Death of net art exaggerated

> Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Net art has been dead for a LONG time.
> We JUST figured that out?
>
> As a point of note,
> At Susan Ryan's College Art Association panel on the future
> of technological art in 2002(I think 2002, might have been
> 2001) during the Q&A session, I boldly announced (in a bit of
> a illicit haze) that the day after the WB2000, that Net Art was:
>
> "…dead as your poor old Great Aunt Edna, as it has been
> recognized and canonized by the Institution.

Death of net art exaggerated.

"Telecommunications by artists is on the brink of becoming a fashionable
medium - or at least so it would seem from the number of tims that
'telecommunications' crops up in the writings and conversation of artists,
critics and theoreticians concerned with the electronic corner of current
art practice. But this new interest will be viewed with very mixed feelings
by artists working with telecommunications media. On the positive - or any
publicity is good publicity - side is the fact that discussion and
information about telecommunications projects and programs will stimulate a
greater interest among artsts and the art community - which will bring, in
turn, increased funding, attention in art journals etc. Up until now there
has been so little attention paid to this kind of work that even the people
doing it were often asked about its 'art content' - which made it very
difficult to compete, with confidence, for a place in art programs. A
serious discussion of the nature and possibilities of electronic
telecommunications systems as media for art activity could change things
dramatically … though not necessarily for the better."

Robert Adrian X Vancouver 1983

"The creative use of networks makes them organisims. The work is never in a
state of completion, how could it be so? Telematique is a decentralising
medium; its metaphor is that of a web or net in which there is no centre, or
hierarchy, no top or bottom. It breaks the boundaries not only of the
insular individual but of institutions, territories and tim zones. To engage
in telematic communication is to be at once everywhere and nowhere. In this
it is subversive. It subverts the idea of authorship bound up within the
solitary individual. It subverts the idea of individual ownership of the
works of imagination. It replaces the bricks and mortar of institutions of
culture and learning with an invisible college and a floating museum the
reach of which is always expanding to include new possibilities of mind and
new intimations of reality."

Roy Ascott Bristol 1983