([email protected])
> Subject: ISEA General Meeting at ISEA2002
>
> *************************************************
> ISEA General Meeting at ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan
> *************************************************
>
> October 31, 2002
>
> 2pm - 4pm at Nagoya Harbor Hall, Nagoya, Japan
>
> ISEA, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, cordially invites you
> to its General Meeting at ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan. This occasion will
> bring together ISEA members and non-members who are interested in
> learning more about current ISEA projects as well as the future
> development of the organization. Representatives from the ISEA Board
> and
> all ISEA committees will be in attendance. Issues to be discussed
> include an evaluation of ISEA2002, ISEA2004, a call for new Symposium
> Host Candidates (ISEA2005, ISEA2006), the development of the ISEA web
> site, and more.
>
> If you are interested in participating and contributing your ideas
> about
> ISEA and its activities, please join us.
>
> Feel free to distribute this announcement among your colleagues and
> other interested parties.
>
> More information about ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Japan is available at
> http://www.isea.jp.
>
> –
> ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts
> [email protected]
> http://www.isea-web.org
> T: +31 20 6120297
> F: +31 20 6182359
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> +ad+
>
> Metamute is now running a specially commissioned article a week. In the
> last 3 weeks, we've published Ben Watson's in-depth review of The
> Philistine Controversy, Eugene Thacker's analysis of the state-endorsed
> biotech 'debate', and James Flint's urbanist reading of Glastonbury and
> Sonar festivals. This week, Stewart Home's reviews Martin Amis's Koba
> the Dread http://www.metamute.com
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 3.
>
> Date: 10.2.02
> From: Anna Kindvall ([email protected])
> Subject: Electrohype 2002
>
> Electrohype 2002 - October 23 - 27
> Malmo, Sweden
>
> Exhibition - INTERPLAY
> October 23 - 27
>
> The exhibition will present a wide range of computer-based art works,
> created by 16 different Nordic and International artists and artist
> groups. The exhibition is shown at two different venues Carolinahallen
> and Malmo Konsthall.
>
> Please visit our web site for further presentation of the participating
> artists.
>
> Artists: Laura Beloff/Erich Berger, Thomas Broom, Andrew C. Bulhak,
> Helen Evans/Heiko Hansen, Rikard Lundstedt, Lisa Jevbratt, Ellen Red,
> Federico Muelas, Morten Schjdt/ Peter Thillemann/Theis Barenkopf
> Dinesen/Anne Dorthe Christiansen/Oncotype/Subsilo, Paul Smith/Vicky
> Isley, C. Anders Walln, Gisle Frysland, John F. Simon Jr., Marek
> Walczak/Martin Wattenberg, Victor Vina, Magnus Wassborg
>
> The exhibition opens on Wednesday October 23rd and will run to Sunday
> evening October 27th.
>
> Conference - Art and software - software as art October 24 - 25
>
> In connection to the Electrohype 2002 exhibition we are also organizing
> a two-day conference focusing on questions related to software and art
> and software as art. The conference will present lectures with a
> concluding panel consisting of artists and theorists. We will invite
> artists who write their own software, artists working close to
> programmers and theorists who closely follow the development in
> computer
> based art. The conference will be held in English.
>
> Lectures Josephine Bosma, Thomas Broom, Boredomresearch, Laura Beloff,
> John F. Simon jr., Andreas Broegger, Martin Howse
>
> Please visit our web site for program and registration form for the
> conference. http://www.electrohype.org
>
> Note: There are a limited number of seats at the conference, we
> recommend you to make your registration soon.
>
> Performance - Artificial Paradises - ap02 Friday October 25
>
> On Friday night, October the 25th, the British artist group will give
> their performance ap02 at Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art here in
> Malmo.
>
> This will be a full evening event supported by DJ. Frans Gilberg. The
> event is a co-operation with Starfield Simulation - forum for
> electronica . This will be a unique opportunity to experience a visual
> and aural performance where art and technology, code and computers
> merge
> into a total experience.
>
> You find more information at http://www.electrohype.org
>
> Best regards Electrohype –
>
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::ELECTROHYPE
>
> Ph: +46 40 780 20
> Mobil: +46 708 94 57 27
>
> e-mail: [email protected]
> URL: http://www.electrohype.org
>
> If you encounter problems with this mail
> address please notify me at [email protected]
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 4.
>
> Date: 10.3.02
> From: Rainer Warrol ([email protected])
> Subject: CLICK STREAM ANALYSIS
>
> CLICK STREAM ANALYSIS
>
> At the Museo Laboratoria di Arte Contemporanea
> Universit di Roma
> La Sapienza
> piazzale Aldo Moro, 5
> 00185 Rome, Italia
>
> 02/10/2002 - 25/10/2002
>
> The exhibition presents 10 fairly wellknown sites of net.art, from Marc
> Napier's Potatoland; to Vuc Cosic's 'History', Marcello Mazzella's
> 'Bodydrome', or Akane Asaoka's 'Planetarium'. But the objective is not
> only to present some representative pieces of net.art to the Roman
> public, but also to explore new ways of presenting this art in a
> gallery
> setting.
>
> The exhibition is project prepared in a few months by Luna Gubinelli
> (for the graphic part) and her brother Mauro (for the programming).
> Luna
> is a doctoral student studying Museal Installations. The sites are
> shown
> by the means of projectors.
>
> Her idea is to present the visitor with a simple and attractive
> graphical first page, as an entry point to the selected sites, to
> reconstruct "within the larger world of the net" a more manageable
> 'museum space' that however remains on the Net and is not a succesion
> of
> separate sites on separate computers.
>
> Furthermore, the Click Stream Analysis of the title is there to make
> visible to the visitor his/her actions in this museal setting : the
> percourse from one site to the other is recorded and can be printed out
> at the the end of the visit as a graphical diagram of the interactions
> with the 'exhibits'. This materialisation of a visit to an essentially
> immaterial world seemed to meet the expectations of the public, if one
> takes into account the number of people looking satisfied and walking
> away with their very own diagram at the end of the visit.
>
> For the lqst week of the show, Luna intends to present her own piece of
> computer art, the amalgamated statistics and diagrams of all the
> visitors.
>
> More info (in Italian) on the vision of the curators at
> http://www.luxflux.net/megaz/3/extent.htm.
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 5.
>
> Date: 10.1.02
> From: Jessica Irish ([email protected])
> Subject: Columbus Day week
>
> + TROPICAL AMERICA +
> http://www.tropicalamerica.com
> A game about the true histories of the Americas…..
>
> Launch: Columbus Day!
>
> Debut: Friday, October 11th @ 5pm
>
> Race in Digital Space Conference MOCA Auditorium, Los Angeles
>
> Inspired by the similarly titled mural by David Alfaro Siqueros-
> subsequently whitewashed in Los Angeles in 1932- Tropical America
> explores the causes and effects of the erasure of history. From the
> battles of Bolivar, to the single-crop economy of Cuba, the myth of El
> Dorado and the poems of Sor Juana de la Cruz, Tropical America reveals
> a
> forgotten terrain, the birthplace of contemporary cross-cultural life.
>
> The users quest begins not before a massacre, as it is often the case
> in first-person shooter games, but rather after a killing occurs. The
> story of Rufina Amaya, sole survivor of the 1981 massacre of El Mozote
> in El Salvador, where more that 1,000 people died in the hands of the
> Atlacatl battalion, becomes the contextual anchor for "Tropical
> America", and the impetus from which the user will begin their
> journey.
>
> For "Tropical America", El Mozote symbolizes the silencing of one
> peoples histories and the perseverance of its survivors to bring the
> events into the open.
>
> [email protected]
>
> ———
>
> A project of OnRamp Arts, 2002
>
> OnRamp Arts is a non-profit media arts organization whose mission is to
> create and produce collaborative, innovative, digital media projects
> that bridge new technology, the arts and local communities.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> : jessica irish
> : onramp arts
> : http://www.onramparts.org
> : 213.481.2395
>
> : next project launch: Columbus Day!
> : TROPICAL AMERICA
> : http://www.tropicalamerica.com
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 6.
>
> Date: 10.1.02
> From: Ken Jordan ([email protected])
> Subject: Freeze Frame [Part 1]
>
> Below is a collaborative essay I wrote with Paul D. Miller aka DJ
> Spooky that Subliminal Kid for the "virtual music" issue of New Music
> Box (http://www.newmusicbox.org) that went live today.
>
> Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia
> by Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
>
> Paul D. Miller's Preamble:
>
> In an era of intensely networked systems, when you create, it's not
> just
> how you create, but the context of the activity that makes the product.
> Let's think of this as a hypothetical situation become real, and then
> turn the idea inside out and apply it to music - operating systems,
> editing environments, graphical user interfaces - these are the
> keywords in this kind of compositional strategy. During most of the
> spring of 2002 I was working on an album called "Optometry." I thought
> of it as a record that focused on "the science of sound - as applied to
> vision." Think of it as a kind of "synaesthesia" project navigating the
> bandwidth operating between analog and digital realms. "Optometry" was
> constructed out of a series of audio metaphors about how people could
> think of jazz as text, of jazz as a precedent for sampling - of jazz
> as
> a kind of template for improvisation with memory in the age of the
> infinite archive. In sum, the album was a play on context versus
> content
> in a digital milieu using sampling as a "virtual band" of the hand.
> Flip
> the situation into the here and now of a world where file swapping and
> peer-2-peer bootlegs are the norms of how music flows on the web, and
> "Optometry" becomes a conceptual art project about how the
> "hypertextual
> imagination" holds us all together. Seamless, invisible,
> hyper-utilitarian… those are some of the words that describe the
> composition process of "Optometry."
>
> What's new here? In 1939 John Cage made a simple statement about a
> composition made of invisible networks that was called "Imaginary
> Landscape." The piece was written for phonographs with fixed and
> variable frequencies (consider that there was no magnetic tape at that
> time), and radios tuned to random stations. The idea for Cage was that
> the music was an invisible network based on "chance operations." As
> Cage would later say in his famous 1957 essay "Experimental Music,"
> "Any
> sounds may occur in any combination and in any continuity." The sounds
> of one fixed environment for him were meant to be taken out of context
> and made to float - think of it as audio free association, and you get
> the first formalist ideas of the origins of DJ culture. But what does
> this have to do with jazz?
>
> In 1964 Ralph Ellison gave a speech about writing jazz criticism. In it
> he discussed Henry James's fascination with Americaness - think of it
> as
> an echo of the Cage notion, and flip the code into a different cipher -
> you arrive at Henry James' critique of Americanness as "a complex
> fate."
> The Ellison lecture was called "Hidden Name/Complex Fate" and Ellison
> takes us on a journey through elements "absent from American life." In
> a
> speech before the Library of Congress, Ellison would flip the mix and
> build a template for a new kind of literature - that's the echo of
> "Imaginary Landscape" that intrigues me. "So long before I thought of
> writing, I was playing by weather, by speech rhythms, by Negro voices
> and their different timbres and idioms, by husky male voices and by the
> high shrill singing voices of certain Negro women, by music by tight
> places and wide spaces in which the eyes could wander…" Again, the
> invocation of an imaginary landscape made of the hyper-real experiences
> of living in a world made of fragments of experience. That's what
> "Optometry" inherits. Think of it as a dialectical triangulation
> between
> the idea of being made from files of expression put through places that
> are not spaces, but code. Gesture is the generative syntax, but once
> the
> sounds leave the body, they're files. And that's the beginning…
>
> 1.
>
> When computers communicate over a network, they do so through sound.
> Before information can be sent over wires run between computers, it
> must
> first be translated into tones. The composer Luke Dubois, of Columbia
> University's electronic music department, has described the static you
> hear when a modem connects as a hyper-accelerated Morse Code, a billion
> dots and dashes sung each second, too fast for the human ear to
> discern.
> This has been true since the dawn of networked computing. When the
> first
> two nodes of the Internet, at UCLA and Stamford, were brought online in
> 1969, Charlie Kline at UCLA famously initiated the connection by typing
> "login." After keying the letter "l" he received the appropriate echo
> back along the phone line from Stamford. The same with the letter "o."
> But when he hit "g" the system crashed; the audible reply from Stamford
> never reached its destination.
>
> In 1972, Ray Tomlinson modified a program meant for ARPANET, the
> precursor to the Internet, that would let people send each other data
> as
> small "letters." He chose the @ sign for addresses for a simple reason:
> the punctuation keys on his Model 33 Teletype made it easy to type; it
> was a convenient way to lend a geographic metaphor to an otherwise
> abstract place made up of data and people's interaction with the nodes
> that hold the data together. In one fell swoop, Tomlinson signaled that
> data could be both a place and a linguistic placeholder for digital
> information as a complete environment. By using the @ symbol, he
> restated what modernist artists and composers had been pointing out for
> over a century: when information becomes total media in the Wagnerian
> and the Nietzschian sense in, we arrive at the "Gesamkunstwerk" or "the
> total artwork." The Situationists referred to this as a
> "psycho-geography." Antonin Artaud wrote an essay about it called
> "Theater and It's Shadow;" for him it was based on the interaction of
> different forms of alchemy. When Artaud coined the term "virtual
> reality" in his 1938 essay "The Alchemical Theater," he anticipated a
> realm where signs, symbols, letters, and ciphers were all placeholders
> in the rapidly changing landscape of a society that faced the surging
> tides of industrial culture's mad race to become an information
> culture.
> It was a phrase to describe a mind trying to make sense of the data
> road
> kill on the side of the information highway being built in the minds of
> artists whose dreams punctuated an immense run on sentence typed across
> the face of the planet as technology carried the codes out of their
> minds and into the world. In the 20th century, one symbol – "@" –
> ushered in a new world linked by the intent of people to communicate.
> This is a world of infinitely reflecting fragments, vibrating,
> manifesting a hum, making music.
>
> The connection between sound and networked computing is more than the
> product of technical convenience. It can be traced to the first
> visionary articulation of the digital age. In his seminal essay from
> 1945, "As We May Think," Roosevelt's science advisor, Vannevar Bush,
> proposed the creation of a device he called the memex, which provided
> the inspiration for what later became the networked personal computer.
> Bush's memex system had the ability to synthesize speech from text,
> and,
> conversely, to automatically create text records from spoken commands.
> He wrote enthusiastically of the Voder, which was introduced at the
> 1939
> World's Fair as "the machine that talks." "A girl stroked its keys and
> it emitted recognizable speech," Bush wrote. "No human vocal cords
> entered in the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some
> electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a
> loud-speaker."
> Bush also discussed another Bell Labs invention, the Vocoder, an early
> attempt at a voice recognition system. Central to his vision of the
> memex was the notion that sound would circulate through the system,
> available for easy retrieval and manipulation.
>
> Today that ease of access and malleability is transforming the way
> musicians conceive of and make music. It is now simple to convert sound
> into digital streams, so it can flow anywhere across the computer
> network, to be manipulated by a continually growing array of software.
> Real time collaborations between musicians across the Net are becoming
> common. Online collaborations that are not real time are commonplace.
> The combination of databases (for storage), software (for
> manipulation),
> and networks (for interactivity between databases, software, and
> musicians) is challenging many long held notions of what music making
> can or should be. Established boundaries are blurring.
>
> This blurring comes from a basic premise behind computing: that all
> information can be translated from its original form into binary code,
> and then re-articulated in a new form in a different medium. Texts can
> be stored in a database as ones and zeros, and later output as images
> or
> sounds. Ted Nelson, the man who coined the terms "hypertext" and
> "hypermedia" in the mid-1960s, was among the first to appreciate the
> full range of opportunities that networked computers make possible. In
> 1974, he proposed the playful idea of "teledildonics," a computer
> system
> that would convert audio information into tactile sensations. Why
> should
> music only enter the body through the ear? Why not through the skin, or
> through the eye?
>
> Artists have been using computer networks for collaboration at least
> since 1979, when I.P. Sharp Associates made their timesharing system
> available to an artist's project called "Interplay." Organizer Bill
> Bartlett contacted artists in cities around the world where IPSA
> offices
> were located, and invited them to participate in an online conference
> –
> essentially a "live chat" – on the subject of networking. At the time
> this technology was rare and expensive; artists had no access to it.
> "Interplay" is often referred to as the first live, network-based,
> collaborative art project.
>
> Around the same time, the innovative use of satellites by artists such
> as Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis, Kit Galloway, and
> Sherrie
> Rabinowitz were connecting performers across great distances in
> collaborative, interactive pieces. A dancer in New York would improvise
> to music played in Paris, while video of the two would be edited into a
> single performance for broadcast in, say, Berlin. Although these
> pioneering telematic works did not make use of networked computing –
> bandwidth and processor speeds were not yet great enough to allow for
> it
> – they set precedents for the real time network-based interaction
> between artists that became possible in the 1990s, as the technology
> improved and costs came down.
>
> Online collaboration today takes many forms. Using Web-based music
> technologies, artists are working together to create new music. There
> are online studios that connect artists across great distances, and
> Web-based jams between musicians who have never laid eyes on one
> another. At the same time, even more popular are "collaborations"
> between artists who are not even aware that a "collaboration" is taking
> place. Referred to as "remixes" or "bootlegs," digital files of a wide
> range of recorded material are being cut up and manipulated into
> entirely new works of art – blending distinct and unlikely source
> materials into singular creations. Of course, this kind of unsolicited
> collaboration challenges some long-held notions of intellectual
> property, and an artist's unique affiliation with his or her own
> output.
> But at the same time, it brings back the idea of a shared folk culture,
> where creative expression is the property of the community at large,
> and
> can be shared for everyone's benefit. Digital technology may be a route
> that reconnects us to aspects of our tribal roots.
>
> As new as these techniques are, however, they retain a continuity with
> pre-digital compositional approaches. The network simply allows
> musicians to perform together online, replicating the experience they
> have always had when jamming in the same room. At the same time, the
> mixing of distinct aural elements certainly does not require digital
> technology; analog sound mixing dates at least to John Cage's 1939
> performance of Imaginary Landscapes, which featured a mix of turntables
> and radios. From this perspective, computer networks simply contribute
> to long standing tendencies in composition that preceded the digital
> era.
>
> However, some composers are exploring a wholly original, uncharted
> musical terrain, one that is unthinkable without networked computers.
> In
> these works, the sound experience is created through the real time
> participation of the listener in the making of the performance itself.
> These online sound art pieces rely on the interactive engagement of the
> listener, who helps to shape the specifics of the performance through
> her choices and actions, which are communicated to the music making
> software over the wired network. In this way, the traditional
> distinction between "artist" and "audience" begins to melt away, as the
> "listener" also becomes a "performer."
>
>
> [Editor's note: End, Part 1. Part 2 will appear in next week's digest]
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
> 7.
>
> Date: 9.25.02
> From: matthew fuller ([email protected])
> Subject: simon pope- art for networks
>
> The following interview is carried out in connection with opening of a
> show 'Art for Networks' starting now at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff,
> Wales. (It tours afterwards.) The show includes work by: Rachel
> Baker,
> Anna Best, Heath Bunting, Adam Chodzko, Ryosuke Cohen, Jeremy Deller,
> Jodi, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, Radio Aqualia, Stephen Willats,
> Talkeoke, Technologies to the People.
>
> 6 Questions in search of a network
>
> 1. Matthew Fuller: In the original Art for Networks project you state
> that one of the motivations of the work was to discover another set of
> relations for art on the internet. What was argued against was the
> idea
> that network art could be categorised according to a certain
> chronology.
> This chronology slotted certain works into a history primarily on the
> basis of how closely they married themselves to technological
> developments. What was suggested instead was that there was a whole
> wider sense of networks that are being made and used by artists. Do
> you
> think that this statement of an alternate set of trajectories still
> holds true or polemically necessary?
>
> Simon Pope: The Art for Networks project was initially devised as a way
> of making sense of, and investigating how to move beyond, so-called
> 'net.art'. This definition was, as Heath Bunting (1) has said, 'a joke
> and a fake' anyway, but held sway in some circles.
>
> 'Net.Art' signified a technical art of the Internet or, more
> specifically, the Web. It was defined as a progression through clearly
> defined stylistic and technical phases: from an Avant Garde, through
> 'high period' Web-based net.art and interminable Mannerist replays, all
> the while waiting for the emergence of the new Avant Garde… This lame
> art historical approach denies wider or longer views of how artists and
> their work operate.
>
> The demand for a neat, linear art history becomes a real problem for
> anyone it implicates. As Jodi are quoted as saying "We never choose to
> be net.artists or not."(2) Pinned onto this restrictive and arbitrary
> time-line, artists have their destinies plotted for them. It was time
> to
> take Stewart Home's cue (3) and begin a process of
> 'self-historicising'.
> The exploration of more expansive definitions of 'network' is part of
> this, at first through interviews and presentations in 2000 and now
> through this exhibition.
>
> 2. MF: If the show works through various uses and creations of networks
> as art, were there any ways in which this focus inflected the way in
> which the show was curated? Can we imagine a curation for networks?
>
> SP: 'Network' isn't used here as an 'ideal concept' (4). It remains
> open
> to interpretation and ongoing enquiry by the participating artists.
> The
> network becomes a field, terrain or environment through which to
> operate
> on, in or through.
>
> Networks have been described in many ways, often at the moment where
> some phenomenon eludes an accepted form of classification: Landow
> reminds us that Foucault adopts the network when describing the means
> "…to link together a wide range of often contradictory taxonomies,
> observations, interpretations, categories, and rules of observation."
> (5). Jeremy Deller's work often exemplifies this, for example.
>
> Josephine Berry noted that "The term 'networks' has nearly become a
> cipher for saying 'everything' with the proviso that 'everything' be
> framed by technology" (6). Jodi's 'Wrong Browser' project continues
> their scrutiny of the conventions of the most popular of these
> technologies that link 'everything', the Web Browser. (7).
>
> Others artists are not concerned with technology as such. They
> investigate social networks, distributed knowledge or social protocols,
> for example.
>
> Together, all of the artists in this show help us speculate, with the
> widest possible scope, on what an art for networks might be.
>
> 3. MF: Perhaps it is useful to think about two of the modes of network
> that currently exist. There's the development of systems that take
> heterogeneous material and connect it through a unifying, reductive,
> measurable protocol. Another might be informatisation - that everything
> can be transposed into a transmissable and calculable numerical
> 'equivalent'. Perhaps these kinds of networking technologies are
> linked
> to the idea of a discovery of an ur-language, a code that precedes all
> codes. A different kind of network might be that which is deliberately
> non-compressible, that generates its own terms of composition as it's
> enacted; rather than reducing one thing to its intermediary, it focuses
> on inventing new connections, proximities, conjunctural leaps.
>
> SP: The unifying system forces homogeneity onto previously
> heterogeneous
> material and has plenty of historical precedents such as systematic
> classification in Zoology, the Dewey decimal system. Objectified matter
> is ordered, processed - the system aims for closure, completeness. In
> your second example, the subject resists classification or reduction to
> a cipher. For example, in organizations, there's always tension between
> structure - invariably hierarchical - and those who work within it.
> Despite the most ruthless line-management, the subject - individual or
> group - will find ways of subverting the structure. A common form of
> resistance is the 'gossip network'. Rachel Baker's 'Art of Work', for
> example, has previously inserted itself into this context. (8)
>
> I think Manuel De Landa's model (9) of meshworks and hierarchies is
> useful here and relates, (at least in my understanding of it), to the
> relationship between networks, hierarchies, agency and structure.
>
> Meshworks (networks) and hierarchies exist as a mixture. The meshwork
> formed as an aggregate of dissimilar, heterogeneous material, the
> hierarchy from similar, homogeneous material, forming strata. They are
> interdependent and can change states, one into the other. They stratify
> and destratify, depending on the flow of energy: meshworks form from
> hierarchies and vice versa.
>
> 4. MF: Perhaps too, there is a range of disjunctive connections between
> these two kinds of network. For example, one of the claims often made
> for the architecture of the internet, and which is currently under
> severe test, is that it's inherently decentralised, that any time a
> hierarchy such as a national legislature attempts to close a site down,
> can be worked around. It might be remarked of course that if a
> technology is inherently liberatory, people acting on the basis of this
> liberation are simply carrying out what is programmed into the machine.
>
> SP: The technologies of the Internet describe both networks and
> hierarchies (or aggregates and strata): hierarchical systems such as
> the
> DNS (10) that provide structure, and could be seen as a constraining,
> strategizing desire. The DNS produces a homogenous structure: it's a
> classification system that defines a number of interrelated strata.
> HTTP, on the other hand, might be seen as the confounding of that
> system
> through the construction of networks within that structure: they form
> links between nodes to produce aggregates, affinities of dissimilar
> material. So yes, 'liberation' is built into the system, but it relies
> on agency to actualize it! OWN (11) could be seen as an attempt to
> assert this through building ad hoc, open, wireless networks. Critical
> theories of Hypertext (12), have stressed that such networked
> technologies produce a 'decentred' subject at the point of reception;
> with no single centring device to provide surety, Ideology, let alone
> shared values, appear impossible. In Stephen Willats' work we see a
> struggle with this: participation's key in many of his works and is
> often carefully constructed to explore or develop a 'meta-language', a
> symbolic language shared by disparate social groups. (13)
>
>
> 5. MF: It seems that quite a few of the projects circulating here
> situate themselves right at a point where there are various kinds of
> feedback, or bastard combination, generated between one kind of network
> and another?
>
> SP: Heath Bunting's 'Courier' (14) is a good example: although
> efficiently coordinated online, exchange and distribution of items
> 'couriered' between destinations soon becomes problematized. As items
> pass between social networks, via a technical network, they're
> immediately invested with new value. Trust between networks is
> negotiated 'on-the-fly', each exchange subject to very close
> consideration.
>
> 6. MF: Some of the work here is represented by documentation of a
> process that's already occurred. Other parts of the show invite
> participation. I don't mean simply 'interaction', but an actual
> challenge or invitation to take part in something going on. Natalie
> Bookchin, in the original series of art for networks interviews
> suggested that art galleries and museums were good storage places for
> ideas and activities that had worked in the past, but that were now
> done
> with. What might be the implications or possibilities for producing a
> show purely of the latter sort?
>
> SP: Much of this work demands participation, often both over time and
> across space. For example, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie's 'An Artist's
> Impression' (15) is constructed at live events at each venue throughout
> the tour. We see the process of building on the 'island' in response to
> continuing online activity by contributors.
>
> In Anna Best's commission, work shown in the gallery changes over the
> duration of the tour as interviews with local participants are recorded
> and presented at each venue.
>
> Ryosuke Cohen connects to a massive, distributed network of
> contributors, each of whom sends stickers or stamps to add to each
> iteration of 'Braincell'. We see this exhibit grow over the duration of
> the tour as each version is posted back to us.
>
> While most of the work is represented in the gallery in some form or
> another, it's often not the primary venue: Adam Chodzko's new work
> distributes an archive of planning information into a travellers'
> encampment in Kent. Suddenly there's connection and interaction between
> sedentary knowledge and a potentially nomadic culture.
>
> Also, Rachel Baker's commission, extending the prototype of 'Platfrom'
> (16) unfolds a narrative for passengers travelling on the Eurostar.
>
> Radioqualia reminds us of the networks of open collaboration that
> contribute to the development of Free Software, with 'Free Radio Linux'
> , an "audio distribution of the Linux Kernel" (17).
>
> Beginning this tour from an independent venue has meant that there's no
> compulsion to seek authority, fixity add or to the canon - this can be
> erased and re-written if necessary. For example. Technology To The
> People's website (18) is entirely 'open' to encourage participation in
> the development of this exhibition, over time and across geographical
> location.
>
>> From a curator's point-of-view, this ability to describe a 'network'
>> to
> link across temporal and spatial divides (19) provides a way around the
> restrictions of the 'net.art' taxonomy and linear art historical view.
> Of course, this approach isn't restricted solely to curating
> 'networked'
> art.
>
> Notes:
> 1. Snap to Grid, Peter Lunenfeld, 2001. p
> 2. Interview with Jodi, Tilman Baumgaertel, 2001
> (http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2550)
> 3. Five Thousand Years of Foreplay: Stewart Home interviewed by Marko
> Pyhtil (http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/pyhtil.htm)
> 4. Southern Oscillation Index, McKenzie Wark. Online, 1998
> (http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9810/
> msg00099.html)
> 5. The Nonlinear Model of the Network in Current Critical Theory.
> George
> P. Landow, 1992 (http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/jhup/network.html)
> 6. The Unbearable Connectedness of Everything, Josephine Berry. Online,
> 1999 (http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/sa/3433/1.html)
> 7. Baumgaertel,, Ibid.
> 8. Art of Work, Rachel Baker (http://www.art-of-work.com/guide.html )
> 9. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel de Landa. Zone Books,
> 1997.
> 10. The Domain Name System: A Non-Technical Explanation - Why Universal
> Resolvability Is Important, InterNIC, 2002
> (http://www.internic.net/faqs/authoritative-dns.html)
> 11. OWN, James Stevens & Julian Priest.
> (http://www.informal.org.uk/inf/article.php?sid)
> 12. The Network in Marxist Theory, George P. Landow. Online 1992
> (http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/jhup/marxnet.html)
> 13. Art and Social Function, Stephen Willats, Ellipsis (London), 2000
> 14. Irational Courier, Heath Bunting. Online, 2000
> (http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl)
> 15. An Artist's Impression, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie. Online 1998
> onwards (http://www.somewhere.org.uk/artists/impress/index.htm)
> 16. 'Platfrom' prototype supported by Proboscis. Online, 2002.
> (http://www.platfrom.net/)
> 17. Free Radio Linux, Radioqualia. Online, 2002
> (http://www.radioqualia.net/freeradiolinux)
> 18. Art for Networks website, Technologies to the People. Online, 2002-
> (http://www.artfornetworks.org)
> 19. Landow, Ibid.
>
> A number of original interviews, conducted for BBC Arts Online in 2000,
> can be found at
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/digital/interviews/index.shtml
>
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