NetArt: Links
Thomas Dreher
- Platforms for NetArt
- Contributions to the History of NetArt
- Texts on Actual Aspects of NetArt
- Reviews of Books on Electronic Media, Hypertext and Hyperfiction in IASLonline Rezensionen (book reviews)
- Portals, Mailing Lists and Newsgroups with News on NetArt, Net Conditions and Activism
- Databases for Intermedia Art
- Abstraction Now:
In August and September 2003 the Künstlerhaus Wien (Vienna) presented the exhibition "Abstraction Now" with non-mimetic art in its multi- and intermedia dimensions. Abstraction is featured as a "hybrid dynamic process" (Pfaffenbichler). The curators Norbert Pfaffenbichler and Sandro Droschl presented examples in the media painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, CD, installation and net as parts of a mediascape with digitized picture processing. This contemporary mediascape prohibits divisions in independent, media specific developments (concept). The Online Project contains between one and three contributions of each of the 22 artists and groups. Many contributions are integrated parts of the site (Dextro, Insertsilence, Juerg Lehni, Golan Levin, Lia, Meta, Glen Murphy, [N:JA], Norm, Casey Reas, Return, Soda/Ed Burton & Julian Saunderson, Manny Tan, James Tindall, Mariugop) and links connect with further projects (Jodi, Jan Robert Leegte, Peter Luining, Mus Watz, Yark Napier, Nullpointer/Tom Betts). The net projects present processes with f. e. Java and many times with Shockwave and Flash but the source code remains closed (exception: Marius Watz). Some projects are soundtoys (see below) which combine audio and visual processes with possibilities to navigate with mouse movements (Burton, Insertsilence, Lia, Luining, Return, Tindall). Lev Manovich discusses the contributions of the Online Project in Abstraction and Complexity as examples for a paradigm shift from reduction (abstract art and science between 1910 and ca. 1920) to complexity (& emergence): They oscillate "between order and chaos". Manovich contradicts the curators´ equation of non-mimetic with non-representative art and proposes an investigation of abstract works as "symbolic representations" of "the new social complexity" (7/2004). - Banner Art Collective:
The Website "Banner Art Collective" was installed by Brandon Barr (concept) and Garrett Lynch (design) in October 2002. Its archive contains more than hundred banners. The archive offers examples of abstract banner design and banners with humorous and activistic messages for an integration into web pages. The banners are developed in part by well known artists (f. e. Agricola de Cologne, Gerhard Mantz, Millie Niss, Jim Punk) and by students. HTML-instructions are offered for the integration in web pages. Artists find the Interactive Advertising Standards as preconditions for an integration of their own contributions into the archive. A Banner Art Collective's Artist Kit simplifies the work with these standards (3/2003. 9/2011: The URL-adress does not exist anymore, but it is stored in the Internet Archive without the files of the banners).
- Carnivore:
In 1st October 2001 "Carnivore" was installed by RSG (Radical Software Group) as platform on the website of Rhizome. The platform includes contributions of Cory Arcangel, Area3, Jonah brucker-cohen, Vuk Cosic, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, Entropy8EntropyZuper!, Lisa Jevbratt, Golan Levin, Mark Napier, RSG, Scott Sona Snibbe and others. Their "client applications" (Java applets and Flash-movies) are visualizations of (transformed parts of) dates collected in a local area network with software of RSG ("packet-sniffing"). The software "Carnivore PE" (since 4/6/2002 for Windows) was inspired by Ethernet and is offered as Open Source Software for download. It could be a method for employees to control employers, nevertheless: The processing of data traffic in a local are network is directed in contributions for "Carnivore" primarily to esthetic presentations instead of decoder functions. RSG reuses in "CarnivorePE" the name of the FBI-software "Carnivore" (the terms for DCS1000) which supervises the international data traffic (via search terms). That context caused the jury of the Prix Ars Electronica 2002 (department "Net Vision", prize: Golden Nica) to state that "the Carnivore project" is "based on the FBI's software for monitoring network traffic". That statement provoked a counterstatement by the jury of the Read-Me Festival 1.2: "The relationship of Rhizome´s Carnivore to the FBI´s spying tool of the same name seems to be a matter of concept and hipness-value, but it is not explained and is not very obvious." (3/2003) - CODeDOC
:
The online gallery Artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presents smaller works in "CODeDOC" (since September 2002, curated by Christiane Paul). Paul decided that "the code should not exceed 8 KB" and that it "should move and connect three points in space." She excluded HTML and FlashScript to reduce the number of relevant artists. The website leads users first to the source code (C++, Java, Lingo, Perl, Visual Basic) of a contribution and then to the browser presentation. Furthermore the integrated American artists (Sawad Brooks, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, John Klima, Golan Levin, Kevin McCoy, Mark Napier, Brad Paley, Scott Snibbe, Camille Utterback, Martin Wattenberg and Maciej Wisniewski) commented the works of their colleagues (3/2003).
Christiane Paul organized CODEDOC II for the Ars Electronica 2003 in Linz (Ars Electronica and Brucknerhaus, September 2003) as a platform for European Artists (Ed Burton, epidemiC, Graham Harwood, Jaromil, Annja Krautgasser & Rainer Mandl, Jean Leandre, Antoine Schmitt and John F. Simon jr.) (2/2004). - copy-art.net
In June 2004 the curator Irini-Mirena Papadimitriou launched the platform at IBID Projects (London). The site included works by Anna Best, Bigert & Bergström, Colectivo Cambalache, Critical Art Ensemble, AK Dolven, House of O´Dwyer, Per Hüttner, juneau projects, Miltos Manetas, Matthieu Laurette, N55, Szuper Gallery and Thomson & Craighead. The platform received eight further projects for the exhibition at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, September-October 2004). Six projects are included after the ICA show (Stand: Oktober 2006). Some links direct the observers to works on other web sites by Anna Best, Critical Art Ensemble, Ella Gibbs, Miltos Manetas, Thomson & Craighead und Carey Young.
Any use of (parts of) the works has to follow the rules which are defined by Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0. The works can be downloaded, copied and modified. The authors have to be named.
Thomson & Craighead use a standard copyright information ("All rights reserved....") in attributed-text.net (1997, links are actualized afterwards) as a starting point for a collection of links. These links direct the reader to web pages with articles including discussions of copyright problems and others. These web pages appear under the copyright information and the bibliographical notes are presented over it. The Critical Art Ensemble expands the field of discussion from questions concerning copies and modifications in the context of copyright to the same questions within the framework of biotechnology. In Free Range Grain they discuss the EU´s "laws regarding the importing and labeling of GM [=genetically manipulated] foods". Mathieu Laurette follows the communication guerilla´s strategies with his form for the indication of news about a give away for downloads: On Laurette´s form for an e-mail distribution a firm can be noted. The readers of the e-mail will receive a faked information about the firm´s reaction to the free offers of a competitor by opening one of its products for free copies (How to launch a rumour on the Internet?, 2000).
The works realize remix strategies (Colectivo Cambalache, Doug Fishbone, Isabel Saij) or they offer material for copies and further exploitations including transformations (Carey Young, Gavin Wade) and/or they present strategies and theories on the themes copyright (Matthieu Laurette, Szuper School, Thomson & Craighead) and (post-)autonomy (David Goldenberg) (10/2006; 10/2009: website unavailable). - Electronic Literature
Collection Volume One:
In: Electronic Literature Organization. October 2006. The platform includes 60 works exemplifying electronic literature´s development from 1994 to 2006. The examples are selected by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland for the "Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination Initiative (PAD)" of the Electronic Literature Organization. The platform facilitates the use of each work´s functions by introductory remarks and technical informations ("instructions").
The parallel availability of the database as CD-ROM demonstrates the character of the works included: They are closed projects independent of net conditions (like connections to external archived files (external links), online uses of participants and archived entries of previous uses). The horizon of the selection is not constituted by interactions and the distinction between cooperative and collaborative participation procedures (Christiane Heibach: Oszillationen//Netzkunst/Netzliteratur, see below) but by the readers´ explorations of the authors´ programming decisions. The functions made available to readers by the monitor presentations and their programming codes (Squeak, Hypertext, Processing, Flash, Director, VRML, Quicktime and others) are the dominant points of reference, except they are forced in the position of passive observers. This kind of electronic literature doesn´t integrate itself inseparably into the net culture like the Assoziationsblaster (Dragan Espenschied/Alvar H.C. Freude, since 1999, with an english version) but tries to control its embedding as frame (art) within the frame (culture). The development of the technical possibilities offered by hardware and software is the dominant point of reference meanwhile the net culture realized by its participants remains excluded (We can find traces of the net context only in the use of external material filed for reuses in closed archives and the used common hardware and software).
N. Katherine Hayles offers an introduction to the database in "Electronic Literature: What Is It?" (see below) The article constitutes chapter 1 of her book "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary" with a wider discussion of the subject. The book contains the database on CD-ROM (Hayles, N. Katherine: Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame/Ithaca 2008. Free CD-ROMs without book available: Electronic Literature Organization. Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). B0131 McKeldin Library. University of Maryland. College Park, MD 20742) (10/2009). - Extrapolation:
The website of Wigged Productions (directed by Seth Thompson) presents the online exhibition "Extrapolations" from the 1st July 2006 to the 15th June 2007. The server of the curator Huberto Ramirez is used as an archive for half of the eight works, meanwhile other links conduct to works on external sites. The projects use the media photo and film in digital forms of animation for the mediation of political contents.
Ramirez looked for documents of a kind of political engagement which tries to provoke social changes not from the margins but from the centers of power. These centers aren´t bound anymore to locations or nations. According to Ramirez the model of Tactical Autonomous Zones is removed by strategies for actions within the centers of power. Strategic configurations are reactions to ephemeral situations and will be reconfigured by occasional needs. Ellipse and metaphor are strategic means to brake up established interpreting kinds of understanding. Ramirez´ curatorial statement refers to Craig Owen´s "The Allegorical Impulse" (October, Nr. 12/Spring 1980, part I, p.67-86; October Nr.13/Summer 1980, part II, p.58-80).
Deva Eveland´s Mouthpiece #2 offers a document of that "impulse". He puts toothpicks with glued little flags printed with stars and stripes between his teeth and violates his gums. The flags hinder talking: The flags and the nationalism symbolized by them muzzle [In German: "machen `mundtot´" = kill (talking by) the mouth].
All examples use `worlds´ of images for the imagination of `worlds´: The images represent more than the facts. The orks present the effects of globalization in a direct but exaggerated manner (The Yes Men´s proposition sheds a new light on the difference between the poor and the rich in the distribution of food – compare the Plattsburgh lecture in March 2002) or in an indirect manner for example via the presentation forms of mass media (Jody Zellen) or via the latin alphabet which actually needs no other than an English presentation (Peiyun Lee). Lana Lin demonstrates the (still?) impossible egalization of cultural differences embedded in languages in No Power To Push Up The Sky via the presentation of 15 translators´ efforts to repeat in English the content of an interview with Chai Ling in 1989. Ling organized the students´ protest in China. She reported the situation some days before the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Arzu Özkal Telhan demonstrates in The Unattended Body the relations between social indifference and the fear produced by terrorism under the conditions of the globalization in the U.S.A.: Those who rest for too long time in passageways without recognizable reason alarm the video voyeur´s care of security (the care of the observers, our care) meanwhile passengers and drivers ignore the persons with deviant behaviors (10/2006; 4/2013: website unavailable. See Internet Archive).
. - The Famous Sound of Absolute
Wreaders:
Johannes Auer developed the concept of the project which is constituted by levels of texts over texts: manual text modifications, audio comments and coded transformations. Five authors – Auer, Reinhard Döhl (died in 5/29/2004), Sylvia Egger, Oliver Gassner, Martina Kieninger, Beat Suter – changed contributions of other authors. These texts constituted the basis of a radio version for two speakers, which was sent by ORF in 9/7/2003 and lasted 40 minutes, and a net version with six projects. "Multitasking" (Auer) became "multi-talking" in the radio version via readings of texts collaged manually and generated as remix as well as "multi-asking" via comments in normal and alcoholized mental states.
Two net projects reflect levels of the project in especially impressing manners: Oliver Gassner divides in as time goes on: absolute wreaders Kieninger´s text on Gassner´s tango rgb and Auer´s Lob-Buch einer gemeinsamen Reise in four frames with activatable auto-scroll functions. He adds a fifth frame with a text, which asks to reactivate the auto-scroll functions permanently, and includes its own auto-scroll-function in the request. Suter and René Bauer use in Scrabble mit Döhl Döhl´s modification of Kieninger´s "der schrank. die schranke", his comments on contributions of further participants and their net projects as basis for transformations of texts and pictures. Five scripts generate text fragments running over the monitor as "multi-layer-scrabble" and expand the project´s material via net search.
Kieninger´s Fenster 1 2 3 4 5 6, Gassner´s "as time goes on" and Suter/Bauer´s "Scrabble" present models for simultaneous ways of reading parts of texts in movements. These models modify strategies of the literary avant-garde and point to reading possibilities provoked by the forms of presentation (6/2004). - The 5k:
In autumn 1999 the web designer Stewart Butterfield installed "the 5K" (5120 bytes) as a platform with a competition for contributions of any kind. The contributions can´t be larger than 5k and server-side processing is excluded. The contest is renewed every year since 2000. The jury evaluates "function", "aesthetics", "concept" and "size score"/"entries overall". The prize is a donation of 5120 US Cents, a symbolic sum: Cent=Bytes. Users could evaluate and comment the archived works. The platform "is entirely non-commercial and does not accept sponsorship or advertising" (3/2003; 6/2006: The URL-adress leads to a placeholder-homepage without archive). - Illegal Art:
From 2002 to 2004 the travel exhibition "Illegal Art: Freedom and Expression in the Corporate Age" (curator: Carrie McLaren) presented many examples for different ways to reuse copyrighted audio and visual resources. The organizers received legal advice (together with other groups) from Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, "a joint convention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics".
The website of the exhibition features film extracts, animations, music and art works in different media – partly combined with their juridical history –: Some law-suits remained open in the course of the exhibition (3/2003).
In 2004 the Homepage of the former travel exhibition informed about new cases like "The Grey Album" of DJ Danger Mouse and Brad Neely´s new audio track to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone" (with links and downloads).
(s. chapter (Il)legal Art in From Radical Software to Net Activism) (6/2004; 5/2013: website unavailable. Films stored in the Internet Archive) - Kingdom of Piracy <KOP>:
KOP thematizes Copyleft/Copyright problems, as they occured in conflicts between advocates of the net ideal of limitless connectivity including free download and the Copyright demands (download barriers against private copies, etc.) of the software- and entertainment industries. The last ones threaten the net architecture with their regulation demands: "Data Lords" contra "Digital Commons" (Curatorial Statement). The three Writing Projects 2002 elucidate the urgency of these problems.
The ACER Group in Taiwan was the first sponsor of KOP. The directorate staff of ACER was replaced in April 2002 and the government of Taiwan began with an anti-piracy-campaign. The Taiwanese pilot site was given up in the midst of June 2002 after the directorate of the Acer Digital Arts Center demanded the control of links and a change of the platform´s title. The curators Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch and Yukiko Shikata resisted these demands. They found in 2002 a new server for KOP at the Ars Electronica Center (Linz/Austria). FACT in Liverpool installed an expanded site in February 2003. Projects of BEIGE, Shu Lea Cheang, Eastwood, Espenschied/Freude/Milles, Olia Lialina, Graham Harwood/Mongrel, Uebermorgen, Raqs Media Collective, RSG, www.0100101110101101.ORG and others found their ways to the ends of the project with different means (3/2003).
The project "DIVE" (2003) heightens the awareness to conceptual, software and process related aspects of net projects. DIVE 0.1 is published by FACT in Liverpool as website and as CD-ROM (with book, Armin Medosch (ed.): DIVE. An Introduction into the World of Free Software and Copyleft Culture. FACT, Liverpool/Virtualcentre-Media.net 2003, ISBN 0-9541604-9-5). The server of the site (for downloads) and the CD-ROM contain a series of net projects under the category art, for example browsers like I/O/D´s Webstalker and Nullpointer´s "Webtracer" or epidemiC´s "Antimafia" for an activistic use of peer-to-peer, The Yes Men´s Reamweaver for the construction of modified mirror sites, Double Negative´s "plaNet Former" and others. Further webpages introduce into Copyleft-licenses and free networks (with links). Articles by Armin Medosch (see below), Janko Röttgers, RAQs Media Collective (see below), Saul Albert and Lawrence Chua explain the investigative context of "Kingdom of Piracy". "Kingdom of Piracy" became the most extensive and conceptually most precise platform for relations between Free Software, net activism and NetArt, especially after the installation of "DIVE" (2/2004). - Looped:
25 Danish artists present loops with few and short sequences (video, animation, text, sound) since 16th October 1998. The loops are substituted permanently. The platform which someone (Mette Sandbye for Artnode) had to do! (3/2003; 10/2009: website unavailable) - Netfilmmakers:
Since 2004 every three months a new edition, usually with three films (including experimental, net specific forms in and with film formats), is published in the "netgallery". Themes of past editions have been "Territory" (2004), "Docu-Slash" (2006), "Navigation" (2006) and "Real-Un-Real" (2009) among others. Director and curator Annette Finnsdottir presents the platform in an article for Vague Terrain (Journal 11/2008): She points our attention to three examples. The most interesting of them is the "interactive netfilm" (Don´t) Leave Me Alone von Kassandra Wellendorf (2006) allowing users to start movements in the pictures of the diptych. In What Remains (2009) Alan Sondheim presents 3D digital filmmaking in times of Second Life.
In comparison to platforms being always open for contributions like YouTube and Vimeo Netfilmmakers unavoidably provokes the question concerning the legitimation of a curated film platform with closed entities. The subject oriented selection of Netfilmmakers is opposed to platforms like dvblog with no other limitation for contributions than the format Quicktime and being interesting enough for the editors (Doron Golon, Brittany Shoot and Michael Szapowski). Curatorial activities are substituted in dvblog by the editors´ tagging (10/2009, 5/2013). - page_space project:
Braxton Sodermann´s introduction explains the goal of the platform (2004): Authors collaborate not to create a text field as links which are graphically distributed on a page – as Ted Warnell did it in his contribution to The Field Project (1999) – but they create digital environments for the presentation of texts written by other authors. The projects have been programmed in Flash and Macromedia Director. Priority has the screen page as a presentation space for (parts of) texts but not the code. The relations between code, screen display and code poetry, exemplified in Talan Memmott´s Lexia to Perplexia (2000), are not relevant for the featured works. Jason Nelson´s untitled (to reconstruct) enfolds Jody Zellen´s text via clicks on squares as a tree structure from top left to downright. Deena Larsen´s Cut to Flesh presents a surface with distributed interrogation marks. Clicks on the interrogation marks start diagonal moves of parts of Zellen´s text. Larsen offers the non-hierachic complement to Nelson hierarchic structure: The same text is enfolded and readable in all of its parts in Nelson´s work meanwhile it appears in Leeson´s graphic presentation in fragmented phrases without reference to their connections. Jim Andrews uses in Arteroids words and parts of phrases written by Christina McPhee and Helen Torrington as elements with whom the "script/"-element of the player should not collide and which have to be shooted. Realistic game environments are removed by a text space which requests from level to level to solve more and more difficult situations. Brian Kim Stefans´ Dibagan allows readers to distribute words of geniwate´s text on a surface. The game offers four elements to move them out via cursor and to read them. Picture and sound offer the context to recognize the relations between the words: the war in Iraq. Simon Biggs´ non-LOSS´y translator turns Loss Pequiño Glazier´s text (written with Greek letters and Arabic numerals) into a graphic element of a dynamic presentation which integrates the letters written by participants but doesn´t reconfigure the field from input to input
Further contributions and collaborations by and with Simon Biggs, geniwate, Loss Pequiño Glazier, Deena Larsen, Brian Kim Stefans, Pedro Valdeolmillos and Jody Zellen (10/2006). - Processing:
Since Mai 2003 the platform contains examples (with source code) of Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Brendan Dawes, Mikkel Crome Koser, Golan Levin, Lia, Mark Napier, Josh On, Schoenerwissen, Jared Tarbell and others for the implementation of the software "Processing". Many contributions present possibilities of "generative art". The software was developped by Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas and the current version is available free of charge. "Processing" was developped at MIT (Media Lab, Aesthetics and Computation Group, in collaboration with the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea). The software is via LGPL (Library General Public Licence) open for implementations and developments. Reas explains that the software facilitates the artistic practice in relation to C, C++, Java and Open GL. Furthermore Processing is useful for the development of code with a bigger number of elements whose generation will need intense calculation.
OpenProcessing presents contributions of participants together with their codes. The applet of Processing allows to revise the codes, to download them as .pde-files and to open the coded generation processes.
Rhizome published a call to its members to send contributions to the platform Tiny Sketch a (part of OpenProcessing). After the closing day at 13th Septembe r2009 the members of the platform Rhizome voted the best contribution until 30th September (prize: 200 USD). The code of each contribution had to be written in Processing "using 200 characters or less".
Workshops and tutorials offer introductions into "Processing" to participants without any knowledge of programming. Daniel Shiffman´s "Beginner´s Guide" is published as book and as website (6/2004, 10/2006, 9/2009). - runme.org:
The "software art repository" presents download systems. It includes tools for users´ own creations. A system of categories in the form of an index and a hypertext keynote system help users to find their pathways. Categories like bots and agents and political and activist software offer interesting projects. The platform includes many links to projects on other sites, too. Runme.org exists as archive since January 2003. The reason of the installation of runme.org as archive was to last longer than the sites of the programming artists. The open, but moderated platform is offered as chance for net presentations. Projects which have been downloaded in runme.org until the 1st March 2003 were presented in Read-me 2.3 in Helsinki (University of Art and Design, Media Centre Lume, 5/30-5/31/2003) (3/2003, 8/2003). - Singlecell
and Doublecell:
"Doublecell" (12/2/2002) is the second, conceptually modified edition of "Singlecell" (2001): The two platforms of Golan Levin present projects realized with Director, Flash and self made software (in C++, Java, Lingo and ActionScript). The projects in "Singlecell" don´t have different levels (no links to different pages) and they don´t divide the surface of a page in different frames: After the opening each contribution presents the monitor surface which introduces the user to all functions. The sites present reactive animations or movies, with or without sound, in "Singlecell" in amorphous and in part anthropomorphic forms. Excellent Computational Design by Ed Burton, Danny Brown, Peter Cho, Joshua Davis, Juha Huuskonen, Golan Levin, Lia, Casey Reas, Jared Schiffman, Manny Tan, James Tindall, Martin Wattenberg and others (3/2003). - {Software}
Structures:
In 2004 Casey Reas presents his project "{Software} Structures" on the portal Artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He demonstrates the usability of LeWitt´s verbal concepts for "wall drawings" for the development of visual structures in generative art. The codes are written in Processing, Flash MX and C++ and result after download in faster or slower generating screen pictures. The source code is presented in text files separate to the downloadable files.
Reas presents in one part of his project five – three static and two animated – Processing-translations of three "wall drawings" which LeWitt notated in the Seventies and early Eighties. Reas developed three further examplas (#001, #002, #003) out of verbal concepts stimulated by LeWitt´s notations for"wall drawings": Reas developed verbal concepts in a first working procedure without anticipation of the chances and problems of the different pogramming languages. The next step after the verbal concepts was the realization of codes in different programming languages: The third example (#003) was modificated with Processing by Reas, Robert Hodgin, William Ngan and Jared Tarbell. Die Processing-"Implementation" wurde mit C++ (Casey Reas) und Flash MX (Jared Tarbell) rekonstruiert.
Flash realizations with fewer elements had to be developed because program code with hundred and more elements runs very slow in Flash. Versions in C++ are only available for downloads and separate installations. An intense effort in time was necessary for the development of variants in C++. They are generated by computers faster than the variants for net browsers which are written in Processing (10/2006). - Soundtoys:
Steve Tanza founded "Soundtoys" in October 2001 as a platform for audio-visual projects. Users are able to influence the visualization and/or the sounds via cursor actions and/or clicks and/or inscriptions. Presented are games (f. e. Steve Tanza, Peter Luining) beside digital sound instruments (z. B. Ixi/Thor Magnusson and Enrike Hurtado, Chris Yewell) and non reactive works (f. e. Tina LaPorta). Tanza transfers the audio visual possibilities of soundtoys to an index which presents the projects as movable houses on a map and gives an audio accompaniment to cursor actions on houses. This index disappeared with the redesign of the site in February 2006. It was substituted by Neil Jenkins´ Tag Navigator(5/2013: not found), the Content Navigator by Adam Hoyle/Julian Baker (5/2013: old Shockwave Player), and others. Stanza reused his index in Inner City (5/2013: not found), now with links to his own projects.
The journal includes articles about the history and the theoretical context of soundtoys. All artists are presented in interviews, including artists like Amy Alexander, Jim Andrews, Corby & Baily, Golan Levin or Adrian Ward, who are introduced with links to works on other sites, too. The interviews thematize the question of the adequate medium for the distribution of soundtoys – CD-ROM or internet – because the closed audiovisual systems of "soundtoys" exclude connectivity (3/2003, 6/2006, 5/2013). - Translocations:
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis accompanies the exhibition How Latitudes become Forms (2/9-5/4/2003) with the platform "Translocations" (curator Steve Dietz). Artists from Brazil, China, Croatia, India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and U.S.A. received commissions for nine net projects.
Fran Ilich´s Webblog Big(b)Other and Re:combos Translocal Mixer allow distant participants verbal and audio cooperations. Both projects present modifications of normal net practice. The modifications are approximations to the framework of the exhibition. Translocal Channel presents a South African video archive and lectures on questions of globalization as well as a discussion about "global curating" (as streaming and stored videos).
Sawad Brooks´ and Warren Sack´s Translation Map seem to fit into this round dance of thematic oriented events. Users are able to send contributions to sites whose actors send them further to net forums and ask for translations (Betaversion 0.02). The support of a "collaborative re-writing process" via "a multi-protocol message delivery system" is an idea which can´t have many perspectives to be realized with success: The problems to transgress language barriers are preserved in the net context. Raqs Opus (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) offers a forum open for downloads and ties to the net utopia of files and software shared free everywhere and by all (Another part of "Translocations": Andreja Kuluncic´s Distributive Justice: America: s. Lesson 13) (3/2003, 8/2003, 10/2009: access to the website with the index of the online projects: "Forbidden[:] You don't have permission to access /translocations/ on this server."). - The Wartime Project:
Andrew Forbes reacted in November 2002 to the scenarios of an American war against Iraq and initiated "The Wartime Project". He invited net artists to send contributions to memorize "the horror and destructiveness of war". The website includes already 133 projects (from December 2002 to February 2004) and is open for further contributions. A wider part of the projects use software for games and animations. The works illustrate Bush´s war world `overaffirmative´ (f. e. lokiss [March 2003, not found in August 2003]) or parody it (entropy8zuper!, Evgenij Vasilev [March 2003, not found in August 2003]). Other contributions range in the critical field `estheticizing of politics´ (microbo und bo130). The movement of anti-war activists is presented in some projects as motivation for further actions (Ruth Catlow). Some artists use the chance to download their works on the server of the "Wartime Project". Other artists place links to anti-war projects which are installed on their own sites. The project is an important part of the Anti-War Web Ring (3/2003, 8/2003, 2/2004, 10/2009: Site temporarily not available). - whitneybiennial.com:
Peter Lunenfeld and Milton Manetas directed their attention in a talk to the idea to search for the URL addresses which are occupied by the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The idea of a platform as extension of (and alternative to) the Whitney Biennial 2002 was realizable because the domain name www.whitneybiennial.com was free. This domain name directs the attention of surfers to the site and allows them to recognize the intention.
Michael Rees developed Turntable as Flash application. Twelve artists mixed for "Turntable" one to six Flash-based snippets out of animations. The snippets can be installed several times, modified and dislocated in "Turntable". Manovich explains Rees´ tool in Generation Flash 1/3 (see below) with the terms "loop" and "sample" which characterize formative features of a "remix culture". Furthermore the first version of the platform contains one to five Flash animations of 122 artists. Manetas had the idea that in 3/7/2002, at the opening of the Whitney Biennial, 23 U-Haul trucks with rear-projection screens for the presentation of the whitneybiennial.com could surround the Whitney Museum of American Art. Matthew Mirapaul announced this event in 3/4/2002 in The New York Times as an alternative to the opening gala of the Whitney Museum. The spectators expected the trucks in vain but found an invitation of Whitneybiennial.com to a party in Chelsea.
The platform received a second net presentation after the Whitney Biennial 2002: Simulated exhibition spaces present pictures on walls. The pictures are connected with hotspots which link to 22 animations and games. The platform with its project character and its openness for new initiatives constitutes an alternative to the temporally limited Biennial exhibition events (2/2004).
Mai Ueda installed a linklist simultaneous to the Whitney Biennial 2004. The list presents 42 thumbnails with screenshots (with links to big screenshots which allow to read the URL-adresses of net projects) as a selection of works like a group exhibition. Ueda´s proceedings for 2004 is meagre in comparison to the platform as an expansion and counterposition to the Whitney Biennial 2002 because he did not realize more than a net feature of a group of net projects in the form of visual data (3/2004).
Contributions to the history of NetArt:
- Adrian X, Robert: Art
and Telecommunication 1979-1986: The Pioneer Years.
In: Dietz. Steve (ed.): Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace. Walker Art Center. Minneapolis/Minnesota, February 2001. In German in: Springer. Bd.I/Heft 1. April 1995, p.10s. Adrian X reports projects for and with telecommunication from 1979 to 1986 which have been initiated in Austria or which included Austrian contributors. In 1980/81 the Viennese branch of I.P. Sharp Associates Pty.Ltd. (IPSA, head office in Toronto) used their Computer Timesharing Network to provide for the technical infrastructure. The mailbox-program ARTBOX was developed for ARTEX by Gottfried Bach, the director of the Viennese branch of IPSA. ARTEX was a "user-group" in the net of IPSA. Since 1983 the further developed program was called ARTEX (The Artists´ Electronic Exchange Program). Bach´s program and its "user-group" with ca. 30 members carried the same name. ARTEX was used for the organization of projects and as their medium. Some of these projects integrated Slow Scan TV (SSTV), telefacsimile (FAX) and telephone. Adrian X presents Bill Bartlett as "the real pioneer of low-tech artists´ telecomm". The pioneer years of "the low-tech telecommunications projects" ended with "the networking of Personal Computers in BBSs [Bulletin Board Systems] and the increasing presence of FAX and other telephone peripherals in offices and homes". ARTEX existed until 1991 when Reuters purchased IPSA (10/2006). - Albert, Saul: Artware.
In: The Mute Issue 14/September 1999. Albert presents Linux as an idea which became a machine that produces art works. Sol LeWitt´s "paragraph" "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" (Artforum, Summer 1967, p.80) looses the authoritarian function of an unchangeable artist´s idea because it is substituted by the concept of a collaborative Open Source Project which is open for modifications: In 1999 Linux won the Golden Nica in the ".net"-department of the Prix Ars Electronica (2/2004). - Albert, Saul: Open
Source and Collective Art Practice.
(9/1999). The Community Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies acted merely within a regional radius. The Community Radio movements of the eighties couldn´t change the hierarchical infrastructure of the emission of radio channels. But the internet made possible world wide collaborations and world wide coordinations of actions which will be realized in many places.
The collaborative development of Open Source Software offers a model for net collaborations of any kind. The community of software developpers is constituted by interested members which don´t need press releases. But the "gift economy" in the art world is constituted by the artists´ labour and expenses in time and money for their own distribution and fame (via the use of the media publicity caused by exhibitions in galleries and museums). The Open Source Software community creates a structure of reputation via inscriptions which inform about the coauthors of a project: Not the "death of the author" (Roland Barthes) but his/her evaluation play a decisive part in the community of engaged people (2/2004; 5/2013: not found). - Andrews, Jim: Interactive
Audio on the Web.
In: trAce Online Writing Centre: Review, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton/Nottingham, 9/22/2003. This survey of interactive audio projects presents with "Electrica" of 1999 (Gundula Markeffsky, Peter Huehlfriedel, Leonard Schaumann) the earliest example, created for the Beatnik Player (which is still downloadable). Moreover Andrews discusses Online synthesizers. The link list contains interactive audio net projects and Online sequencers; links to non-interactive and offline audio projects are added. Some projects combine the audio level with visual elements which offer more than only a graphic design for audio functions (2/2004). - Arns, Inke: Die
Geburt der Netzkunst aus dem Geiste des Unfalls.
Anmerkungen zur Netzkunst in Europa 1993-2000 (The birth of net art in the spirit of the accident. Annotations to net art in Europe from 1993 to 2000). Lecture, Gallery Ifa, Berlin, 12/7/2000. In: Kunstforum Bd.155/June-July 2001, p.236-242. The expert in Slavistics presents early net art "as the first total European phenomenon after the fall of the wall." She points out the integration of Eastern European artists (Cosic, Frelih, Lialina, Peljhan, Shulgin, Stromajer) (3/2003). - Arns, Inke: Social
Technologies. Deconstruction, subversion and the utopia of democratic
communication.
In: Daniels, Dieter/Frieling, Rudolf (eds.): Media Art Net. Overview of Media Art: Society. Goethe-Institute, Munich/ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe/Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst, Leipzig 2004 (Website and book "Media Art Net 1: Survey of Media Art", Vienna 2004). Arns outlines how artists developed basics for the constitution of a counter-publicity and activistic strategies via alternative uses of media. The historical starting points are the Cut-Up-methods of Brion Gysin (in collaboration with William Burroughs, 10/1/1959) and the alternative use of television by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell in the beginning of the sixties. The exploration of the possibilities of two-way-communication, which offers each spectator/receiver ways to interact as participant/sender, leads in the sixties and seventies to (re- and) interactive projects for actions (with Closed-Circuits), installations with Closed-Circuits, Cable TV and internet. Strategies of video- and media activism are developed, modified and expanded via the integration of new technologies in net activism since the nineties. Arns outlines a dialectic of post-utopian and utopian approaches in her "Summary" (2/2004). - Arns, Inke: Soziale
Technologien. Formen des Widerstands in der elektronischen Öffentlichkeit.
(Social Technologies. Forms of resistance in the electronic public). Contribution to the department "Soziale Technologien" ("Social Technologies") of the annual project "Die Offene Stadt: Anwendungsmodelle" ("The Open City: Models for Practical Use"), Kokerei Zollverein Essen 2003. Arns´ introduction into the classic examples of net activism is excellent. She describes sites and systems of communication partly with their main characteristics (Heath Bunting, Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, etoy/Toywar, Institute for Applied Autonomy, www.0100101110101101.org, Ubermorgen.com, Surveillance Camera Players) and partly with details (RTMark, Makrolab, Textz.com) (2/2004). - Baumgärtel, Tilman: Immaterialien.
Aus der Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Netzkunst.
(The prehistory and the beginnings of net art). In: Telepolis, 6/26/1997. Baumgärtel outlines the history of telecommunication art from László Moholy-Nagy to the beginnings of net art (3/2003). - Baumgärtel, Tilman: Das
Internet als imaginäres Museum.
(The internet as imaginary museum). Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), project group "Kulturraum Internet", Berlin 1998. Baumgärtel presents the early history of net art. The most important key points are: "Kunst als Materialprüfungsamt" ("art as office for the examination of materials"), "Kontextsysteme" ("context systems") and "virtual communities" (3/2003). - Berry, Josephine: The
Re-Dematerialisation of the Object and the Artist in Biopower.
(chapter 4 of the thesis "The Thematics of Site-Specific Art on the Net", Faculty of Arts, University of Manchester 2001). In: Nettime, 2/5/2001. Berry constructs the history of net art as continuing the criticism of the commercialization of art presented by Lucy Lippard in 1972 in the "Postface" of her book "Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972". Berry outlines the early net art as proceedings of the conceptual criticism of the art´s commodity state. She takes over terms for descriptions of the contemporary social and economic systems from Michael Hardt´s and Antonio Negri´s Empire. Berry´s statements provoked an alert discussion in the mailing list Nettime with Josephine Bosma (several times) and Tilman Baumgärtel as participants (3/2003). - Couey, Anna: Cyber
Art: The Art of Communication Systems.
In: Matrix News. Vol.1/Nr.4, July 1991. Couey defines cyberspace as a "computer generated space that humans can enter and therein interact". Cyber art requires computer networks as "operational cyberspace". Cyber art has no physical support and experiments with forms of communication. "A hierarchical communications model" dominates Western art and mass media. This model is replaced by "public participation in cultural activity" in projects for and with telecommunication systems. "Interactivity" or rather "reciprocal of collaborative communications" are "essential characteristic[s] of telematic activity".
The first "communication sculptures in the late 70s" integrated satellite networks and slow scan television" (SSTV). The "most well-known project of the early telecommunication art events" is "Hole in Space", organized by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1980. ARTEX (1980/81-1991) is featured as "the first artists´ international computer network". In 1986 followed Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) as a mailbox within the bulletin board system (BBS) WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link) (10/2006). - Cramer, Florian: Exe.cut[up]able
Statements. Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden
Texts.
(Exe.cut[up]able Statements. Poetic Calculi and Phantasms of Self-Executing Texts). Dissertation General and Comparative Literature. Free University Berlin 2006/Munich 2011. In his dissertation on "poetic calculi" Florian Cramer confronts two developments with each other:
- For the Kabbalism of the 16th and 17th century words generated by combinations of several basic units are derivations of theologically founded universal conditions. Proteus poems got their name by Julius Caesar Scaliger in 1561 referring to the God who "perpetually changes his face" (pdf p.69/print p.69; Word Made Flesh, see below, p.44). These poems are a "word permutational poetry" (pdf p.82/print p.81) guided by theological speculations. Cramer interprets Quirinus Kuhlmann´s poem "XLI. Libes-kuß" (first publication in "Himmlische Libes-küsse"/"Celestial Kisses of Love", 1671) on more then 60 pages and presents its Kabbalistic derivations as a "culminating point of the proteus poetry of the 17th century" (pdf p.89/print p.87). Cramer explains Kuhlmann´s integration of earlier Kabbalistic derivations in the "Himmlischen Libes-küsse" and interprets his "Wechselrad" ("wheel of change") as a "Proteus versification machine" (pdf p.130/print p.129), whose "permutation algorithm" (pdf p.132/print p.131) offers a means to derive cosmological combinations of elements.
- The cosmological derivations of connections between elements of the world in Proteus poems of the 16th and 17th century are changed in the 20th century to speculations about world-immanent relations, f.e. in pataphysics (pdf p.204s./print p.202s.). Cramer selects literature of the 20th century with permutations and recursions based on theories speculating about world-immanent relations. The Kabbalistic deduction from macrocosm to microcosm is transformed into a "microcosm of viral signs with macrocosmic effects..." (pdf p.285/print p.280). Cramer demonstrates that William S. Burroughs anticipated with his speculative poetics in "Electric Revolution" (pdf p.277/print p.272) relations between code, language and virus in MEZ Breezes codepoetry "_Vivo.Logic Condition][ing]]1.1_" (2001, pdf p.271s./print p.267s.). Parallels of biological viri and computer viri provoke "poetics of infection", "...of infecting effects as well as of infections in the structure of language." (pdf p.285/print p.280)
- Cramer, Florian: Words
Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination.
In: Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute. Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Rotterdam 2005. Cramer writes a history of computation. Computation includes calculation and algorithms in languages and in ways of using technologies. Furthermore Cramer sheds some light on precursors of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and presents visual languages in the form of icons which are developed for the systematization of knowledge.
Dates are structured via visual codes in religious and speculative systems (Campanella, Johann Valentin Andreae, Jan Amos Comenius). Mystic contents and knowledge of the world are presented in Judaic and Christian Kabbala, by Raimundus Llullus and Llullism as elements for generative processes which are executable with the help of a few rules. Manners of permutation are developed which anticipate formal logic. The systems of calculation and technologies used for the generating of algorithms are either stripped from semantics with analytical procedures (formal syntax) or they constitute the core of religious, religious inpired or speculative ways of thinking. The chapter "Computation as a Figure of Thought" offers a systematization of the intellectual history of computation.
Permutations of the Sixties indicate different intentions in the selections of words: Brion Gysin´s "In The Beginning Was The Word" quotes the well known phrase of the bible (the Gospel of John 1.1) and uses unusual sequences of these words for the provocation of `inspiration´ or rather for the creation of possibilities to discover meaning potentials. Eugen Gomringer´s "constellations" exemplify a rationalist concrete poetry contrary to Gysin. One of these "constellations" includes a postponement of letters (the "e" in "error") in lines with repetitions of the expression "no error in the system". This concrete poem presents its rule in its execution and contradicts the impression of an "error". Cramer uses the comparison of Gysin´s work with Gomringer´s poem to exemplify the differences between "semantic" and "formalist" programming in the literary neo-avantgarde.
The Situationists attacked the most important authors of information aesthetics, Max Bense and Abraham Moles. The "generative psychogeography" of Socialfiction.org ties up the Situationists´ revaluation of phenomena and sources in modern art which can´t be integrated in Bense´s information aesthetics: The romantic flaneur is the precursor of the Situationist´s «dérive» and he is revivified in Social Fiction´s ".walk", an algorithm usable as a pathfinder. Social Fiction´s term "speculative programming" offers to Cramer the motto for his cultural history of computation. Cramer confronts the rational and constructivistic programming of literature (Theo Lutz, Reinhard Döhl) using procedures proclaimed by information aesthetics on one side with the `poetic´ procedures´ of the writers´ group Oulipo (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino) on the other side. Cramer presents Oulipo´s poetic procedures as examples of speculative programming. Works of some members of Oulipo exemplify manners to compensate algorithmic constraints. Cramer outlines how their literary procedures transgress the rational framework via provocations of the reader´s imagination. Oulipo opens speculative programming for Software Art, net.art and code poetry: Mary Anne Breeze (MEZ), I/O/D, Netochka Nezvanova, Alan Sondheim and Adrian Ward offer to Cramer examples which he uses in his plea for dystopic strategies to destruct illusions of calculability and a complete algorithmic reconstruction of the world. Cramer presents speculation and imagination as the core of computation, contrary to technically oriented theories of media (6/2006). - Daniels, Dieter: Interaction
versus Consumption. Mass Media and Art from 1920 to today.
In: Stocker, Gerfried/Schöpf, Christine (ed.): Ars Electronica 2004. Timeshift – The World in Twenty-Five Years. Die Welt in 25 Jahren. Kat. Ausst. Ars Electronica Center Linz/Ostfildern 2004, p.153-159. Dieter Daniels outlines "the creation of the radio from wireless transmissions." The amateurs built their own radio devices. The technical development of the First World War was the precondition for the amateurs to emit voice and music. They used these new technical possibilities to produce "small but periodic `broadcasts´". Meanwhile in the United States the radio broadcast was financed privately to find buyers for the radios produced since circa 1921, European radio stations were financed by nations. Radio, technically usable for two-way communications in participatory projects, became a one-way transmitting medium in the twenties. Bertolt Brecht criticised this use of the radio as a one-way medium in his radio theory and instructed in 1929 the listeners of his radio play The Flight of the Lindbergh to "sing, speak and hum together with the radio". Because the commissioner Deutscher Rundfunk didn´t realize the play, Brecht "clarified his intention in a scenic presentation." He "placed on one side of the stage the radio and on the other side the listener..." (Brecht).
Daniels demonstrates with the Bulletin Board System "The Thing" (since 1991) and the Internationale Stadt Berlin (from 1994 to 1997) how artists realized participatory projects in the internet and the web before the new economy substituted their openness for collaborations by "the ultimate goal of activating the public through the mainstream media" whose programs are guided by the interests of investors and advertisers. Daniels chooses HyperSoap (since 1998) developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an example for product placement reducing the participation to "direct ordering options" and presents the project "Public White Cube" as a reaction of artists to the "commercialization of the Net": Joachim Blank and Karl-Heinz Jeron, co-founders of the Internationalen Stadt Berlin, auctioned off via e-Bay "the right to alter an exhibition [being part of the project] and the artworks" and received bids up to 200 DM. This marketing of participation is interpreted by Daniels "as a post-utopian symbol": It remembers the utopias at the beginning of the internet (and demonstrates why they never became real).
Daniels´ contribution to the catalogue of the Ars Electronic Festival 2004 contains theses of his book "Kunst als Sendung. Von der Telegrafie zum Internet" (München 2002)/"Art as Transmission. From the Telegraphy to the Internet" (Munich 2002) (3/2013). - Daniels, Dieter: Reverse
Engineering Modernism with the Last Avant-Garde.
In: Daniels, Dieter/Reisinger, Gunther (ed.): Netpioneers 1.0 – Contextualising Early Net-based Art. Berlin and New York 2010, p.15-63. Daniels differentiates between net pioneers having installed internet platforms for different kinds of projects and fora on one side and on the other side projects with the characteristics of art works experimenting with the possibilities of the internet. The platforms offered internet access and storage space on servers. These sites integrated participants into a collaborating community. The collaboration on a platform installed by artists as places for interactions (The Thing, since 1991; Public Netbase, since 1994; Internationale Stadt Berlin, since 1994) was called into question after 1995 by the commercialised accesses to the web: The platforms with infrastructures installed and administered by artists and collaborators lost their function as a virtual place for communications and as host offering cheap or free access to the internet and storage capacities.
In the course of the success of commercial providers offering accesses and storing capacities cheaper than ever before the internet-oriented artistic acitivities shift since the middle of the nineties from "frameworks" (the term used by Daniels for internet platforms installed by artists and collaborators) to "Net-based art" exploring the possibilities of the web (HTML for browsers) in a mostly self-referential manner. Daniels declares the early net art and its experimental orientation as avant-garde but no longer modern in the sense of an autonomy of the aesthetic and the "modern cult of the genius." (p.52) Early net art explores possibilities of its technical conditions ("this avant-garde principle of anticipation", p.32) but it doesn´t follow the goal of internet platforms to realize communication systems as "Temporary Autonomous Zone" (p.29s.,55) and alternatives to mass media: "The consequence...was a partial return to the notion of an `artwork´." (p.30) Daniels explains the revival of the self-referential form analysis of modernist art in "Net-based art" as "re-modernist" (p.56) meanwhile the "frameworks" installed and used by artists transformed themselves to "service providers" (p.30) accomodating their practice to the contemporary net conditions before they could have been established as modern (p.54s.).
Daniels problematises the goals of artists working with and in the internet in referring to Gene Youngblood´s term "metadesign" (p.17s.) and Joseph Beuys´ term "social sculpture" (p.18). Youngblood proposes the development of concepts and technical realizations of new media for communications integrating telecommunication meanwhile Beuys plays with an overlay on the one hand of the sculpture´s expansion to processes of all kinds, and on the other hand an understanding of the term "sculpture" as a designation of social structures: A consequent artistic practice initiates social change. Youngblood´s as well as Beuys´ propositions "are prototypical of the American and European concepts of the relationship between technology and society...that constitute Net-based art´s parental lineage." (p.18)
Alongside The Thing as a Bulletin Board System (BBS) offers the "Bionic MailBox" (since 1987, p.23s.) installed by the artists Rena Tangens and padeluun an example for "metadesign" because their practice using new technologies created new possibilities for communications.
However the artists´ group etoy constituted itself as a group excluding non-members as participants of their website (p.37, nevertheless the members needed external participants to prepare and realize the "Toywar"). For Daniels etoy and the artists´ duo Jodi are examples for a social practice linking Beuys´ concept of a social practice back to established concepts of artistic activities (3/2013). - Daskalova, Rossitza: The
Ground for Net.Art in the Former Eastern Block (Central and Eastern
Europe).
In: Le magazine électronique du CIAC/The CIAC´s Electronique Art Magazine. Centre international d´art contemporain du Montréal. No.12/janvier-january 2001. An encyclopedic overview on the context (institutions, foundations, context systems, events) of net art in the countries of the former Eastern Block: Informations on activities of the Soros Foundations Network offer special insights into the postcommunist conditions for net artists (3/2003). - Dreher, Thomas: The
Art and the Artists of Networking.
In: Gerbel, Karl/Weibel, Peter (ed.): Mythos Information. Welcome to the Wired World. @rs electronica 1995 (Brucknerhaus Linz). Vienna 1995, p.54-67. The article reconstructs the history of artistic media combinations: from networking with media (telephone, radio, television) in net-works to networks (resp. net projects) and their consequences for established definitions of art (Supplement: bibliography of the catalogue AEF 95) (3/2003). - Drucker, Johanna: Humanities
Approaches to Interface Theory.
In: Culture Machine. Generating Research in Culture and Theory. Vol.12/2011. For Johanna Drucker Erving Goffman´s frame analysis (Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. London 1974) provides a springboard to the conceptualization of the human interface to the world as an action (either) to change positions in an environment for the observation of the world in different perspectives and distances or to manipulate computing processes on a technical interface. Cognition is a process resisting methods to reconstruct human and technical interfaces (to machines like computers) as `objects´: Drucker problematizes relations between cognition and body as a demonstration against the reduction of subjects to users.
Drucker explains "embodiment" (p.8) as a twofold concretization: first the human as an active subject, and second the execution of a program in machining processes. "Web environments" (p.13s.) aren´t used only for programmed tasks, because programs facilitating manipulations at technical interfaces include "structuring principles" (p.16) for "processes of frame jumping – moving from one cognitive frame to another" (p.9) This "frame jumping" provokes processes of "repositioning ourselves as reader/viewers in the multimedia environment" (p.9). Computer games and the gamer´s possibilities to navigate in different perspectives through the game world (point of view/point of action) inspired Drucker to analyze possible structures of an "electronic space (e-space)" trying to facilitate an "interpretative activity" (p.16): "We can borrow from the conventions of electronic games and offer multiple views simultaneously." (p.17) (3/2013). - Fauconnier, Sandra:
Web-specific art. Het World Wide Web als artistiek medium.
(Web-specific art: the World Wide Web as artistic medium). Proefschrift kunstwetenschappen, Universiteit Gent 1997. Introduction to the internet and net art with a lot of references. The third chapter with a relative detailled description of the early history of net art and the fourth chapter with its trial to outline the problems of early net art (activism, virtual communities, interactivity) offer keys for the state of development in 1997 (in Dutch) (3/2003). - Fritz, Darko: A
brief Overview of Media Art in Croatia (since 1960s).
In: culturenet.ht. web portal to croatian culture. panorama: media art 2003. The history of Croatian media art starts with the exhibition series "New Tendencies", realized five times from 1961 to 1973 in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The dominant points of the "New Tendencies" changed from abstract painting and cinetic art to Computer and Conceptual Art. Fritz proceeds with an outline of the later development of media art with video, computer and internet. He characterizes the projects in short descriptions and demonstrates the plenty of Croatian media art (2/2004). - Hayles, N. Katherine: Electronic
Literature: What Is It?
In: Electronic Literature Organization. Vol. 1.0. 2007. Slightly modified print version: Hayles, N. Katherine: Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame/Indiana 2008. Chapter 1, p.1-42. N. Katherine Hayles wrote the introduction to electronic literature for the platform Electronic Literature Collection (see above). She presents "forms of electronic literature" like "hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, `codework´, generative art and Flash poem" via short explanations of works mostly included in the Electronic Literature Collection.
Then Hayles discusses theories proposed and methods used by critics of electronic literature. The elder theories of George Landow and Jay David Bolter include partly "extravagant claims" contradicted by Espen Aarseth doubting that readers have free choices by trying to explore the possible paths constituted by links. Bolter and Landow have revised their early statements on connections between "deconstruction and electronic literature" in books and editions published later.
Hayles steps from Lev Manovich´s concept of "transcoding" – the transfer of "ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the `cultural layer´ to the `computer layer´" (Language of New Media, see below) – further to Florian Cramer´s cultural history of notations, algorithms and codes (Words Made Flesh, see above). She expands the problematic issues of the connections between hardware and software to cultural aspects of the history of media. She presents Mark Hansen with his "powerful arguments for the role of the embodied perceiver" as a counterpart to Friedrich A. Kittler´s technical oriented approach. Hayles uses this opposition to point to the necessity to integrate the social and economic conditioned uses of media into researches on computer art. Background knowledge and theories can be gained using Hayles recommendations of books written by Allan Liu, Alexander Galloway (with Eugene Thacker), Rita Raley and Adrian Mackenzie. Hayles summarizes her discussion of Kittler and Hansen in chapter 3 on "Contexts for Electronic Literature: Body and the Machine" of her book on "Electronic Literautre": "...media and cultural formations interact" (p.119) in historical processes, and she points to some consequences of these processes for the computational practice of readers. Hayles uses her sketch of these consequences as a presupposition of the discussion "How Electronic Literature Revalues Computational Practice" (chapter 4) (10/2009). - Heibach, Christiane: Oszillationen//Netzkunst/Netzliteratur.
(Oscillations//Net Art/Net Literature). Lecture, Municipal Bibliothec Stuttgart, 10/10/2002. In: Auer, Johannes/Heibach, Christiane/Suter, Beat (Hg.): netzliteratur.net_Netzliteratur // Internetliteratur // Netzkunst 2002. Heibach outlines the role of NetArt in "processes of oscillations" in the "society of networks". She structures the field of net projects using criteria of esthetics of production (cooperative, collaborative, dialogic), representation and media (2/2004). - Hillgärtner, Harald: Netzaktivismus
im Spannungsfeld von Kunst und Technik.
(Net activism within a field of tensions between art and technology). Research for the M.A. graduation, Institut für Theater-, Film und Medienwissenschaft, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main 2001. Hillgärtner develops a horizon of net activism´s problems via a reconstruction of the history of the internet. He uses that background for discussions of Jodi, etoy and RTMark (with Toywar) (3/2003). - Hirschsteiner, Guido: Netzkunst
als Avantgarde.
(Net Art as avant-garde). Research for the M.A. graduation, Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 2000. A history of net art presenting criteria of webness (free of contexts, immateriality, interactivity, self referenciality). Hirschsteiner uses methods of systems theory ("subsystem avant-garde") to discuss media aspects as well as aspects relevant for the history of art and literature (3/2003). - Idensen, Heiko: Intertext-Interaktion-Internet.
Kollaborative Schreibweisen – virtuelle Text- und Theorie-Arbeit:
Schnittstellen für Interaktionen mit Texten im Netzwerk.
(Intertext-Interaction-Internet. Collaborative ways of writing – virtual text- and theory-production). In: Auer, Johannes/Heibach, Christiane/Suter, Beat (Hg.): netzliteratur.net_Netzliteratur//Internetliteratur//Netzkunst 2000. In: Gendolla, Peter/Schmitz, Norbert M./Schneider, Irmela/Spangenberg, Peter M. (Hg.): Formen interaktiver Medienkunst. Frankfurt am Main 2001, p.218-264. Idensen discusses the interpenetrations between the history of "reading machines" and the history of projects for Cross-Reading in link systems (Raymond Roussel, Vanevar Bush, Ted Nelson). The examples for Cross-Reading contstitute the prehistory to collaborative writing projects like The World´s First Collaborative Sentence (Douglas Davis, since December 1994), Assoziationsblaster (Dragan Espenschied/Alvar C. H. Freude, since 1999) and nic-las (Joachim Maier/René Bauer, since 1999) (2/2004). - Kahnwald, Nina: Kunstbrowser.
Neue Strategien der Inszenierung von Informationsstrukturen.
(Art browsers. New strategies for the mis en scène of information structures). Research for the M.A. graduation, Theaterwissenschaft, Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin 2002. In: Kahnwald, Nina: Netzkunst als Medienkritik. Neue Strategien der Inszenierung von Informationsstrukturen. München 2006. Browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator connect performativity and semiotics via the conventionalized "page metaphor". The art browsers dis- and recoordinate these page-like relations. Static presentations are substituted either by alternative static presentations which dissolve readability (Mark Napier: Shredder, 1998, and Riot, 1999; Rolux: Internet Implorer, 1999) or by dynamic transient presentations (I/O/D: Web Stalker, 1997, Maciej Wisniewski: Netomat, 1999, exonemo: FragMental Storm, 2000/2002, Jodi: Wrongbrowser, 2001). The dynamic visualizations supersede the "page metaphor" via the staging of the net data stream. Kahnwald describes that data staging in terms of theatricality. The relations between datas, source code and their visualizations are technically arbitrary and a question of the "mis en scène".
The data stream in the internet is recontructable as a technical process and with it as something else than the browser presentation. But the technical functions are recognizable via the browser presentation (and the views of source codes offered by browsers).
Data streams are presented by art browsers in non-representing manners because the functions for the coordination of the data traffic can´t be represented by browsers without a freeze of the processing character (2/2004). - Magnusson, Thor: Processor
Art – Currents in the Process Oriented Works of Generative and
Software Art.
Thesis Department of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture. University of Copenhagen. August 2002. The author reconstructs a prehistory of "Processor Art". The history of software as a written set of instructions to generate realizations begins before computer aided art and accompanies its development: Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, La Monte Young, Sol LeWitt a. o. He presents "Generative Art" and "Software Art" as the crucial points of his investigation of projects working with the microprocessor of the computer. Magnusson limits his research to software "as a meta-artwork", which offers possibilities to develop artworks. Chapter 4.3.4 presents the "Browser Artists" I/O/D, Jodi, Mark Napier and Nullpointer (3/2003). - Manovich, Lev: The
Language of New Media.
Print version: Cambridge/Massachusetts 2001. Manovich resystematizes the media development from photography over film to internet. He discusses the division of filmic media in mutations of the digital animation like reactive installations, computer games, video animation, WebCam, QuickTime-files etc. Manovich presents characteristics of that development in terms like "Cultural Interfaces", "Database", "Navigable Space" und "Cinegratography". The history of media like painting, photography, film a.o. is superseded by the programming of the digital calculator´s processes. They constitute a "language of new media". The five principles of digital calculation are: "numerical representation", "modularity", "automation", "variability" and "transcoding". "Transcoding" effects "cultural transcoding" within the "computerization of culture", and substitutes this culture´s "categories and concepts": "...the computer layer will affect the cultural layer."
On the one hand software removes the history of media, on the other hand Manovich reconstructs that development using film as a key medium. "The cultural layer of new media" is reconceptualized: The computer layer´s accomodation to "the interfaces of older media machines" is superseded by "hypermedia" and their "separation between an algorithm and a data structure".
Reviews: Arns, Inke: Metonymical Mov(i)es. In: ArtMargins, June/July 2002. URL: http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/books/341-metonymical-movies (5/6/2013); Hüser, Rembert: Der Vorspann zum Buch zum Film (2002). In: IASLonline Rezensionen. URL: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/ rezensio/ liste/ hueser1.html (9/30/2006); Idensen, Heiko: Die Sprache der neuen Medien lesen und schreiben? (2002) In: dichtung-digital. URL: http://www.dichtung-digital.de/ 2002/03-22-Idensen.htm (9/30/2006); netzliteratur.net. URL: http://www.netzliteratur.net/ idensen/ idensen_manovich.htm (9/30/2006); idensen/ idensen_manovich.htm (30.9.2006); Truscello, Michael: The Birth of Software Studies. Lev Manovich and Digital Materialism. In: Film-Philosophy. Vol.7/No.55. December 2003. URL: http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n55truscello (5/6/2013); Warner, William B.: Computable Culture and the Closure of the Media Paradigm. In: Telepolis, 12/22/2001. URL: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/11/11377/1.html (9/30/2006) (reinclusion after the new net availability of the file: 10/1/2006). - Manovich, Lev: Deep
Remixability.
Media Design Research. Piet Zwart Institute. Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Rotterdam, fall 2005-spring 2006. Manovich uses the animation software "After Effects" (1993) as an example for a sketch of the change which resulted from the availability of dates with different origins (photography, film, video, live action, typography, design) within one frame. The chance to work with an arbitrary amount of elements in transparent layers substitutes the paradigm of `pure media´ with "a new metamedium" which "produces only hybrids" and replaces the montage of distinct elements placed "next to, or on top of each other": "remixability of previously separate media languages." After 2000 compositing "within a single 3D space" (example: Flame) replaces the editing within a two-dimensional frame. Layers are positioned within a three-dimensional Cartesian space and can be edited separately. Manovich regards the core of a paradigm shift from the Gutenberg galaxy to the motion graphics in "deep remixability" and in "the figure of the inversion". The "modular media composition" permits to edit particles separate and is object oriented: "The spatial dimension becomes as important as the temporal dimension." (10/2006) - Manovich, Lev: Software
Takes Command. Version 11/20/2008.
Version not proofread, in Word, with annotations, without illustrations. Publication of the Software Studies Initiative. University of California, San Diego (UCSD). La Jolla 2008 (Print: London 2013). In the first four chapters (parts 1-2/chapters 1-4) Manovich situates once again the origins of "remixability" and "modularity" within a cultural context and delineates their development as a central part of an ongoing digitalization penetrating and changing culture. In the seventies Alan Curtis Kay and a research group at the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox) made software with interfaces (Graphical User Interfaces/GUI with windows) for computers being usable for children and for more than only remediations. Kay´s research at PARC and "After Effects" (1993) for the animation of films on affordable computers (Macs, and, since 1997, PCs) are Manovich´s examples in "Software Takes Command" (as well as in earlier articles) for the combination of hardware available for everyone (PARC´s "Dynabook" as precursor) with (interfaces for) software allowing to execute plans and procedures in ways unimaginable before digitalisation.
In the last chapters (part 3/chapters 5-6) he thematises the current rearrangements of relations between "deep remixability" and "modularity": The availability of the same modules on various devices ("media mobility") causes a preference for ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) as a device-independent standard. Contrary to that return to the code modules for the accomodation of websites (and integrated elements of other sites (mashups)) to the wishes of readers and participants are developed further and combined with each other: Interfaces offer readers and participants tools allowing to edit more complex procedures (and, with them, source codes) meanwhile the relations between browser presentations and source codes remain opaque.
Readers use modular tools to find their paths within the grown and growing amount of informations. The "extreme democratization of media production and access" (p.283) provokes Manovich to recognize the connections between consumables and culture: The consumers use the internet to become participants with their own contributions in a "mass culture" constituted by the "new challenges" of "social media".
These challenges guide the professional information design as well as the amateurs´ contributions. In his delineation of the current uses of media Manovich takes up Michel de Certeau´s differentiation between "strategies" and "tactics" in «L´invention du quotidien» (1980. In English: "The Practice of Everyday Life". San Diego 1984). De Certeau differentiates "strategies" of town planning from "tactics" of passerbies to coordinate their moves in urban environments. The current information design uses "modularity" for tools facilitating the participants´ remixing activities and changes "strategies" into "tactics". Operators and designers of platforms transform strategies into tactics in their efforts to react to the participants´ incessantly modificated remix strategies. The guidelines for the information design of platforms are determined by the readers´ strategies to combine offered services with each other and to send contributions: "...the logic of tactics has now become the logic of strategies." (p.268)
This outline assumes that the development of combinable soft- and hardware modules integrated recursions between "strategies" and "tactics", reactions of users to designers/programmers, and vice versa. Manovich delineates these earlier developments in the first four chapters: After new "strategies" have been worked out by programmers as software via developing concepts of the users´ possible "tactics", the software developers and platform operators come up with "tactics" for accomodations to the users´ needs. Readers and participants evolve "tactics" facilitating the use of offered functions into "strategies" to orientate themselves within the amount of available informations and to connect the tools with each other. Tensions between professional designers/artists and amateurs as well as between "strategies and "tactics" are parts of "the dynamics of web culture". Here, "the world of professional art has no license on creativity and innovation." (p.285) (2/2009) - Medosch, Armin: Technological
Determinism in Media Art.
Sussex University, Interactive Digital Media, MA thesis paper, Oktober 2005. Media Art was destined by a "technological determinism" until 1995. The main subject were simulated worlds but the technical preconditions remained beyond the scope of reflection and criticism. A discourse on virtuality and the digital was established and influenced institutions like the Ars Electronica in Linz and the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. This discourse was underpinned with postmodern theories. Medosch doesn´t explain the postmodern foundations detailled enough to differentiate between media oriented theories of Paul Virilio and Vilém Flusser on one side and a philosophically oriented deconstruction of modern times written by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze und Jean-François Lyotard on the other side. Jean Baudrillard´s critical position of simulated worlds is ignored here.
Medosch states that the postmodernist criticism of "ideologies of dominance" was not integrated into the discourse on Media Art but he doesn´t discuss the reception of discourses on modernism and postmodernism in the art context: Peter Weibel integrated postmodern criticism of representation and dominance (Jean Baudrillard, Vilém Flusser, Paul Virilio) into his artistic practice (using video and computer), theories and publications. Weibel´s use of postmodern theories could have been a theme for further investigations.
"Technoscience" constructed a framework of expectations with scientific research projects like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (AL) which constituted a "Techno-Imaginary". Medosch marks Roy Ascott´s, Paul Virilio´s and Peter Weibel´s recourse to an ontological digital: The digital became the foundation of the analog and computer aided, digitally organized simulations of worlds were used as a model to explore reality. "Parallel processing Network Computers" (Weibel 1996) have been conceptualized as the model of human cognition – and digital art presented this model as a theoretical framework of the world.
Medosch presents Peter Weibel as a target of his criticism but he doesn´t reconstruct his position in the art world of the Eighties and early Nineties. Weibel used his discourse directed to new technological possibilities (Die Beschleunigung der Bilder..., Bern 1987) to mark his difference to an art world centered on the static object as the collectors´ item. Weibel favoured and favours the project status of time based forms of reactive systems. But `project´ means in Weibel´s case how far the work is able to function as a model in a discourse which presents itself as a scientific research.
The media practice of the Nineties provoked a change in the meaning of the term `project´. Software developments as and for art projects became parts of Free Software databases open for further developments: the transgression of technological determinism. But Medosch develops the transgression of technological determinism not in this way.
He demonstrates with the slogan "datahighway" how far the popularization of the internet had its ties in technological determinism. NetArtists had another understanding of the internet. Knowledge of technologies and their use lost their elitist High Tech character and don´t serve anymore formations of institutions for media art (Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Center for art and Media in Karlsruhe, NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo) combining research in art and science with programs and projects in the favour of private and public sponsoring. Medosch uses here the Free Software development to mark the transgression of technological determinism.
Medosch critizes that Lev Manovich ascribes a leading role to the hyperrealism of digital simulated worlds in his history of a progress from Russian and German experimental films of the Twenties to computer games and projects for net databases. Manovich explains montage, central perspective and multilinearity as characteristics anticipated by the Russian avantgarde film which had to be extended in younger projects and their integrations of new technologies. Medosch critizes Manovich as a contemporary example of a topos: the legitimation of the new via the old and established. Medosch mentions Siegfried Zielinski (Archäologie der Medien..., Hamburg 2002, p.11) as the source of his revision of the topos but not Bazon Brock who demanded in the Eighties to observe the old in points of view gained by actual art. Brock´s concept of "communication design" (Ästhetik gegen erzwungene Unmittelbarkeit, Cologne 1986, p.102-108, 350-355, 365ff. a.o.) anticipates aspects of Interactive Design and its research to find new modes of communication in projects using new media possibilities.
Questions concerning the (self)institutionalization of alternative theories, technologies and strategies can´t be excluded in the planning of academic courses on "Interactive Design" – so far to the context for whom Medosch wrote his text (6/2006). - Möller, Klaus: Kunst
im Internet – Netzkunst, Untersuchungen zur ästhetischen Bildung.
(Net art, investigations of esthetic education). Research for the diploma graduation, Fakultät Erziehungswissenschaften. Universität Bielefeld 1999. Möller develops aspects of net art (interactivity, ways of processing) before the horizon of its predecessors: He reconstructs Intermedia Art with actions, concepts and media of telecommunications as a prehistory of the oberver´s role in net art. He uses Jodi as an example to explain his method of reception esthetic (basics: John Dewey) (3/2003). - Morse, Margaret: The
Poetics of Interactivity.
In: Switch Journal. Issue 18/2003 (abridged). In: Malloy, Judy (ed.): Women, Art, and Technology. Cambridge/Massachusetts 2003, p.16-33. Morse reconstructs intersections between participation as a strategy against social inequalities, the technical functions of interfaces and "intersubjectivity". The possibilities of interactions as dialogues with closed works, technical systems and human beings are diversified by (inter-)media forms of presentation: performance, CD-ROM, internet. The net presentation contains Morse´s general reflections on interaction and omits the explanations of examples included in the chapter "Artists, Gender and Metainteractive Art" (Women, Art, and Technology, p.23-31) of the much longer print version (7/2009). - Ries, Marc: Rendezvous.
The Discovery of Pure Sociality in Early Net Art.
In: Daniels, Dieter/Reisinger, Gunther (ed.): Netpioneers 1.0 – Contextualising Early Net-based Art. Berlin and New York 2010, p.65-79. "The spirit of a `postal´ principle" (p.65) of transmissions to senders constitutes the center of Marc Ries´ reflections about the internet: The meaning of the term space is a relation of a transmission of one space to another and "a permanent, distributive production of social structures" instead of "a closed box" (p.66). Marc Ries exemplifies the relation between typewriter and postcard by Marcel Duchamp´s «Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 à 1h 3/4 heures après midi». The use of the term «rendezvous» (p.67) in the French language accentuates "the act of moving, and of being moved" (p.67) meanwhile in the German language the term points to an appointment: "place and time are communicated" (p.67).
The exterritorial and public "postal non-place" (p.67) is continued in artists´ projects for transmissions by telecommunication and satellites. In 1980 Kit Galloway´s and Sherrie Rabinowitz´s "Hole-in-Space" as well as the conference "Artists Use of Telecommunications" thematize the transmission: "Telecommunication art involves the creation of relationships without the production of concrete artworks." (p.72) Ries explicates the oscillations of these media experiments between conceptual, actionist and interventions-oriented art (p.72).
A common project is emerging: "...a political will to create the conditions for a social space embracing the equality, participation, and accessibility of and for potentially everyone via technology that genuinely incorporated this communitary ideal." (p.72s.) The "forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists" (p.74) of artists´ net projects of the eighties and nineties evoke "pure sociality" (p.74) between participants knowing each other and practicing a "self-referential, self-reinforcing perception of others: the social for its own sake, unembedded in goals and actions." (p.74)
In the nineties, in the time of the end of the Bulletin Board Systems and the fast growing web accesses, these relations between participants are transformed into plural relations being "self-opening, as a movement `from oneself to everyone else´". (p.76) Following Ries this entails "a new concept of community" (p.76) (4/2013). - Schally, Sabine: Netzkunst
reflektiert ihr Medium.
(Net art reflects its medium). Research for the diploma graduation, journalism. Universität Wien 2001 (Now only available as a copy without illustrations in The Internet Archive Building). Schally outlines in short a method with elements of systems theory and presents then selected artistic projects in longer and relative detailled descriptions. She chose projects which offer concepts for reflections on media specific criteria (3/2003). - Seifert, Uwe: The
Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. A Paradox of Interactivity.
In: Seifert, Uwe/Kim, Jin Hyun/Moore, Anthony (ed.): Paradoxes of Interactivity. Perspectives for Media Theory, Human-Computer Interaction and Artistic Investigations. Bielefeld 2008, p.8-23. Seifert introduces into theories of interactivity and emphases the function of New Media Art for the research of new possibilities for human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-robot interaction (HRI). In its relation to human agents the computer is transformed from a passive to an active counterpart: It is possible to substitute both variables in the function "x acts upon y" (Mario Bunge) by human beings as well as by computers: Computers are "patients" as well as "agents". The computer reacts to the input of human beings and takes over the "agency" with impacts on human beings. These processes cause the rising of "socio-technological action units" ("soziotechnisches Systeme").
Hans Lenk and Jürgen Ropohl reconstruct the human-computer interaction as an asymmetrical relation because "it lacks intentionality and (human) purpose." In the actor-network theory interactivity is based on symmetrical relations between human beings and machines in "socionics" (Bruno Latour).
In "intelligence augmentation" human beings and machines are merged "that neither can do in its own" (David Harel). The "internal model" of human beings contains not only the observation of environments and the body coordination but also the symbolic interaction in social precoded contexts. The "affordance" (James J. Gibson, Donald Norman) contains action possibilities provoked by media ("actionable properties" of objects, environments, computers) and constituted by cognition and body coordination. "Efficiency" offers the concept complementary to "affordance". The effective use of action possibilities causes perspectives on their extensibility. Here New Media Art offers "test beds" for new developments and scientists use it for their researches.
The term "mediality" signifies the culture´s development caused by media. The social context with its forms of (inter)mediation, mediations and the mediatised is produced, conserved and transformed by processes with "interactants".
According to Sherry Turkle human beings and computers are related symmetrically "as partners". In his explanations of the concept of "cognitive artifacts" Edwin Hutchins emphases the function of processes against objects in the production of cognitive effects and the learning of capabilities. The "cognitive artifacts" and their influences on social interactions entail an important scientific problem to offer insights into human beings´ ways to conceptualise themselves as "decentered selves" (Turkle) reacting to and living in their social context sustained and conditioned by media (8/2009). - Simanowski, Roberto: The
Reader as Author as Figure as Text.
Lecture, "p0es1s. Poetics of Digital Text", Symposium, Universität Erfurt, Erfurt 9/27/2001. Modified German/English print version with the title: "Tod des Autors? Tod des Lesers!/Death of the Author? Death of the Reader!" In: Block, Friedrich W./Heibach, Christiane/Wenz, Karin (ed.): p0es1s. Ästhetik digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p.79-91. Simanowski explains the death of the reader in collaborative writing, meanwhile Robert Coover and George P. Landow characterized the death of the author as a cause of hypertext. Simanowski uses his pregnant discussions of the role of coauthors in three collaborative projects (Carola Heine: Beim Bäcker, 1996; Guido Grigat: 23:40, 1997; Dragan Espenschied/Alvar C. H. Freude: Assoziationsblaster, 1999) as a basis for his argument that the recipient of collaborative projects is dead as reader but lives as coauthor because the contributor follows other contributions with heightened awareness. Contributions of coauthors stress the attention of pure readers because of their differences in quality meanwhile the same person has a heightend interest in the course of the discussion if (s)he is integrated as an engaged coplayer in a field of tension which can be modified via action and reaction (2/2004). - Stallabrass, Julian: The
Aesthetics of Net Art.
Lecture, 61st Annual Meeting, American Society for Aesthetics, Westin Saint Francis Hotel, San Francisco, 4/1/2003-4/10/2003. In: Qui Parle. Vol.14/No.1, Fall/Winter 2003-2004, p.49-72. Julian Stallabrass outlines the discourse of art criticism on aesthetics and its role in the artworld of the 20th century. Then he explains net art´s steps across the borders of the context of art: The collector´s item not reproducible without losses and its ability to be exhibited in the context of art is substituted by web projects containing reproducible data and not always designating themselves `as art´. A normative art criticism is substituted by a dialog on the subject what net art possibly can be(come) in mailing lists like Nettime. Most participants of the dialog are artists.
Stallabrass discusses two projects of Alexei Shulgin (WWW Art Medal, 1995-97; Form Art, 1997), projects by the artists´ group etoy, and the platform RTMark for net activism. Stallabrass presents Antoni Muntadas´ The File Room (1994) as a continuation of Art & Language´s Index 01 (1972). Meanwhile the "Index 01" could have given readers a chance to reconstruct the dialog between the members of Art & Language, if the cards in the boxes could be read in exhibitions, the database of censored works in "The File Room" can be read via web accesses since 1994: The database is open for further contributions. The difference between "physical databases" (pdf p.9), f.e. the Index projects by Art & Language, and digital art is the digital separation between interface and database: "In the new media, the content of the work and the interface are separated; a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database" (pdf p.9 with reference to Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media, Cambridge/Mass. 2001, p.226s.).
The participants of "non-commercial collaboration" (pdf p.14) made possible by web projects presuppose this separation of digital media not only but develop its technical requirements in "the free software movement" (pdf p.14). The bourgeois subject of "the aesthetic as an ideal of self-realisation" is transformed into "the networked subject more interested in exchanging – bits and bytes – than pieces." (pdf p.14) Stallabrass quotes Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri to recognize in "the networked subject" "the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism." (pdf p.14, Quotation Hardt/Negri: Empire, Cambridge/Massachusetts 2000, p.294) (3/2013). - Stallabrass, Julian: Can
Art History Digest Net Art?
In: Daniels, Dieter/Reisinger, Gunther (ed.): Netpioneers 1.0 – Contextualising Early Net-based Art. Berlin and New York 2010, p.165-179. Julian Stallabrass points to the barriers between the history of art and net art as well as to the possibilities to break them down. Stallabrass outlines an art criticism trying to define the limits of contemporary art and the mainstream art booming in the art market until 2008 as closely connected problems meanwhile net art withdraws the borderlines of art and its market. It transgresses the limits marked within "cultural activism" as borders of "political action" (pdf p.177). A contrast to the sale of unique objects to "the mega-rich" (pdf p.172) constitute projects with often reproducible digital data offering open access and whose distribution can´t be controlled: "...online art...appears not merely dissociated from the mainstream market for contemporary art, but also dangerous to it." (pdf p.173)
Art historians changed their methods in interpretations of photographs as well as videos and reacted to methods developed in other disciplines. Now further changes directing research towards "a much more thorough demystification of the processes of the making and viewing of art" (pdf p.178) are possible options for the future of art criticism (3/2013). - Weiß, Matthias: Netzkunst.
Ihre Systematisierung und Auslegung anhand von Einzelbeispielen.
(Net Art. Its Systematization and Interpretation on the Basis of Individual Examples). Dissertation Faculty of Philosophy, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg im Breisgau 2008/Weimar 2009. Matthias Weiß (actual name: Matthias Kampmann) wants to integrate net art into the "system of art". For Weiß this system seems to be an ideal of art history. Nevertheless, the efforts of the art world (art trade, art criticism, art museums) have been seldom to integrate net art: The artworks for collectors and net art remain separate spheres. Weiß follows Niklas Luhmann´s efforts to define the "system of art" by marking the limit between art and non-art (pdf p.57,64ss.,212s./print p.102s.,116ss.,358s.). Weiß wants to classify net art as a part of the "system of art" – not without indicating its border as relocatable by expansions of the use and meaning of the term art. Weiß ascribes the status art to transgressions and border blurrings between art and non-art like the "Toywar" between the artsts´ group etoy and the toys seller eToys Inc., too.
The attempt of the toys distributing corporation eToys Inc. to take over the domain name etoy.com with juridic means has been repelled successfully by the artists´ group. The artists resisted to sell their domain name to eToys Inc., too. For etoy the means of media activism against eToys Inc. have been necessary to defend their website with its domain name as a precondition for the distribution of their continuous artistic creations. The site includes now a mis-en-scène of the "Toywar". Is it necessary to mark the activistic strategies used by etoy and its supporters in the "Toywar" as part of the "system of art", as proposed by Weiß? His effort to ascribe the status art to the "Toywar" is not persuading.
Meanwhile Henry Flynt argued in Concept Art (1963) that developments of formerly artistic strategies can lead to results that must not be categorized as works of art, Weiß doesn´t follow Flynt. In his interpretations of net projects he emphasizes technical preconditions – computing processes, codes and telecommunication. Weiß doesn´t use his focus on technical requirements to answer questions concerning the status of art as open as it was proposed by Flynt. Furthermore, Weiß doesn´t categorize the browser Web Stalker (1997) by I/O/D (Matthew Fuller, Colin Green, Simon Pope) with Matthew Fuller (1998 in "Means of Mutation") as "not-just art". In his categorization of the "Web Stalker" as net art Weiß acknowledges the twofold nature as a useful tool ("Werkzeughaftes") and art work ("Kunsthaftes", pdf p.140/print p.241). Nevertheless Weiß wants to affiliate the useful tool with the "system of art" because of its performative features ("means of mise-en-scène"/ "Mittel der Inszenierung", pdf p.140/print p.241). He doesn´t mention the performative features as a general problem of the design of all browsers, not only for "art browsers" ("Kunstbrowser"): He can´t escape the receivability as an alternative browser as well as an "art browser".
Weiß integrates each one of the projects mentioned above into one of the "generic terms" ("Oberbegriffe") of his net art classification. This structure of net art constitutes a subsystem of the "system of art" (pdf p.64ss.,89,212s./print p.116ss.,156,357ss.). Browser Art (as art for browsers), Generative Net Art, Activism, Mutual Net Art, Conceptual Net Art, Net Art-Installation and Performative Net Art (pdf p.89/print p.156) are presented by Weiß in definitions of their characteristics as well as in detailed interpretations of exemplary projects.
Weiß uses his detailed interpretation of Alexej Shulgin´s Form Art (1997) as an example for Browser Art. He explains the source code elaboratively. With this interpretation Weiß follows his intention to win criteria with the analysis of the technical conditions for a demarcation between Net Art and non-art.
With Richard Kriesche´s Telematic Sculpture 4/Telematische Skulptur 4 (1995) and Stelarc´s Ping Body (1996) Weiß chooses projects for detailed interpretations that haven´t been used as examples of Net Art by other critics. With these projects he presents works exemplifying the generic terms Net Art Installation and Performative Net Art. Weiß wants to bridge the "gap" ("Lücke", pdf p.213/book p.359) between (media) forms accepted `as art´ and net art among others with Kriesche´s connection to forms of sculptures expanding the field of art, and with Stelarc´s use of the net in Performance Art (as another expansion now accepted `as art´).
Weiß declares his system of generic terms as provisional and open for evolutions. He takes account for possible changes of net conditions causing a kind of net art being not acceptable to his system of generic terms. Nevertheless he doesn´t conclude that different kinds of net art mustn´t be reconstructable as one "system": There may be different fields of net art resisting to be reconstructed as one "system".
Terms like "Hybrid Art" and the expansions of the history of art to a study of the history of images (in media like photography and film, not only in paintings) as well as to investigations of the history of media point to actual methods of research in the history of art neglecting demarcations between art and non-art. Scientific research is involved in investigations of a plurality of media practices that mustn´t be reconstructable as a working field constituting (parts of) the "system of art". The transfer of methods developed in other disciplines cause reevaluations of objects for investigations. Intersections between disciplines sustain the interdisciplinary give and take of methods (compare the studies of performance art, photography and film).
The project of an interdisciplinary development of methods substitutes the defence of disciplinary borders. This project allows to react to contemporary developments dissolving limits between media practices and embracing interconnections between transmission systems. If limits of disciplines cause problems in investigations of contemporary developments then transgressions are demanded. (3/2013) - Ziegler, Henning: The
Digital Outlaws. Hackers as Imagined Communities.
In: nmediac.The Journal of New Media Culture. Vol.1/Nr.2, Summer 2002. Ziegler confronts popular imaginations of Hackers (examples: film "Die Hard 2", 1990; press reports on the "I love you"-virus, 2000) with the self descriptions of Hackers and Crackers. He reconstructs public imaginations of Hackers (with Benedict Anderson) as "imagined community". The damages caused by Crackers (and the angst combined with them) are interpreted (with Julia Kristeva) as "the `abject of dataspace´" and "the `abject´ of hacker culture." The notion "ethical hacking" includes meanings which offer an exit out of the hacker culture´s own "Hacker/cracker antagonisms".
Hacker don´t understand hacktivism as "hacking" although some hacker strategies are used. Chapter V offers a short history of hacktivism (Electrohippies, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Billboard Liberation Front) (2/2004). - Ziegler, Henning: When
Hypertext became uncool. Notes on Power, Politics, and the Interface.
In: Dichtung-Digital, Nr.1/2003. Hypertext became "cool" in the first half of the nineties and "uncool" in the second half. The rhetoric of the descent was the same than the one which supported the ascent. The "graphical user interface" (GUI) of MAC and PC as well as the browsers Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer simulate a stable data context (instead of the instable context) and they simplify the use of functions with icons for clicks instead of a written command input. "The Antimac-interface" (Don Gentner/Jakob Nielsen, 1995) is a counterpiece to the standard interfaces. As such it is part of an "imaginary form" which allows to recognize "an absent social political reality" (Louis Althusser): The intention of the offer was to satisfy the needs of a mass of users whose expectations should be built and grow with interfaces which are user friendly and pseudo-stable. The finite possibilities to choose interfaces offer stable conditions, too.
Instability offers a field for the operations of hypertext artists and users. If an author reclaims copyright for a (contribution to a) project then he finishes modifications caused by instability and coauthors and closes (parts of) the project.
Links don´t open hypertext projects to participation but offer a limited number of possible choices. (Ziegler´s examples: Mark Amerika, Heath Bunting, Stuart Moulthorp). Ziegler asks if peer-to-peer will decentralize the centralization and closedness of hypertext structures (or if centralization will be moved to the periphery) (2/2004).
Texts on Actual Aspects of NetArt:
- Adams, Randy: Paris
Connection. A Project in Critical Media.
In: trAce. Online Writing Centre: Review, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton/Nottingham, 5/17/2003. Randy Adams interviews Jim Andrews (via e-Mail) on Paris Connection. This site was initiated by Andrews and was realized with coauthors. It presents five Parisian artists (Jean-Jacques Birgé, Nicolas Clauss, Frédéric Durieu, Jean-Luc Lamarque, Antoine Schmitt, Servovalve) using mostly Director (resp. the program language Lingo) and knowing each other. "Paris Connection" is a co-production of four portals offering French, Spain and Portuguese translations of contributions to explain the artists´ projects. Andrews interviews the Parisian artists and provokes them with his Director knowledge to sometimes surprising responses.
Andrews ascribes in Adams´ interview the notion "critical media" to a net criticism which investigates intensive software and net conditions. Andrews marks a difference between "critical media" and "touristic" contributions by authors which don´t write primarily on "multimedia net.art" (2/2004). - Arns, Inke: Read_me,
run_me, execute_me: Some notes about software art.
Lecture, Kuda.org Centre for New Media, Novi Sad, 4/9/2004. Arns marks differences between Software Art and Computer Art of the sixties, computer based reactive installations of the nineties and Generative Art. Software Art directs the attention of recipients to the code in the context of its use: Software serves not only as a means which was treated either in Computer Art and reactive installations as part of the black box computer or in Generative Art as notation for the digital generation of surfaces.
Software is a central part of the contemporary landscape of media and machines. Software Art refers to the processes of their construction and fixing by their users and/or by other instances: Software Art offers model cases for a test of the society which began to handle digitalization as an ordinary case. "Coded performativity" doesn´t only mark a feature of the code readable by humans (compare "Codeworks"), but marks as well the framework created by laws (as code) and the established manners of use. insert_coin of Dragan Espenschied/Alvar Freude and walser.php of "textz.com" (Sebastian Lütgert) thematize these social conditions.
Here Arns differentiates her thesis of the illocutionary character of the source code (Arns, Inke: Texte, die (sich) bewegen..., see below). (6/2004). - Arns, Inke: Texte,
die (sich) bewegen. Zur Performativität von Programmiercodes in
der Netzkunst.
(Texts That Move (Themselves): Notes on the Performativity of Programming Codes in Net Art). Lecture, "Kinetographien", conference, European Academy, Berlin, 10/25/2001 .In: Arns, Inke/Goller, Mirjam/Strätling, Susanne/Witte, Georg (ed.): Kinetographien. Bielefeld p.57-78. Texts which appear in moving (cinetic) net presentations cause Arns to ask what moves surfaces resp. "phenotexts": the source code resp. the "genotext". Who observes only the phenotext as performative disregards the illocutionary character of the genotext: Readers can be able to foresee the functions which source codes will actualize in processors.
It is impossible to divide spoken words from speach acts, to separate speach and the act of speach in a communication context. Comparable with the speach act is the relation between the code as computer input and the digital process caused by the input: The source code and the speach act cause effects "without time delay".
Arns finds the performativity of programming codes in Software Art and "Codeworks" (Alan Sondheim).
Cases of "coded performativity" reproduce legal limitations (resp. limitations caused by the legal code) in the source code (2/2004). - Arns, Inke: Transparent
World. Minoritarian Tactics in the Age of Transparency.
In: Andersen, Christian Ulrik/Pold, Søren Pro (ed.): Interface Criticism. Aesthetics Beyond Buttons. Aarhus 2011, p.253-276. The ideal of transparency followed by modernist architects until the sixties is combined by Inke Arns with Michel Foucault´s analysis of the "disciplinary societies" and their transition to the "control societies" explained by Gilles Deleuze as the next phase in the development of "dispositive power". Transparent walls permit social control by offering occasions for surveillance.
Digitalisation changes the function of transparency into criteria for interfaces as surfaces offering an easy handling of functions without being confronted with deeper levels: The danger is banned that users are confronted with codes. If transparency of the levels organizing the programming of computing processes is wanted than the user surface has to be opaque. The code controlling computing processes ("coded performativity", p.12 quoting Reinhold Grether) and visualization don´t anymore depend from each other but exclude each other: One level is transparent because the other level is intransparent: "In the age of transparency we find ourselves dealing with a fundamental de-coupling of visibility and performativity/effectivity." (p.261) Transparency of surfaces relevant for the user´s control of functions requires intransparency on levels underneath these surfaces: "The age of transparency is distinguished by the decoupling of (panoptical) visibility and (post-optical) performativity." (p.273)
Arns features projects realized until 2007 by the Camera Surveillance Players, Bureau d´Etudes, Dragan Espenschied and Alvar Freude, Annina Rüst and Local Area Network, Michelle Teran, Trevor Paglen and the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Manu Luksch and others who either point to hidden control functions (1) or lead them ad absurdum (2): two manners to `showcase´ them to controlling persons (2) or to control people (1).
In "the age of transparancy" the panoptical surveillance of "disciplinary societies" and the post-optical "performativity" controlled by hidden software diverge: Today transparency and control aren´t as complementary as they have been in a not so distant past (3/2013). - Biggs, Simon: Transculturation,
transliteracy and generative poetics.
Lecture, "European Electronic Literature Conference", University of Bergen, Bergen, 9/12/2008. Language contains more than speach acts and text: "Language has always included the visual, aural and tactile." Biggs outlines the concepts of "transculturation" (Fernando Ortiz), pluriliteracy (Ofelia Garcia/Lesley Bartlett/JoAnne Kleifgen) and transliteracy (Sue Thomas/Chris Joseph/Jess Laccetti/Bruce Mason/Simon Mills/Simon Perrill/Kate Pullinger) elaborating relations between different uses of media and cultural fields.
Biggs presents John Cayley´s Translation (2005) as a model of "dynamic processes of signification". Cayley thematises transitions between lingustic states with audible and visual means. Generative procedures between translations transform a text by Walter Benjamin explicating translation as a problem of transformations. Sometimes the text appears in one language for a short while. The reduction to one language is a moment within passages between generative phases: "...he conflates the technical with the cultural..."
Biggs refers to Terry Winograd´s definition of the computer as a linguistic machine instead of a thinking machine: "The very notion of `symbol system´ is inherently linguistic...a form of verbal argument." (Winograd 1991) In "Translation" Cayley shows on one side the linguistic structures in contextual independency and refers on the other side to the contextual dependency of meanings by pointing to the instability of generative processes. This contextual dependency is dynamic: "...these dynamic processes of signification." Language is "computational" and culture as well as language can be understood as "a network of constantly regenerating relations." The consequence of these conclusions is to understand technology as "the material manifestation of the social" (7/2009). - Breeze, Maryanne: The
Sound of Reality Lag: Versionals are the New Black.
In: Furtherfield Review, 8/7/2007. Platforms of web 2.0 like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and others substitute "ego-mediated variables" by "actuated identity markers". The amount of markers, their distribution and the connections with and between them is crucial for "versionals", not for friendship. Private data are turned into "open-ended versional noise". The relations to reality become infected by the "versional effect" (7/2009). - Cayley, John: The
Code is not the Text (unless it is the Text).
Lecture, "p0es1s. Poetics of Digital Text", Symposium, Universität Erfurt, Erfurt, 9/28/2001. In: Electronic Book Review. Vol.3, 9/10/2002; 5/25/2003. Modified, shortened German/English print version: Block, Friedrich W./Heibach, Christiane/Wenz, Karin (ed.): p0es1s. Ästhetik digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p.287-306. The code should function as computer input which starts reading processes. If this is not the case then forms of programming languages/codes are used as stimulations for the production of experimental texts like "Codeworks" of MEZ/Mary Anne Breeze and Talan Memmott: "The code has ceased to function as code." Unfortunately neither MEZ nor Memmott develop a "Code Pidgin English" in the process of writing.
The artists group Jodi integrate text parts in their source codes which are not readable for processors: "code-as-text". Cayley presents his Codework "Pressing the `Reveal Code´ Key" as an example both as source code (in HyperTalk) for computer input and as readable text with "ludic" qualities: "...this code is the text." The work presents a readable text and demonstrates a working code: "logic-as-literature in new media".
A "literature constituted by flickering signification" is able to deal with the status of texts as always "compiled, decompiled, recompiled". "Flickering signifiers" (N. Katherine Hayles) jump between different digital contexts and levels. This strategy is based here on the difference between the levels of code and text: "The code is not the text." (Compare the counter-position of Florian Cramer in "Digital Code and Literary Text", see below) The title of the net version offers an extended version of the non-equality of code and text which is relevant for Cayley´s own example: "The code is not the text (unless it is the text)" (2/2004). - Cox, Geoff: Virtual
Suicide as Decisive Political Act.
Lecture, conference "Activist Media and Biopolitics", Universität Innsbruck, November 2010. In: Sützl, Wolfgang/Hug, Theo (ed.): Activist Media and Biopolitics. Critical Media Interventions in the Age of Biopower. Institut für psychosoziale Intervention und Kommunikationsforschung. Universität Innsbruck. Innsbruck 2012, p.103-116. Geoff Cox points to politically motivated suicide and its thematisation in computer games before he presents "virtual suicide" as a tactical means in social media.
Wafaa Bilal exposes in the modificated game A Virtual Jihadi (2008) the situation of Iraquis between American occupants and the Fundamentalists´ terror. The first-person shooters "Quest for Al-Qua'eda: The Hunt of Bin-Laden" (2002) and "Quest for Saddam" (2003) realised by Petrilla Entertainment are modified into the fundamentalist game "The Night of Bush Capturing" (Global Islamic Media Front, 2006) chasing George W. Bush instead of Osama Bin-Laden or Saddam Hussein. Bilal takes over the code of "Quest for Saddam" that was used in "The Night of Bush Capturing", too, and gives the characteristics of his appearance to the suicide-bomber. Bilal´s version thematises the tensions between "the extreme fantasies of islamophobia and islamophilia" (pdf p.2/print p.104). Cox documents this content with an artist´s quote instead of an analysis of the game.
Cox borrows the social framework of a "mechanism of control over the imaginary" from Franco Berardi who interpretes suicide as "the pathology of the psycho-social system" (Berardi: Precarious Rhapsody... London 2009, p.55; pdf p.1/print p.103).
Adult Swim´s internet game Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) (2009) offers suicide as a goal "rather than go back to work" (pdf p.3/print p.106). The gamer navigating her/his avatar wins if (s)he is fast and successful to escape the office work by efforts to find someone or something causing his/her virtual death. Cox recognises a parallel structure between the game´s "mise-en-scène" (pdf p.4/print p.106) of violence and "the symbolic violence of the capitalist workplace" (pdf p.4/print p.106). For me the game doesn´t try to let the gamer react to the challenges of the actual working conditions but parodies in an ironical and entertaining manner the daily little wars with the provocative goal to seek latent violence and to expose oneself to its explosion.
Olga Goriunova´s Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word (2000) for the production of notes indicating suicides is used by Cox as an intermediary to a discussion of Tactical Media for the "virtual suicide" in social media. The "cycles of struggle" are integrated by the "current neoliberal regime" as a "motor" useful "for its own development" (Mario Tronti: The Strategy of Refusal, 1965; pdf p.5/print p.108). If Facebook threats moddr with legal steps because their Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (2009) with its mechanism for "unfriending" violates the rights handed over to the platform owners in the course of the registration procedure, then moddr transgressed a line between integrable and not anymore integrable resistance: The resistance of the net surfers not wanting to work anymore for Facebook´s win is a direct threat for its business model. The "unfriending" reduces the data traffic necessary for the advertisement revenues and it provocates the owners of the platform to legal actions to mark the limit of tolerance. For Cox Facebook is following the "logic of governmentality" criticised by Michel Foucault. This logic illustrates the replacement of "the regulatory function of the state in relation to the market (liberalism) with the market itself (neoliberalism)." (pdf p.3,6/print p.105,109). Cox presents Les Liens Invisibles´ project Seppukoo (2009) as a further example for "virtual suicide". One of its authors presents it as "`viral´" and as "a sort of involuntary form of strike" (pdf p.8/print p.110): By "the mechanism of viral invitations" "individual actions" of "unfriending" are shifted "onto a collective stage" (pdf p.8/print p.110 quoting Guy McMusker) (4/2013). - Cox, Geoff/McLean, Alex/Ward, Adrian: The
Aesthetics of Generative Code.
Lecture, "Generative Art 2000: 3rd International Conference on Generative Art", Politecnico di Milano, Milano, 12/14-16/2000. Uses of Perl as not working code (Perl Poetry) are denied by McLean/Ward. McLean and Ward present examples of codes causing different working processes in different computers. These different executions of the same code complicate the esthetic discourse on relations between program/concept/text and presentation in a manner which the authors compare with relations between the text of poetry and its vocal performance.
The executions of McLean´s and Ward´s examples produce "`watermarks´ of the processor and operating system". The relations between code and execution are variing with the used processors and these variations indicate the quality of the code – and vice versa: Codes can be used as model cases for investigations how monitor presentations are generated (2/2004). - Cramer, Florian: Animals
that Belong to the Emperor. Failing Universal Classification Schemes
from Aristotle to the Semantic Web.
Lecture, Forum on Quaero: A Public Think Tank on the Politics of the Search Engine, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, 9/30/2007. In: Nettime, 12/19/2007. Cramer criticises projects (Theseus, Quaero) of the Semantic Web offering one of the possible classifications of knowledge ("cosmology") under the term "ontology" as the only basis of data processing with "semantic tags" in the future: "Beyond cosmology falsely named ontology, it is metaphysics disguised as physics." As much as projects of the Semantic Web try to pretend to be able to replace human beings by software with its processing of meanings ("semantics") and their references to facts ("ontology"), computers remain "syntactical machines" processing data input with programmed algorithmic procedures incapable to substitute "ontology" or any world of words´ and phrases´ meanings: The "culturally and folksonomic ways" of data input and processing can´t be skipped over (7/2009). - Cramer, Florian: Digital
Code and Literary Text.
Lecture, "p0es1s. Poetics of Digital Text", Symposium, Universität Erfurt, Erfurt, 9/27/2001. Modified german/english print version: In: Block, Friedrich W./Heibach, Christiane/Wenz, Karin (ed.): p0es1s. Ästhetik digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p.263-276. Cramer explains his counter-position to John Cayley (see above) and his interest in software as text in non working uses of programming codes. Net Poetry of Jodi, antiorp/Netochka Nezvanova, MEZ/Mary Anne Breeze, Ted Warnell, Alan Sondheim and Kenji Siratori amalgamate structural and speach act oriented research (Structuralism and Philosophy of Ordinary Language).
Authors of Codeworks integrate in their writing processes conceptual NetArt with uses of Open Source methods. They develop their writing procedures further with takeovers from Hacker Cultures meanwhile industrial software (with closed source code) like browsers and plugIns (QuickTime, ShockWave, Flash) is integrated as a means of production into Hyperfictions and Multimedia Poetry (2/2004). - Cramer, Florian: Exe.cut[up]able
statements. The Insistence of Code.
Lecture, Ars Electronica 2003, Brucknerhaus, Linz, 9/8/2003. In: Stocker, Gerhard/Schöpf Christine (eds.): Code – The Language of Our Time. Ars Electronica 2003. Ars Electronica Center, Linz/Ostfildern-Ruit 2003, p.98-109. Iconic programming languages have a low complexity in comparison to the syntactical possible relations of text based software. Therefore interfaces divide the use of visual signs (icons) from the text based software. Text based interfaces allow a transparency of relations between the levels of programming and its use. This transparency is not possible with iconic interfaces. Cramer presents the relationship of code and interface as the crucial point of codeworks created by Alan Sondheim and MEZ/Mary Anne Breeze (2/2004). - Cramer, Florian: Peer-to-peer
Services. Transgressing the Archive (and its Maladies?).
In: (Internet-) catalogue of the exhibition "adonnaM.mp3-Filesharing, the Hidden Revolution in the Internet", Museum of Applied Arts, department digitalcraft, Frankfurt am Main, 3-4/20/2003. Cramer characterizes peer-to-peer networks like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and Freent as music archives and interprets the net and its organization (ICANN, TCP/IP, DNS, etc.) as its own archive with object- and meta-dates (IP-adresses and domain names). Peer-to-peer networks don´t always use the archival organization of the internet but possess sometimes their own server- and/or terminal-based organizations. GNUnet and Freenet move files between the integrated terminals: The places of memory are moving and become unlocalizable for censoring efforts (of the Copyright industry). If files are lost in storage media and hard disks then the data can be found in the instable peer-to-peer networks: Filesharing as a chance for a "cultural memory" surviving the deletion of memory because of the "unsystematic means of data transfer" (2/2004). - Cramer, Florain: Zehn
Thesen zur Softwarekunst.
In: Auer, Johannes/Heibach, Christiane/Suter, Beat (ed.): netzliteratur.net_Netzliteratur//Internetliteratur//Netzkunst 2003. Print version, German/English ("Ten Theses about Software Art"): Gohlke, Gerrit (ed.): Software Art – Eine Reportage über den Code/A Reportage about Source Code. Media Arts Lab des Künstlerhauses Bethanien. Berlin 2003, p.6-13. For Cramer Software Art problematizes its means with these means as well as with other media. The relation between instruction and execution is thematized in a way external to computers in "event cards" of George Brecht (example "Lamp Event", part of the event card Three Lamp Events, Summer 1961: "on. off") and in .walk of Social Fiction. A difference to the conceptual, dematerializing instruction is marked by artists who work with software not only to use its functions, to present models of its functions or to expand its possibilities but to treat the code as material (via interventions and modifications). On one side Social Fiction resystematizes in ".walk" the "Conceptual actionism of the sixties" as "computer software", on the other side there are artists who treat software as material in "Codeworks" as well as in modifications of games and pages in HTML (example: Jodi).
Critics introduced the term "software art" for works, which don´t fit into the framework of the art world, but need explanations. The term "art" in Software Art means craftmanship, too, which causes a new use of the former concept "ars" which integrated arts and crafts. Conceptualization, media pluralism, knowledge of software and processualization are combined in Software Art in sometimes extreme different manners. If Software Art´s pluralism is reduced by "critics, curators and juries" to few, often realized media forms ("experimental web-browsers, data visualizations, modified computer games and cracker code") then they leave aside this pluralism which complicates the definition of art (6/2004). - Cubitt, Sean: Immersion,
Connectivity, Conviviality.
Lecture, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MUMOK), Vienna/Donau-Universität Krems, Department für Bildwissenschaften, Telelecture, 12/9/2008. Cubitt interprets the difference between the uses of adequate media for low- and high-resolution in pictures or films from a social point of view. He mentions the low-resolution screens of mobile phones and the human-to-human-communication via SMS as examples for the "actuality of isolation" and the "illusion of community". Efforts to transpose technical demands of high-resolution media and transmissions to mobile gadgets with little screens and interfaces can transpose the problems of the high-resolution context – the dominating "actuality of community" resulting in "the illusion of isolation": The "neo-baroque spectacle" of the high-resolution media runs the danger to become the only paradigm of media. All users participate but they imagine themselves as isolated observers.
This "neo-baroque spectacle" is fixed on the "fight against the absolute evil" meanwhile it remains undetermined concerning all other problems. The "immersive sublime" of the high-resolution media finds its counterpart in the "connective despair" of the low-resolution media. The communication in a "world of hyperindividuation" fails: "The binarism of hi-res and low-res takes us to the sick heart of the contemporary world." Only "convivial tools" will be able to actualize the lost possibilities of communication: "...a dialectic of embodied experience and socialisation on the grounds of a mediated world."
Cubitt interprets Urban Tapestries of Proboscis (see Collective tips, part 1 and part 3) as a nostalgic and simultaneously utopian project: It is as well "sewn into the fabric of surveillant and corporate networks" as it is "another model of network interdependence" (7/2009). - Dyer-Witheford, Nick/de Peuter, Greig: Empire@Play:
Virtual Games and Global Capitalism.
In: CTheory, 5/13/2009. The authors explain the "Empire´s" (Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri 2000) working conditions of game developers. Then they feature some possibilities of "Games of Multitude" for engagements against these conditions by taking over procedures of games made for the training of soldiers and traders to develop them further: The Empire creates the possibilities for its own transgression. The authors outline the working conditions in companies of "ludocapitalism" to demonstrate the necessity for the workers to use their own capabilities to escape these conditions. But the "meshwork of satellite offices" shows the companies´ successful strategies to keep the wages down.
Games developed for e-learning in armies, corporations and tradings show the capabilities of gaming procedures. The development of these procedures to enable the gamers´ "`autoludic´ activities" offers chances to gain gaming strategies against actual social and economic conditions transgressing piracy and protest: The authors present games like agoraXchange (Jacqueline Stevenes/Natalie Bookchin 2004-2008) and Superstruct (The Institute of Future, 2008) as possibilities to learn the planning of strategies. These games can interrupt the "magic circle" of a game world separated from reality by proposing ways to develop strategies for the exploitation of inconsistencies in existing power structures and for the change of concepts to observe the world. That sounds abstract and is far from a proposal to begin to change the world by specific kinds of online games and gaming strategies. Realizations of the proposed gaming concept will be useful only as forerunners of a practice resulting in a change of power relations (7/2009). - Flanagan, Mary: Locating
Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.
In: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Perth 2007; Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Vol.16/Issue 2-3. 2008. In «La production de l´espace» Henri Lefebvre distinguishes between an alienated abstract public space specified by propriety, surveillance and consumption, and an urban space characterized by the social life of the people living there. Blast Theory´s Can You See Me Now? (2001) is critically featured by Flanagan because local characteristics and streets are only substitutable parts of the playground. Their own histories aren´t integrated as elements of the game. Flanagan presents Anne Marie Schleiner´s Operation Urban Terrain (OUT) (2004), Suyin Looui´s "Transition Algorithm" (2006) and Samara Smith´s "Chain Reaction" (2006) as positive counter-examples. No one of these projects integrates GPS. The author doesn´t conclude to renounce locative media in projects with local points of reference but recommends to direct the attention more to the conceptual aspects of the game design than to the technological means. Flanagan mentions the opposition between goals accessible with instrumental-oriented actions and social oriented local points of reference but she doesn´t offer a concept to mediate the technological means with social ends in games for activists (7/2009). - Fuller, Matthew: Behind
the Blip. Software as Culture.
In: Nettime, 1/7/2002. Print verion: Fuller, Matthew: Behind the Blip. Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn 2003, p.11-37. After computers, software and interfaces have been created for the needs of users their horizons of expectations are oriented towards the digital consumer goods. There are changes possible: "Software culture" includes the development of new concepts not only on a technological level but on a philosophical level, too. This culture constitutes a "digital subjectivity" with its own sensibility.
Fuller explains differences between "Critical", "Social" and "Speculative Software". The last one fulfills his criteria of conceptuality and digital subjectivity: "Software...as mutant epistemology." (2/2004) - Galanter, Philip: What
is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory.
Lecture 12/11/2003. In: Papers of Generative Art 2003 Conference (Politecnico di Milano, Faculty for Architecture of Campus Leonardo, Milano 2003). In his efforts to define Generative Art Galanter points ,to the following problem of Claude Shannon´s information theory: An arbitrary sequence of different elements contains high information meanwhile repetitions of identical elements are redundant (low information).
Galanter offers the combination of surprise (high information) and redundancy as a possible solution: "Structure" and "complexity" rise between the extremes of high and low information. The measure of "algorithmic complexity" can be found via the explication of the smallest possible amount of rules necessary for a universal computer to produce the relevant sequences of dates. The "algorithmic complexity" doesn´t solve the problem because the random order needs the longest algorithm. The criterion of "the length of a concise description of a set of the entity´s regularities" defines the "effective complexity" (Murry Gell-Mann). The "effective complexity" of chance and of strict order tends towards zero.
Galanter defines the use of systems as a characteristic of Generative Art. He proposes to explain this use of systems with the methods of complexity theory. The consequence of this definition is to recognize "generative art...as old as art itself" (10/2006). - Goriunova, Olga: Swarm
Forms: On Platform and Creativity.
In: Mute. Vol.2/nr.4. January 2007, p.46-57. On the one hand static platforms present their contents on "a single entrance" and curators care for the "common theme", on the other hand "dynamic platforms" are "multiple interface platforms" and administrators maintain "the overall healthy functioning" but don´t care about contents.
Goriunova foresees possibilities of "art platforms" to remain independent and concentrated on common themes beside the "dynamic platforms" often discussed under the slogan Web 2.0. These platforms are operated commercially, meanwhile the copyrights of the contributions are properties of their authors ("shared copyright"). The minor amount of contributors guarantees art platforms´ independency because it keeps off investors.
Enthusiasts as curators of the platforms and their participants should take care for their programmatic goal. According to Goriunova it is a characteristic of an art platform to constitute a "cultural entity": "Its subject is avant-garde and marginal." Beside runme.org (see above, platforms) confounded by Goriunova she calls Micromusic.net and Udaff.com as examples for art platforms. These examples are well known from her earlier articles. The difference between art platforms and platforms for a "hive mind" seems to be more important for her than the difference between static and dynamic platforms. Her summary: "...platforms cannot in general be stigmatised as loci of the unoriginal `hive mind´, and there is no need for a term like Web 2.0" (4/2007). - Guglielmetti, Mark/Innocent, Troy/Whitelaw, Mitchell: Strange
Ontologies in Digital Culture.
(1/2008). In: ACM Computers in Entertainment. Vol.7/Issue 1. February 2009. Philosophy and "information sciences" use the term ontology in different meanings. Meanwhile philosophers try to find an epistemological framework for the ontological problem of relations to that which exists ("what is"), studies in information sciences comprehend the structures of relations between elements in systems as creating ontologies in representations of knowledge – with the consequence that these ontologies are used as representations of that which exists: If it is possible to imagine only those parts as real which are represented in systems of knowledge then the limits of these systems define limited concepts of the world with restricted references to real entities. Against these conventionalized frameworks of being the authors focus on "strange ontologies" proposed by artistic projects.
Before they start their investigation of "strange ontologies" the authors prove the estrangement provoked by "social software" of platforms like Facebook and del.icio.us: In Facebook, "friend" is used for symmetrical relations, meanwhile in "del.icio.us" it has the meaning of "an asymmetrical `fan´ relation" between the tagging person and the author of a tagged file.
Installations and games interrupt the parameters of the computational systems representing real entities with the means of these systems. In his Origami Butterfly series (2006) Jonathan McCabe transgresses the usual procedures of generative art using swarms with self-modifiying parts: Divisions and repetitions are elements of procedures creating structures.
In opposition to conservative systems representing the world in static categories, "dynamic, local and relational qualities" are generated using systems in a strange way. An example offers Brock Davis´ self portrait developed using an editor for the 3D simulation ("Forge") of "Halo 3" ("manipulating 3D objects in the editor environment for Microsoft´s Halo 3"). The readability of the signs representing objects changes: They are secondary as game elements in a pictorial space and suggest primarily the contours of a face (7/2009). - Helmond, Anne: Lifetracing.
The Traces of a Networked Life.
In: Bray, Anne/Dockrey, Sean/Green, Jo-Ann/Navas, Eduardo/Torrington, Helen (Hg.): Networked. A (Networked_Book) about (Networked Art). 2009. Helmond underscores the close connection of net users´ self performances between social networks and search engines. Some techniques of search engines to archive and display user data provoke certain manners to use networks: "...identity is performed through and shaped by social software and constructed by search engines." Services like Storytlr offer possibilities to "mashup your data into stories." This kind of services lumps together the users´ activities in different social networks. The overviews provoke the impression of "one big data stream scattered across the web". The result of users´ interests in self performances via social networks are strategies of "Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)" to avoid search results displacing them from the top of the rankings: "...people are very willing to submit a large amount of information about themselves to search engines for a sense of control over the outcome."
Some techniques of the Google search engine foster SERM strategies: The Google Blog search engine indexes every RSS feed. This includes each Twitter entry within the "public timeline".
The search engines circumvent little by little the "walled gardens" created by the registry and login. In the meantime the social networks supply the search engines more and more overt with user data. The function of specific search engines like Wink, yoName, Spock and Pipl is to find informations on persons in the web and social networks with no more input as search request than the name, the user name or the e-mail adress. This availability of all data about activities is corresponding to services offering to users the administration of data created by them for their self performance and distributed on several networks and media: lifelogging software.
The "multimedia diary" provided by Nokia between 2004 and 2007 offered an overview on the user´s pictures, messages and videos in chronological order. These "lifelogging" activities express the desire to collect as much data as is possible about oneself and the closer environment. "Lifelogging" provokes an understanding of the data in the web as "a place holder for the intentions of humankind." (John Battelle)
This understanding becomes productive in thematic restructurings of available data, f.e. in Google Flu Trends and in projects like Jonathan Harris´ und Sep Kamwar´s We Feel Fine and I Want You To Want Me: "Instead of using this data for health issues or for artistic purposes it may also be used for monitoring or surveillance." Jeremy Bentham´s "Panopticon" is used by Michel Foucault as a model of the "surveillance societies". This model is transgressed by "consumer surveillance" and privatised in an enjoyable way in "self-surveillance" facilitated by services like your.flowingdata.com (YFD). The response to the surveillance is a "sousveillance" (Steve Mann) – a surveillance from the bottom up realized by individuals, not by states or corporations. "Sousveillance" remains conform to the established social conditions in an "identity 2.0" receiving the statistics of its own activities and popularity by Twitter Counter or Twitter Analyzer.
The parts fit into each other in the "assemblage of platform, engine and user". Users are requested by social networks and search engines (Google Profiles) to complete their profiles. The profiles feed the data flow from the social networks to the search engines: "...a reconfiguration of the user...the lifestream is more service-centered than user-centered."
Tagging creativities of the social networks´ users deliver the data amounts required by search engines. The keywords of tags can be used as means in strategies to harm someone´s self performance.
With this "reconfiguration" of the self performances in a data space making it impossible to eliminate digital traces the fulfillment of the authors´ last wills determining the future of (parts of) their performances becomes a probably growing demand for services like Etoy (Mission Eternity), Mediamatic (IkRip) und Pips:Lab (Die Space). The data space online provokes a new form of the testament (9/2009). - Holmes, Brian: Drifting
through the Grid. Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure.
German print version: Springerin. Vol.X. Nr. 3. Autumn 2004, p.18-21. Holmes recognizes two imperial structures combined in projects for collaborative mapping with locative media: the internet and GPS. Holmes presents the political problems of the "digital divide" and the military origins of both information systems as parts of an "imperial infrastructure" being expanded by its liberalized social and economic use. Holmes characterizes the military origins of the internet and GPS as if they cause the same contemporary problems although their structures are different.
The "World Geodetic System" is the global three-dimensional reference frame for military projects and actions of the U.S.A. Holmes uses the "World Geodetic System" as an example to present cartography as one part of the "imperial infrastructure".
In October 2002 Jeron Klee and Esther Polak (in collaboration with the Waag Society) realized the project Amsterdam Real Time. It presented in real time the routes of participants who walked with GPS receivers and PDAs in Amsterdam (The project anticipated Tom Carden´s and Steve Coast´s OpenStreetMap (OSM): The Free Wiki World Map, since December 2004). Holmes critizes "Amsterdam Real Time" because it doesn´t escape "the hyper-rationalist grid of imperial infrastructure". It offers "a fragile gesture, fraught with ambiguity" and can´t fulfill his demand: "social subversion, psychic deconditioning, an aesthetics of dissident experience". The last point is for Holmes exemplified by the Situationism after they abandoned Constant´s "representations of unitary urbanism". Critical Comments: Beiguelman, Giselle: Re: Interactive City: irrelevant mobile entertainment? (8/18/2006) In: Institute for Distributed Creativity. iDC mailing list. iDC Digest. Vol.22/Issue 19, 8/19/2006; Cloninger, Curt: Comments to Holmes, Brian: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure. In: Turbulence.org. networked_performance: Research Blog about network-enabled performance, 12/31/2004; Shepard, Mark: Re: Interactive City: irrelevant mobile entertainment? (8/17/2006) In: Institute for Distributed Creativity. iDC mailing list. iDC Digest. Vol.22/Issue 18, 8/17/2006 (10/2006). - Holmes, Brian: Is
It Written In the Stars? Global Finance Precarious Destinies.
In: Holmes, Brian: Continental Drift. The other side of neoliberal globalization. Blog, 11/6/2009. Short German print version with the title "Was steht in den Sternen? Globale Finanzen, prekäre Schicksale", in: Springerin. Vol. XVII. Nr. 1. Winter 2010, p.18-24. In Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium "shimmering points of light" were projected in constellations similar to starry skies on a dome (the concave part of a sphere´s segment) hanging from the ceiling. In 2001 this installation by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway was first exhibited in the Tate Gallery (group exhibition "Art Now: Art and Money Online", London). It received data of the actual stock market. Cefn Haile´s software used these data to generate "A-life agents". These "creatures" appeared as shimmering spots on the concave screen – similar to the projection of the starry sky – in a planetarium. Each point of light represented "the stock of a publicly traded corporation." Intensity and movements mirrored the actual tradings in stock exchanges.
The title´s term "shoals" points to the relation between artificial life and stock exchange trading. "Shoals" denotes sandbanks being dependent from the the water current, and the term "shoaling" is used for the behavior of fish swarms. Following Autogena and Portway the term "shoals" refers to "shoaling" as well as to the "Black-Sholes formula" invented by Fisher Black, Myron Sholes and Robert Merton. It allows to define the actual stock value more precise than ever before and to reduce the risks of trading with shares if the conditions remain constant. After successes Sholes´ and Merton´s company "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed in 1998. One of the collapse´s reasons was the "feedback effect" caused by successors dealing with the "Black-Sholes formula", too. The complexity theory reconstructs manners of feedback effects leading to chaos. The reconstruction of the stock market using algorithms of artificial life points to research methods of the stock market´s dynamic processes beyond the deficiencies of the "Black-Sholes formula".
The installation and the explanations of its authors deliver Holmes pretexts for his explanation of the globalization as well as for more essayistic remarks like his pointing to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group as a winner. He describes Anish Kapoor´s stainless steel sculpture "Cloud Gate" and its costs as a result of the neoliberal globalization. The sculpture was placed on the AT&T Plaza in Chicago´s Millenium Park and became an attraction for tourists. Holmes opposes the costs of this attraction – 11,5 million dollars – with the conditions of the poor inhabitants of Chicago: 20% of the inhabitants fall "beneath the poverty line." Detroit´s organization of a culture with spectacular events caused "flashy postmodern casinos" to attract investors by regenerating its "impoverished core" after the collapse of the automobile industry. The examples from Chicago and Detroit are used by Holmes to present the "creative industries" and the "casino capitalism" (Susan Strange 1986) as two sides of one coin.
Autogena´s and Portway´s installation presents its visualisation of the dynamic trading processes for a contemplative aesthetic observation meanwhile the reference of the shimmering lights to the stock market remains relevant for the reception of the projection. The connection between the parts of the projection and the whole appears fascinating and questionable simultaneously. The insiders of the stock exchange trading concentrate themselves on its autonomous processes and ignore the influences of external causes as well as the external factors influenced by these processes. The installation follows this concentration on autonomous processes.
The mirroring world of "Cloud Gate" deforms the closer surrounding in reflexes: the tourists and the skyscrapers of Chicago. The sculpture turns the attention of visitors away from the poor people being displaced from the Millenium Park. Human beings serve in "Cloud Gate" as substitutable objects for the inner reflections of mirror worlds. Holmes describes the inner reflections of the "infinite variety of speculative performances" using Detroit´s event culture as an example: "The performer is often a `mark´, the target of someone else´s strategy." Holmes explains the stock market as a system and the investors as agents following its processes and their repeated sequences: Its reconstruction as a system of artificial life presents the companies producing commodities and its distributors as not more than sources for the input of the stock market.
The installation "Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium" excludes the influences of the stock market on the organizations of production and distribution as well as the reactions of the companies´ managers and workers on these influences. This omission is used by Holmes as a gateway to social criticism: He reconstructs the omission via interpretations of the presented elements. The "supernova of derivatives trading" constitutes "meta-commodities that govern the unfolding of the contemporary economic model." The analysed "artificial world model" provokes Holmes to the proclamation: "We need a different world model, which cannot be abstracted from price information analysed by computers."
In his sociocritical approach Holmes expands an analytical method to recognize the social structures within the internal relations of the art works to a kind of interpretation recognizing affirmative or critical references to the social sourroundings in relations between the structures of a work and the social structures of its context: He reconstructs the relations between the presented and the absent or hidden aspects of the society producing art for its needs and desires. The exploration, on the one hand, of these needs and desires, and on the other hand, of the reactions of contemporary artists to these conditions tries to find out the alternatives hitherto neglected by the society and its arts (11/2009). - Holmes, Tiffany: Arcade
Classics Spawn Art? Current Trends in The Art Game Genre.
Lecture 5/20/2003. In: Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, May 2003. "`Retro-styled´ art games" are modifications of classic arcade games like Pong, Asteroid, Missile Command and Centipede. Art games are restricted to simple interfaces for short playtime in comparison to computer games with several levels for longer running times. A "conceptual message" enables a project via social themes like gender and race to problematize the ego shooter scenario and its development in battle games. Holmes exemplifies some ways to develop concepts focused on contemporary power structures by projects like Natalie Bookchin´s The Intruder (1999), Game Lab´s Sissyfight (2000), Ricardo Zuñiga´s Vagamundo (2002) and On Ramp Art´s Tropical America (2002): "Art game play sometimes requires a tolerance for critical theory mixed with intelligent humor..." (7/2009) - LeMay, Matthew: Reconsidering
Database Form: Input, Structure, Mapping.
In: dichtung-digital. Issue 2/2005 (Vol.7/nr.35). The criticism contains the following antithesises to Manovich´s articles The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art (2002, see below) and Database as a Genre in New Media (1998, integrated with Modifications in "The Language of New Media", Cambridge/Massachusetts 2001, p.218-243. see Contributions to the History of NetArt, above):
1. ) The assumption of "a fundamental divide between form and content" constitutes the basis for Manovich´s critical remark on Mapping art and its "endless ways to map one data set onto another." LeMay points to "the complex interrelations between data and the database" in Mapping art and contradicts Manovich´s characterization of databases as additive and extensible collections of "separate elements".
2.) Between the organization of data collections and databases should be distinguished more precise than Manovich does it because he doesn´t consider different relations between "form" and "content" in "static" and "dynamic data sets". Manually executed static coordinations of sound and picture files with textual indices are the precondition of searches in archives. Generated dynamic combinations as results of computer aided searches caused by keyword inputs can leave observers baffled because they (still) can´t integrate the outputs in frameworks contrary to archives executed by observers for observers. The differentiation between static and dynamic data sets demonstrates its relevance in the case of the difference between systems for CD-ROMs and search systems in the internet: Contrary to static structures on CD-ROMs, the dependency of the action of retrieval programs on manual ascribed indices appears in the internet as a dissatisfying combination of a dynamic search with static assignments.
3.) Contrary to Manovich, "the anti-sublime" characterizes not the transfer of incomprehensible data collections to lucid visualizations but the "database logic". This change of the point of view allows to regard the selection, the organization and the presentation in a considerably tighter interplay than with Manovich´s observations with a one-sided orientation to the "beautification of data" (Simanowski, Roberto: Mapping Art as Cultural Form in Postmodern Times 2005). Databases are characterized by "the interconnectedness between data-as-content and structure-as-form". These are traits responsible for the prevalent position of the database assumed but not adequately described by Manovich (4/2007). - Lillemose, Jacob: A
Re-Declaration of Dependence – Software Art in a Cultural Context
It Can´t Get out of.
In: Goriunova, Olga/Shulgin, Alexej (ed.): read-me. Software Art & Cultures Edition 2004. University of Aarhus 2004, p.137-149. Artists like Sarah Charlesworth and Hans Haacke thematize the Conceptual Art´s dependence of the art context despite and because of their art external presentation modes and themes. Contextual Art´s First Generation of the Sixties and Seventies criticized institutionalized restrictive practices. A Second Generation focussed its criticism on the representation of social relations in the art world. Lillemeose divides the Third Generation of the Nineties into a part which follows the directions of the first two generations and another part exemplified by Peter Weibel´s concept of the art work´s function as a direct intervention into the context. A certain part of the Third Generation of Contextual artists moves from the discussion of art as a social construction to active efforts to intervene in social relations. Here starts a Fourth Generation of Contextual Artists and develops a context sensitive mode of Software Art which criticizes its surrounding.
Lillemose constructs a development from Sarah Charlesworth´s context criticism in her "Declaration of Dependence" (The Fox, nr.1, 1975, p.1-7) to a "re-declaration of dependence" of programming artists. Software is not only a program code for compilers but a cultural practice which combines economic, social and technical elements: "Programmers of programming possibilities" (Thomas Dreher) produce "formations rather than forms" (Nicolas Bourriaud) with products used in the context by participants who can develop them further. Alternative software "constructs a user" against a horizon of expectations defined and limited by proprietary software. Lillemose characterizes not only the direct action as a strategy of the Fourth Generation´s Contextual Art, but the indirectly provoking practices of agitation, too. Software as an art and a tool are two aspects which inspire and pervade each other. Lillemose calls the examples The Yes Men, Institute of Applied Autonomy, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, etoy, LAN, I/O/D, www.0100101110101101.org, übermorgen, Carbon Defence League, TWCDCC (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism), Radical Software Group and Knowbotic Research (6/2006). - Lodi, Simona: Illegal
Art and Other Stories About Social Media.
In: Lovink, Geert/Rasch, Miriam (ed.): Unlike Us Reader. Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives. Institute of Network Cultures. Amsterdam 2013, p.239-253. Simona Lodi presents net projects and mobile applications thematising aspects of social media like their business models and the behaviors of users encouraged by them. In 2009, as the Facebook founder and CEO "Mark Zuckerberg declared the end of privacy" (pdf p.242), Facebook "blocked access of two applications to its system" (pdf p.242), Seppukoo by Les Liens Invisibles (2009) and the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine by Moddr (2009), because "both...invited users to close their accounts." (pdf S.242) The registration causes everyone to transfer her/his rights to Facebook. The projects mentioned above promote the deletion of contributions meanwhile Facebook treats them as its property. Facebook´s lawyers treat the company´s private property as untouchable meanwhile its CEO subsumes the intellectual property rights of Facebook´s contributors as being a part of the tendency to "the end of privacy" (pdf p.242): Is the appropriation of the contributors´ rights the "social" in social media?
Lodi presents these projects in short explanations. She is not as precise as it is possible in her comments on the relations between the platforms, their business models and their contributors.
Her second main topic are the artists´ reactions to political platforms reducing activism to clicking votes for petitions. In 2010 this reduction was named "clicktivism" by Mica White. The projects Repetitionr (2009-2010) and Tweet4Action (2011) of Les Liens Invisibles offer online services facilitating the realisation of campaigns and petitions. "Repetitionr" supplies the acceptance by "fake...signatures" (pdf p.248): The risk of petitions without resonance is averted. Lodi embeds these parodies of "clicktivism" in a short feature of activism´s contemporary forms and asks: "How has business appropriated hacker values, exploiting open source principles, freedom and equality, and triggering the activist response?" (pdf p.243) In her opinion the examples for artistic reactions to social media mentioned above investigate the "social" in "social media" and contribute with their "techno-activism" to "new forms of equality and social change" (pdf p.252) (4/2013). - Lovink, Geert: What
is the Social in Social Media?
In: e-flux journal #40, December 2012. Geert Lovink defines "social media" as a "container concept...describing a fuzzy collection of websites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and Wikipedia." An understanding of the "social" as a social life dominated by symboblic interaction caused media scientists to "the real-virtual distinction" made useless today by social media.
For Jean Baudrillard this social determined by interaction `in situ´ became obsolete because polls are used to find out the opinions of the silent masses ("The Masses: Implosion of the Social in Media", 1985). For the postmodern criticism of societies and the media a communication used to mobilise a public against the established power structures has lost its emancipatory potential.
Nowadays the social media re-establish the social: It can be recognized in demands to answer, and as a "corrosion of conformity" demonstrated by the "`Facebook revolution´ of the 2011". The one-way communication of the mass media constituted a system that "plunges us into a state of stupor" (Baudrillard) dissolving the elder social determined by communication. This system loses its dominance because of the social media. They are not only determind by "uploading and self-promotion", but by "the personal one-to-one feedback and small-scale viral distribution elements", too. Lovink answers to critics of social media like Nicolas Carr, Sherry Turkle and Jaron Larnier that they avoid to develop propositions about "what the social could alternatively be, were it not defined by Facebook and Twitter." (4/2013) - Ludovico, Alessandro: Peer-to-Peer.
The Collective, Collaborative and Liberated Memory of Sound.
In: (Internet-) catalogue of the exhibition "adonnaM.mp3-Filesharing, the Hidden Revolution in the Internet", Museum of Applied Arts, department digitalcraft, Frankfurt am Main, 3-4/20/2003. Ludovico presents forms of collaborative artistic production within net projects for peer-to-peer-transfers of .mp3-files. Furthermore he describes how music pieces are appropriated: Sometimes the copyright is neglected generally and sometimes specific copyright violations are intended. "A social and socializing practice" is realized in both cases as a production for and with a "collective performance intended to liberate sounds [from the proprietary concept of copyright] and share them."
These processes create a "sound machine" which approximates itself to the idea of a "Celestial Jukebox". That "sound machine" demonstrates "the uselessness of copyright as currently applied" (as a proprietary frontier). Hackers simulate attacks as warnings that viruses will crash hard drive disks via mp3.-files. These simulated virus attacks are presented as actions which caricate the censoring attitudes of the music industry. But the music industry is able to block a track on a peer-to-peer network via simultaneous activations of downloads (2/2004). - McGonigal, Jane Evelyn: This
Might Be a Game. Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the
Twenty-First Century.
Dissertation. Philosophy in Performance Studies. University of California. Berkeley 2006. McGonigal presents examples for games using ubiquitous computing from 2001 to 2006 for participants playing with technical equipment (mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, digital cameras, GPS receiver, etc.) in open air. She investigates the games following criteria of design and adequacy for participants. The distinction of equipments usable either everywhere ("ubiquitous") or only with regards to site specific criteria is the presupposition for McGonigal´s distinction between ubiquitous computing games and pervasive games. Beside these games with technical equipments prepared for them McGonigal presents other ubiquitous games using the technical equipment of participants (internet). Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are based on ubiquitous computing in another manner than in ubiquitous computing games. Meanwhile it is possible to install the playground of ubicomp games on different real sites for new gameplays, the ARGs are singular realizations provoking players to look for (sometimes encrypted) informations hidden by gamemasters (puppet masters) on specific sites. McGonigal mentions an example for the affiliation of players in groups solving the tasks of an ARG in collaborative efforts: The Cloudmasters challenged the capabilities of "The Beast´s" puppet masters.
Meanwhile the participants of ARGs are obliged to act following the game´s fiction as if it is real, the mobile participants of pervasive and ubiquitous games explore their capabilities to coordinate the technical equipment with daily life´s demands.
McGonigal doesn´t discern pragmatic ways of playing reusing capabilities necessary for the daily life and ways of playing based on an added level of meanings (pragmatics/semantics). For all these games she presupposes a game´s horizon separated from the surrounding or constituting a level of meanings above the daily life´s context (Johan Huizinga´s "toovercirkel"/"magic circle"). This closed horizon has to be opened up in different manners by games and players for required adaptations to the found environmental conditions. Departing from Markus Montola she doesn´t feature these adaptations as a phenomenon of games´ new forms but tries to verify them as decisive factors in the development of the theory of games (7/2009). - Manovich, Lev: The
Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art.
First publication with the title "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in New Media" in: Chair et metal/Metal and Flesh. Vol.7. 2002. Manovich describes the simulation of old media via software in "new structures" as an early "paradigm" of the development of computers (Alan Curtis Kay´s work since 1970 for Xerox, Palo Alto Research Center). The computer as a "simulation machine" becomes a "meta-meta object" containing the original "media structure" and the software tools for a re-mapping of that structure and for modifications. "Meta-media" offer not merely the tools for a remix of various data structures including the "various cultural forms" realized with "new software techniques" but are partially themselves the results of a remix. Manovich exemplifies that using Adobat Acrobat Reader as a model. He presents "mapping one data set into another, or one media into another" as one of the most executed procedures in the practice of the everyday use of computers and "new media art". Manovich points to Lisa Jevbratt´s 1:1 (1999/2001-2002, see short tips) and to the platform Carnivore of the Radical Software Group (2001, see above, platforms) for other artists´ "clients" to demonstrate the presentation of endless amounts of data in one browser frame and how they become manageable for observations: "manageable visual objects".
Manovich marks "data art" as "the anti-sublime" contrary to the "un-representable" and the sublime in Romantic art (Manovich renounces to refer to the classic art book Rosenblum, Robert: Modern Painting and the Northern Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York 1975. With the help of Rosenblum it is recognizable that Manovich points with the term Romantic art to the relation between abstract art and the sublime.). The problem posed by the arbitrariness of many transferences of data configurations could be solved by an emphasis on the arbitrary decision as a "method of irrationality". Strategies following this method can be developed by a fresh view on different uses of "quantitative data" in works of Conceptual artists. Manovich exposes this kind to develop concepts as a manner to express "the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society": "...art has the unique license to portray human subjectivity..." (4/2007). - Manovich, Lev: Generation
Flash.
In: Nettime, 4/9/2002, 4/17/2002, 4/25/2002, 5/1/2002. In February 2002 Turntable (Michael Rees) constituted the digital environment for artistic contributions (Flash snippets) to Milton Manetas´ platform whitneybiennial.com (see above , platforms). Manovich uses "Turntable" as an example of a visual culture which is part of the "Generation Flash" and shares some characteristics with the contemporary audio culture: loop, sample & remix.
Manovich shortens the value of projects which media artists realized in the sixties to a reuse of available technologies and to contents precoded by mass media. Against this background he exposes software artists accomodating abstraction and fulfilling the romantic ideal of a creator ex nihilo (who has to begin with the development of a project´s concept with nothing else than his own imagination).
Projects of the Futurefarmers (example: Utopia) are Manovich´s proofs of a tendency in the creation of net projects which don´t compete with commercial media unlike media artists from Nam June Paik to Barbara Kruger (a reduction of Paik´s and Kruger´s wider offers to recipients) but provoke our intelligence with "small and economical systems". The Generation Flash is as much influenced by projects organized by contemporary entertainment corporations as movies influenced Andy Warhol. But the contemporary distance of the internet to the media cinema and TV offers new cultural possibilities (Manovich doubts his own vision of romantic software artists working "from scratch" when he explains their relations to the vocabulary of products distributed by the entertainment industry: Why shouldn´t those products influence artists since the beginning of the development of a new project?).
Flash excludes artists who live in countries without fast net connections. The evolution of NetArt integrated Eastern European and Russian projects as long as HTML was the dominating language for the writing of source codes. Flash causes a digital frontier for artists and forces them to work in countries which dominate the IT development: "The Utopia is over; welcome to the Empire." These conditions don´t prohibit Manovich to articulate the hope in the "postscript" that Generation Flash will be able to realize a "global cultural laboratory". That "laboratory" could be able to establish a "remix culture" which develops an alternative to the "`top-down´ cultural composites" of the international organized corporations which constitute the entertainment industry.
Manovich marks in his article "Generation Flash" (his) frictions on several levels between critical observations of real net conditions and visions of net culture´s future (whereby he uses Russian Constructivism as a prototype) (2/2004). - Manovich, Lev: The
Practice of Everyday (Media) Life.
In: Lovink, Geert/Niederer, Sabine (ed.): Video Vortex Reader. Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam/University of Applied Sciences. Amsterdam 2008, p.33-44. Manovich discusses the growing contributions to platforms of the Web 2.0 like Facebook, YouTube or Flickr with statistic proofs demonstrating the relation betweeen contributors and passive observers: Only a few users participate. Michel de Certau´s distinction between strategies of power and tactics of subjects in the everyday life is picked up by Manovisch to ascribe a new significance to tactics in the Web 2.0: "...the logic of tactics has now become the logic of strategies." – and vice versa: "...today strategies used by social media companies often look more like tactics."
The "tactical strategies" of the Anime music video (AMV) and films in YouTube reacting to each other exemplify a creativity of contributors to commercial platforms making it difficult for artists to mark differences to amateurs. For Manovich the creativity in Web 2.0 can be found more in its dynamics as a whole and in software tools of commercial platforms meanwhile he attaches lesser importance to particular artistic contributions to platforms like Processing or Information Aesthetics. Unlike Maryanne Breeze (see above) and Juan Martin Prada (see below) and their characterisations of a change to Web 2.0 with losses, Manovich pleads enthusiastically in favour of the current condition of the Web 2.0 (7/2009). - Medosch, Armin: Piratology.
In: Kingdom of Piracy <KOP>. DIVE 0.1. In: Medosch, Armin (ed.): DIVE. An Introduction into the World of Free Software and Copyleft Culture. CD ROM and book. FACT, Liverpool/Virtualcentre-Media.net 2003, p.8-19. Medosch compares the Malaysian piracy against the British Empire (1750-1850) with the actual use of the term "piracy" by the copyright industry. Piracy is caused by hegemonic structures in both cases. Today the copyright industry presumes supremacy and tries to dominate the use of the term "piracy". In Medosch´s opinion efforts don´t promise success which try to correct the determination of the term´s meaning by the copyright industry. "Kingdom of Piracy" reacts with a semantic subversion to that determination. Medosch explains "Open Source software (OS)" and "free software (FS)" as well as the development of Free Networks as an alternative practice which enables itself via initiatives to by-pass the claims of the copyright industry. Medosch interprets NetArt projects like Last.fm (Michael Breidenbruecker, Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Thomas Willomitzer), Frequency Clock (radioqualia) and Nine (Graham Harwood/Mongrel) as part of that alternative practice because they use server based software and relate themselves to the Free Software (2/2004). - Miles, Adrian: Programmatic
Statements for a Facetted Videography.
In: Lovink, Geert/Niederer, Sabine (ed.): Video Vortex Reader. Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam/University of Applied Sciences. Amsterdam 2008, p.223-229. Miles suggests "granularity" as the basis for "non-linear editing systems" in film productions. The smallest unit of a film can be produced by a splitting of larger units (sequences), nevertheless it is not a fragment: "...the `wholeness´ of a shot is qualitative, not quantitative..."
Miles features two software systems allowing film editing with possibilities for observers to select alternative paths. "Videodefunct" and "Korsakow-System" enable producers to combine shots with tags offering observers limited possibilities to choose subsequent shots: "I intend to describe these relations as `facets´ as facet has connotations of a shot being multifaceted." Shots get their meanings by selectable connections to other shots meanwhile the content of a shot contains the presupposition for its combinability in a monolinear filmic narrative. For Miles the marking of these "combinatory environments" as interactive is a "a commonplace (and naïve error)..."(7/2009) - Munster, Anna: Compression
and the Intensification of Visual Information in Flash Aesthetics.
Lecture, Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, 5/22/2003. Munster finds precursors of Flash aesthetics in animation history. She describes the interpenetrations between American animation films for "television, experimental video and short film" and Japanese developments of Mangas and "anime subcultures". These penetrations brought about a style combining signs in flat compositions for allusions of space ("flat aesthetic space"). This "return and reinvention of animation traditions" is "an aesthetic counterpoint to the mainstream articulation of digital visuality as realistic, organicist and seamless 3D animation" in movies like "Terminator 2" (1992) und "Jurassic Park" (1993).
Munster recognizes developments from the "flattened aesthetic" of a Japanese-American "`proto-networked´ society" (since the seventies) to applications of Flash vector graphics and compression codec under net conditions. These influences contradict Manovich´s postulate of software artists´ developing "from scratch" (Generation Flash, 2002, s.o.). The Futurefarmers refer explicitly to "kawai" images of Japanese anime and mangas.
With Flash the programming of animations is changed from sequences of static images (localising pixels on grids via bitmapping) to vectorial and temporal differences with possibilities to combine dynamic images with sonic dimensions in good quality via compression codec not only synchronously. Websites by hi, Res! (Alexander Jugovich/Florian Schmitt: Soulbath, 2000) and Yugo Nakamura (Yugop, 1998-2002) include projects with presentations of forms to be changed by mouse clicks and rollovers provoking observers to recognize the programming as mainly directed to these processes: "...encounters with temporality in nonlinear modes." Cursor movements cause not only "effects of differential speeds" but modifications of wider fields (parallel to sound modifications). At least since Flash applications the "computational space" supersedes the "modernist space" (Brian Massumi) meanwhile Manovich understands the first as a prolongation of the second with an expansion to complexity made possible by software for image processing like Flash (Abstraction and Complexity, 2003) (8/2009). - Munster, Anna: Data
Undermining. The Work of Networked Art in an Age of Imperceptibility.
In: Bray, Anne/Dockrey, Sean/Green, Jo-Ann/Navas, Eduardo/Torrington, Helen (ed.): Networked. A (Networked_Book) about (Networked Art). 2009. The actual state of the web (web 2.0) offers accesses to informations being automated results of the stored data caused by surfing traces. The recipients observe the performance of the results but don´t receive detailed informations on the users´ traces, their storage and evaluation in databases: The complement to data visualisation is imperceptibility. Artists´ projects are presented by Munster as opponents to these procedures of detailed evaluations. Firefox browser extensions in projects like Nick Knouf´s MAICgregator (2009), Dan Pfiffer´s and Mushon Zer-Aviv´s SpaceShift (since 2006) and Eduardo Navas´ Traceblog (2008) focus the attention on the strategies to combine perceptibility and imperceptibility in intransparent ways.
"Traceblog" demonstrates a strategy to obfuscate databases´ tracking procedures of users´ behaviors. According to Munster the collections and evaluations of the users´ traces in databases are not a problem of privacy because the stored data don´t refer to the paths of individuals. The databases measure the traces quantitatively. Statistic procedures lead to the behavior of the average user and with it to "a flattened landscape of information." Artistic projects react against these patterns of mass behavior and try to find new ways of data processing under contemporary net conditions: "To data undermine, then, is to radically automate and to automate radically as a careful ethical and aesthetic gesture." (8/2009) - Munster, Anna: Welcome
to Google Earth.
In: Kroker, Arthur und Marielouise (ed.): Critical Digital Studies. A Reader. Toronto 2008, p.397-416. Google Earth expands the possibilities to use pictures of the earth in searches for places. Cooperations between observers by interactive exchanges and handles of data are excluded by Google Earth as well as by Google Search. The PageRank algorithm of Google Search uses the click rates of platforms for cooperations and communications but doesn´t offer functions of "sociable media".
The billing system for the advertisers of Google AdWords uses the rates of clicks on links leading from the Google AdWords to the advertisers´ websites. The system presupposes Google´s search algorithm with keywords to select the adwords for the presentation of search results on Google´s website and in websites prepared to integrate them (Google AdSense). Google Search as well as Google AdWords equalize the click rates with users´ preferences: The click rates are the fundamental data for the PageRank algorithm as well as for the charging of the advertisers´ accounts. There is no interaction and no social moment between the acting observers: There are only decisions of isolated persons and frequencies of click rates. Munster explains this omission of social moments as characteristic for neoliberalism and compares it with the "preference utilitarianism" of Richard Marvin Hare. A "creative, post-industrial information culture" works with the omission of social moments (as a "black hole", as if there are no communicative acts) equating the best with the selections of the majority.
Übermorgen.com, Alessandro Ludovico and Paulo Cirio started and care for the project GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself. Google AdSense is used in GWEI to earn money via a system of websites and supporters producing clicks. The revenues are invested in google shares. The shares should be handed over to supporters. The project´s website presents the actual amount of shares and tells how much time will be necessary to reach the goal to take over Google. Munster presents GWEI as an example for an alternative media practice and gives an outline of other possibilities to produce "alternative, distributed aesthetics." (8/2009) - Munster, Anna: The
Image in the Network.
Lecture, New Network Theory: International Conference. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 6/28/2007. In: New Network Theory Reader. Collected Abstracts and Papers. Amsterdam 2007, p.6-15. For the context of net projects Munster proposes to replace the symbol´s function by the diagrammatic in Walter Benjamin´s comparison between the symbol and the allegory: The symbol conserves "the identity of the specific and the general" meanwhile the allegory "marks their difference" (Benjamin). Munster points to the vagueness of the diagrams´ relation to the represented. The diagrams gain the allegorical with this vagueness: "...a kind of becoming allegorical of the diagrammatic."
She exemplifies this "becoming allegorical" by Digg Swarm programmed by Digg Labs. It visualizes swarms of tips stored by participants in tags of the platform Digg. The tips point to interesting webpages and Digg Swarm visualizes relations between them. The dynamic visualization actualises itself. The Fidg't Visualizer combines two platforms (Flickr, Last FM): The "Tag Magnet" enables participants to recognize relations to other participants and to use the integrated functions. On the one side the data visualisation are expanded to the "diagram as activity and process", on the other side the "endless generation of its own redundancies" is facilitated.
Geotagging on Google Maps (using the Google Maps API) is characterised by Munster as "a mush up of the diagram and the allegory in network visuality." The mentioned net projects exemplify "the potential for both the disjunctive (diagrammatic expanded in its expressive capacities) and the temporal (allegorical as a mode of unfolding historicity) to play more overt and generative roles in our images and imaginings in networks." (8/2009) - Munster, Anna: Nerves
of Data. The Neurological Turn in/against Networked Media.
In: Computational Culture. A Journal of Software Studies. Issue One/2011. Anna Munster criticises the "neurological turn" and its famous supporter Nicolas Carr: He based his assertion that net surfing causes not only "the loss of meditative, deep thought about the world" but damages the capabilities to think, too, on a research by Gary Small documenting the behavior of net surfers by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Munster demonstrates that Carr´s reference to fMRI lacks scientific footing because Small´s diagrams don´t sustain such conclusions.
In the forties Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts developed a psychologically oriented precursor of Artificial Intelligence. The contemporary research in Artificial Intelligence abondoned the neuron based cybernetic research of McCulloch and Pitts, and developed programs for predictions learning from large databases. Google´s concept for the development of a Prediction API is criticised by Munster for its recursions between behaviors of net surfers and the programmed learning procedures: "...it automates the development process making it in some fundamental ways non-participatory." If net surfers receive the predictions of their actions in the future then, as Carr argues, their neuronal structures will adapt themselves and they will be able to behave in the future only according to the predictions.
Munster pleas to abandon these problematic "neuropolitics" by a criticism of the exclusively neuron based research of the recipients. fMRI can be used in frameworks, too, not leaving aside the cognitive capabilities of thinking, acting, and observing. The image produced by fMRI can be used "as filements of the complexity of neuro-affective-perceptual-cognition" because of its diagrammatic character admitting dynamic relations between icon and index. These "machinic assemblage...of possible fields, of virtual as much as constituted elements" (Felix Guattari: Chaosmosis. An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sydney 1994, p.35) allows to regard the contemporary "neuropolitics" critically with a "different `vision´ of the relation between brains, thought and (soft) technics" (4/2013). - Navas, Eduardo: Modular
Complexity and Remix. The Collapse of Time and Space into Search.
In: AnthroVision. Vol.1.1. September 2012. The authors of remix videos archived in YouTube reacted to the links offered by the platform to other videos: The authors of remix videos react to remixed videos because it is a difficult and sometimes not solvable task to find the original with the search system of YouTube.
Search engines and platforms favor the last contribution. They influence with their preference for the newest videos which versions creators of remix videos find and use for further remix videos. Creators of remixes often react to the last versions of a series without knowledge of elder versions or of the start. Often the original can´t be found in the search systems integrated in platforms. If corporations claim copyrights infringement and ask administrators of platforms like "YouTube to take the video remix offline" (pdf S.26), then creators of remixes can know only parts of histories of remix series.
The remix series are not archived to present the development from elder to newer remixes but to direct as much visitors of the platform as possible to the last version. The search systems and platforms follow their business models in their ways to direct the click attitudes of their visitors. For visitors and contributors of remix videos the coaction of net conditions guided by business models results in a state in which "...the now rules..." (pdf p.26) This "ahistoricity" (pdf p.2) is sustained by the efforts to distribute "constant updates" (pdf p.4) of software with the consequence that more and more elder versions become inaccessible: "Those who are invested in knowledge and history as a living discourse must truly consider the stage we are entering with algorithms that privilege the growing economy of the now." (pdf p.27) (3/2013) - Pias, Claus: Das
digitale Bild gibt es nicht. Über das (Nicht-)Wissen der Bilder und
die informatorische Illusion.
(The digital image doesn´t exist. On the (non-)knowledge of images and the informatory illusion). In: Zeitenblicke, Nr.1/2003. Pias reconstructs the history of cybernetics (Warren S. McColluch, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener) and explains the social historical meaning of information systems. He uses this history as a background for a discourse about the digital image as the result of information processing procedures. The digital image appears `as picture´ only in media of presentation. The results of digital media for the production of pictures provoke a "transcendental appearance" (Immanuel Kant) which shouldn´t cause confusions with analog pictures. The singularity and static (irreversibility) of analog pictures caused kinds of archives which can´t be transfered to dynamic, processing (reversible) data systems.
Cybernetics don´t call for circumstances in a given context but ask for possibilities of systems resp. media. The media scientist Pias refers to cybernetics´ problematization of possibilities when he demands art historians not to transfer old needs/ends to new media/means but to use the changing limits of the digital and net possibilities as a cause for self investigation and renewal: from a digitalized to a digital art history (2/2004). - Picot, Edward: Play
on Meaning? – Computer Games as Art.
In: Furtherfield Review, 30.4.2009; The Hyperliterature Exchange, Mai 2009. Following Picot, "computer games enjoy a special position in the canon of new media art" because they provoke expectations to fulfill criteria of interactivity. Picot outlines some steps of the early history of computer games from adventure games to Myst (1993) and concatenates "interactive fictions" with "hypertext fictions" to delineate his understanding of interactivity as an exploration of a work instead of a participation in collaborative writing projects: works as finite entities with signs and functions stimulating the imagination of recipients, not infinite projects changing their character from contribution to contribution. Picot focuses his arguments not only on this limited sense of interactivity but presents projects of independent authors attracting the recipients´ attention by limited functions to be used to activate the next sequences of the storyline.
Molleindustria´s Free Culture Game (2008) renounces the conventional end of the game with winners and presents the struggle between Open Source software distribution and the commercialization of the authors´ copyright as an open game without winners. The strategies of the gamers are substitutes for the strategies of activists to fight against a domination of the commercialization of copyrights. Following Picot, "the trickiness" for gamers to act successfully in "Free Culture Game" "distracts you from the meaning of the game" – but other interpretations are possible, too.
Samorost 2 (2005) by Amanita Design and The Graveyard by The Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey/Michael Samyn) exemplify games neglecting technical functions for moves and foregrounding worlds of signs, stories and their animations. Moves in "Samorost 2" direct the gamers´ attention to the unfoulding of the story. In "The Graveyard" moves with the arrow keys activate a predeterminate course: "...the game´s most important qualities are negative ones..." Recipients recognize their attunement to the storyline.
Following Picot computer games can be defined as art if they firstly "use the structure of the game for symbolic purposes", secondly avoid to provoke the player´s skills to react fast to animated situations and thirdly erect a distance between the player and "the game´s central character." If games fulfill these criteria then they facilitate a concentration on "the unfolding of the story"(8/2009). - Prada, Juan Martin: Web
2.0 as a New Context for Artistic Practices.
Lecture. In: Prada, Juan Martin (ed.): Inclusiva-net. New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode. First Inclusiva-net Meeting. Medialab-Prado. Madrid, July 2007, p.6-21. The lecture is written in the style of a polemic pamphlet. Against the involontary support of commercial platforms ("social networks") using the participants´ need for communication in the data management´s evaluations Prada argues for a reconfiguration of "net art 2.0" via "the movement for `free data´" and "social software" allowing the "connected multitude" to form a "co-intelligence".
Prada ascribes a leading role to the "metadata" ("classifying, tagging, selecting, voting, scoring, etc.") and mentions as examples Subvertr of Les Liens Invisibles and 10 x 10 of Jonathan Harris. Valuation: Unfortunately there are too many slogans and too few concretizations (7/2009). - Raqs Media Collective: Value
and its Other in Electronic Culture: Slave Ships and Pirate Galleons.
In: Kingdom of Piracy <KOP>. DIVE 0.1. In: Medosch, Armin (ed.): DIVE. An Introduction into the World of Free Software and Copyleft Culture. CD ROM and book. FACT, Liverpool/Virtualcentre-Media.net 2003, p.30-36. The authors´/artists´ collective (Shuddhabrata Sen Gupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narulaaus) from New Delhi explains the piracy in detail as a cause of a certain phase of the capitalism´s history. The ships of pirates and the islands of pirates´ pseudo-republics offer terms for a discussion of the present fight for or against mental propriety (as a new commodity) and peer-to-peer networks. The term "piracy" is used by the copyright industry as a defamatory slogan for undesired downloads ("pirate copies") of software and digital (or digitalized) audio and video works. That use of the term "piracy" is the starting point of an economical and social history which presents "electronic piracy" as a reaction to corporative organized private expropriation/theft of common goods. The platforms title "Kingdom of Piracy" (see above, Platforms) emerges from that background as a motto of digital pirates´ republics (2/2004). - Richard, Birgit: Media
Masters and Grassroots Art 2.0 on YouTube.
In: Lovink, Geert/Niederer, Sabine (ed.): Video Vortex Reader. Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam/University of Applied Sciences. Amsterdam 2008, p.141-152. Richard presents research results of the YouTube Research Lab at the Goethe University in Frankfort on the Main (Institute for Art Pedagogics, New Media Department). The researchers categorised different kinds of clip forms (see draft of a classification scheme). Richard´s description of the clip forms offers an unprejudiced view on the video contributions to YouTube. In a thematic bottleneck on clips combined with the tags "art" and "Kunst" she discusses the relation between features of art events and autonomous contributions. The last kind of clips is not stored under the category "art". New forms of (artistic) presentation can´t be found in the tag system of YouTube. Richard characterises YouTube clips as "a supplement, a marginal but important fresh addition and revitalisation of art."(7/2009). - Ries, Marc: Überlegungen
zu einer Kartographie des Unsichtbaren. Stadterfahrung und Internet.
(Reflections on a Cartography of the Non-visible. Urban Experience and the Internet). Lecture, "Negotiating Urban Conflicts", Conference, Institute for Sociology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 4/8-4/9/2005. In English in: Berking, Helmuth/ Frank, Sybille/Frers, Lars/Löw, Martina/Meier, Martina/Steets, Silke/Stoetzer, Sergej (ed.): Negotiating Urban Conflicts. Interaction, Space and Control. Bielefeld 2006, p.167-175. Marc Ries characterizes urban experience as a reflection between the visible and the non-visible. Maps offer an abstract overview and make visible what remains non-visible to the multi-perspective observation in the streets. In comparison to the "abstract ground plan for the planning surveillance" the web opens "a room of its own, a socio-mediatized room being part of a geo-aesthetics of media." "The internet can´t function like a geographical space with an here and there, because it is a relational space with an exclusive here and now." That makes possible "mediatic interfaces" for a "participatory democracy" (4/2013). - Rossiter, Ned: Processual
Media Theory.
Lecture 5/22/2003. In: Melbourne DAC, the Fifth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, RMIT (The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Melbourne, May 2003. Empirical media studies are trying to discern the "supposed essence of the object" and its inessential parts as well as to create the presupposition for collections of data via reductions to essential elements. This "real abstraction" (Louis Althusser) does not grasp the connections and the possibilities of the use of media relevant for Rossiter. He tries to capture them by a strategy integrating time-based procedures. He detects a "multiplicity of [time-based] modes: rhythmic, instrumental, scalar, biological, compressed, flexible, and so forth." These modes penetrate each other in different manners by the uses of different media like internet, mobile phone with SMS, real-time video or sound files.
Rossiter wants to sketch out relations between characteristics of media and their use motivated by social, political and economic reasons. He discusses open and closed systems (Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, Ilya Prigogine, Isabella Stengers) to show up structures relating technical properties and recipients in specific ways to each other. The time dimension is not only relevant for the development of these structures but also for the reflection of the media theoretician´s point of view. (S)he is integrated in the same evolution of the media and their uses: "...processual media theory itself is implicated in the systems of relations it describes..."
Rossiter uses Michael Goldberg´s installation "catchingafallingknife.com" (Sydney 2002) as a model. The installation demonstrates the development of 50.000 Australian dollars within three weeks of buying and selling News Corp shares (Rupert Murdoch´s News Corporation) using different softwares for the stock exchange dealing (7/2009). - Ryan, Marie-Laure: Cyberspace,
Cybertexts, Cybermaps.
In: dichtung-digital. Issue 1/2004 (Vol. 6/nr.31). The author draws a bow from geographic spaces using mapping procedures to maps as visualizations ranging from fictional (action) spaces to data spaces. "Static maps" with or without references to real spaces ("Myst"; Coverley, M.D.: Califia, Eastgate 2000) and "dynamic maps" with computing programs using data searching processes for the construction of visual information systems (Walczak, Marek/Wattenberg, Martin: Apartment, 2001) constitute the two poles of described examples from the ranges hypertext-literature for CD-ROM and internet, computer games and net art. Mary Flanagan´s [Phage] (2000) selects datas of the hard disk, combines and presents them in three-dimensional motions "like pieces of trash on a windy day at the dump." "[Phage]" demonstrates itelf as "the anti-mapper to all mappers" (Dillon, George L.: Writing with Images. Towards a Semiotics of the Web. Washington 2003, chap. 6.2) and with it as the final consequence of data systems generating datascapes in a self referential manner ("Civilization", "The Sims": "let the gameworld serve as its own map").
Ryan features ubiquitous computing with locative media like GPS as a "revenge of geography". 34 North 118 West was realized by Jeff Knowlton, Naomie Spellman and Jeremy Height. Their project serves as a proof for the return of the real referent and for a mapping which does not anymore open arbitrary playgrounds for the visualization of data. For Ryan, the localization of contributions for accesses in real spaces (<Geo-Notes>) and for maps (<Geo-Tagging>) looks like a return to the beginning of the textual media´s history: "...the space odyssee of the text reconnects...the real world geography" – and reverts the voyage from material to immaterial textual worlds back to the start of the "odyssee" in cultures with oral histories (4/2007). - Sack, Warren: Aesthetics
of Information Visualization.
In: Lovejoy, Margot/Paul, Christiane/Vesna, Victoria (ed.): Context Providers. Conditions of Meaning in Digital Art. Bristol 2011, p.123-150.
Firstly: The early concepts for computers by Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener and Douglas Engelbart thematise the data management in the administration as the context of use.
Secondly: Sack looks for precursors of artistic strategies for the data visualization and proposes Conceptual Art: Bureaucratic forms of presentation like the Index 01 of Art & Language have been used for a criticism of society thematising also corporative strategies like the administration of vast amounts of data.
Thirdly: Sack connects both lines of argumentation, the digitalisation and the criticism of administration with its own means. In the 18th and 19th centuries the "Body Politic" was developed from an absolutistic force organizing the bodies in circles around the center of power ("the `star´ network") to a democratic-rhizomatic "government of things". In They Rule (2001/2004) Josh On & The Futurefarmers visualise an aspect of this system thematising the networks between companies via persons in the supervisory boards and managerial positions of different enterprises.
Alternative networks like MoveOn.org or SMS networks could be able to visualise their relations as a "form to show the Body Politic itself to itself." Sack touches the problem of a critical self-embedding (and transfers Art & Language´s critical self-embedding into the art world to a wider framework): Contextual reflectivity of wider, not replaceable social frameworks is the implicit consequence of a critical data visualisation suggested in Sack´s last phrase: "...we need to see ourselves and our imagined communities within our larger political and cultural contexts." (7/2009) - Schleiner, Ann-Marie: Dissolving
the Magic Circle of Play. Lessons from Situationist Gaming.
In: Baigorri, Laura/Berger, Erich/Dragona, Daphne (ed.): Homo Ludens Ludens. Catalogue of exhibition LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. Gijon 2008, p.164-171 (in Spain), 276-281 (in English). The examples for "ludic interventions" chosen by Schleiner transgress the limits of plays and games. Johan Huizinga´s concept of the "magic circle" ("toovercirkel") determines theories on games (including pervasive games) until now. Schleiner confronts them with a situationistic approach quoting Guy Debod and Gilles Ivain/Ivan Chteglov several times.
Huizinga thematised the limit between the play and its surrounding area meanwhile the Situationists conceptualised the environment as a playground: The ludic is a strategy of criticism only as a practice within the criticized context. Schleiner argues without transforming the Situationistic concept of "psychogeography" into a term of environmental psychology as it can be found in many articles on projects with locative media reducing the Situationistic reflection on urban conditions to a problem of capturing atmospheres (f.e. Jane McGonigal: This Might Be a Game, see above).
Schleiner uses her own practice in "Velvet-Strike", "Operation Urban Terrain (OUT)" (August 2004, see collected tips 2, part 2) and "Riot Gear for Rollartista" modifying games with participants in the (real and virtual) playgrounds to foreground her aim to take up the Situationistic call to change the lifeworld: "We don´t want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place." (7/2009) - Sentamans, Mario-Paul Martinez Fabre y Tatiana: The
Lapses of an Avatar: Sleight of Hand and Artistic Praxis in Second Life.
Lecture. In: Prada, Juan Martin (ed.): Inclusiva-net. New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode. First Inclusiva-net Meeting. Medialab-Prado. Madrid, July 2007, p.51-76. Artistic Projects for Second Life are featured and some of them are described more precisely. Projects problematising relations between virtuality and reality are confronted with strategies using the possibilities immanent to the medium. An example for the first offers "Imaging Place SL: The U.S./Mexico Borders" (John Craig Freeman), meanwhile examples for the latter are "Hyperformalism" (Dancoyote Antonelli), "Code-Performance" (Eva and Franco Mattes) and "La-Interactiva" (Richard Gras and others). Valuation: Useful introduction (7/2009). - Simanowski, Roberto:
The Compelling Charm of Numbers. Writing for and thru the Network of
Data.
In: Biggs, Simon (ed.): Remediating the Social. University of Bergen. Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies. Bergen 2012, p.20-27. Roberto Simanowski thematises Facebook´s Timeline as a renewal of chronicles from the Middle Ages, allowing account holders variants between ways to organize databases and narrative forms. In a field of tensions regards Simanowski the human "predisposition" (p.25) for narrative relations as the counterpart to the isolated elements in a database. Account holders use Facebook´s "Life Event" as a tool for the documentation of biographical events in a chronological sequence of contributions provoking on the one hand friends to sort out potential relationships in following the human urge to create clarity via simplifying interpretations. On the other hand Simanowski points to a tendency to the quantifiable. That proves the Quantified Self-Community "gathering in about 40 groups world wide" (p.24) (Quantified Self) to communicate about the creation of protocols of quantifiable life events with digital technologies. Facebook´s Timeline connects structures of databases and the tendency to report one´s own life as a "numerical narrative" (p.24) in an ongoing autobiographical and multimedia-based chronicle.
The database interpreted by Lev Manovich as "a new symbolic form of a computer age" (p.25) becomes in new applications like Facebooks Timline "symbolic...for the ongoing shift from culture to economy" "adding `value for the consumer´ but also, and first of all, for the companies." (p.27). Investors and corporations care about the avoidance of too big tensions between digital collections of data and human predispositions for narrative connotations (4/2013). - Simanowski, Roberto: Transmedialität
als Kennzeichen moderner Kunst.
(Transmediality as a Feature of Modern Art). In: Meyer, Urs/Simanowski, Roberto/Zeller, Christoph (ed.): Transmedialität. Zur Ästhetik paraliterarischer Verfahren. Göttingen 2006, p.39-81. In Simanowski´s definition the term transmediality marks the "blending of configurated joined sign systems into another". According to Jay David Bolter´s and Richard Grusin´s "Remediation: Understanding New Media" (Cambridge/Massachusetts 1999, p.19-44) there are several kinds of presentation in the "history of the intermingling of different representation´s forms" provoking observers to memorize or to deny the used "medium": "hypermediacy" and "immediacy". Simanowski characterises a thematized transmediality ("hypermediacy") as a contemporary consequence from Clement Greenberg´s demand articulated in "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940) that art should accomplish "purity" by accepting the confinements of its medium via reductions of all elements disturbing self reference. Today, according to Simanowski, problematizations of their own media presuppose to thematize multi-, inter- and transmediality. The reason for the reduction of all elements not being part of the selected medium – the cause of "formal criticism"/"modernism" – was the self-referential reflection about the media´s use. This reflection can be saved within a framework of "multimediality which is the logical consequence of all informations´ translation into a digital code."
Simanowski thematizes transmediality in works containing not only programmed media. He uses the works of Emmett Williams ("13 Variations on 6 Words of Gertrude Stein", 1958/65) and Tim Noble/Sue Webster ("Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)", 1998) as examples in a characterization of transmediality. Williams overwrites a text several times until it becomes unreadable. The text is presented as a visual texture not without refering to its origins: "Transmediality is developed by the exponentiation of a medium." Noble/Webster install a sculpture arranged with reused garbage and places it before a spotlight causing a shadow play. The sculpture with its contour offers as light breaker an uncommon cause for recycling: Does the sculpture merely become a picture ("Plastik zum Bild"/"From Sculpture to Picture"), or is the sculpture integrated into (an installation as) a presentation of the production of silhouettes? The question demonstrates that transmediality is a case of observation, too – and Simanowski thematizes transmediality as a "transfer taking place or being thematized in the moment of reception."
Simanowski exemplifies the programmed transmediality by Laurent Mignonneau/Christa Sommerer´s "Life Spacies II" (1999, internet and installation): Textual inputs are transformed into vegetable forms. In Mapping art the "numerical code" becomes a case for "transmedial copies" which firstly allow an easier readability of configurations concerning social processes representing or producing the data, secondly use the data as causes for the production of "abstract shapes", or thirdly use data "in the service of a message without references to the used input." Mapping art is explained not only as a problem of the development of codes for transfers of data configurations but also as a problem of the plausibility for the observer´s cognition.
Manovich writes (in "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art"): "Visualisation art is concerned with the anti-sublime" and Simanowski answers with the concept of Mapping art as a "new level of the technical sublime" whereby artists articulate the "incomprehensible in comprehensible aesthetic forms" without the need to comment the aestheticized. Simanowski displaces the direction of the discussion on Mapping art from the program code to its machine-made effects, and with it from "meta-media" (Manovich) to the observable transmediality. He uses his displacement to thematise "the postmodern experience of the absence of one point as the core to begin with efforts to understand reality" but he leaves out the not arbitrarily pluralizable reality of the technical digital and the programming. Then relevancy will change from the media transfer to the interplay between programming and the technical possibilities of its machine-made execution. From this point of view "the knowledge of programming" is not only a case for craftsmen necessary for transmedial processes and others but programming codes (and the cultures of the programming people) become a decisive reference point of the reflection meanwhile transmediality may appear as the consequence of the programmable (4/2007). - Smith, Greg J.: Information
Visualization and Interface Culture.
In: Braman, James/Vincenti, Giovanni/Trajkovski, Goran (ed.): Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics. Hershey/Pennsylvania 2009, chapter XII, p.195-211. Greg J. Smith outlines how data visualizations and the possibilities to select via interface different forms of presentation interpenetrated each other in the development of computer technology.
Vanevar Bush´s Memex (plan, 1945) and early head-up displays (HuD, since 1968) are early interfaces based on concepts for links between documents in the first case and for navigations of pilots in the second case. The interface between human and machine included in the sixties output media like cathode ray tubes and head-up displays.
The graphical user interface (GUI) of the computer Xerox Alto (1973) anticipated with mouse, "windows, buttons, icons and widgets" the GUI of the Apple Macintosh (1984). Already Apple´s Lisa (1983) contained scrollbars, trash baskets, the drag-and-drop procedure and the file system. All these elements became a standard of personal computers for 25 years.
Lev Manovich outlines the database as a precondition for the information becoming "modular" and the remix as an obvious method to use modularity. For Smith these methods are the presuppositions for data visualization. A new "data subjectivity" arises from the interactions with interfaces of programs for data visualization.
"The Aesthetics Computation Group", directed by John Maeda, and Ben Fry developed visualizations for interfaces offering possibilities to change the monitor image. Steven Johnson (Interface Culture, 1997) explains this modifiability as a consequence of the comprehensive separation between "raw data" and their presentation on monitors. Fry´s Isometric Blocks (2004) and Stamen Design´s Oakland Crimespotting (2007) are mentioned by Smith as examples for a "pervasive interface culture" with "the implicit understanding that information is modular and...a site for interaction."
Modes of behavior are developed simultaneously as reactions to interfaces as well as to informations on real situations. Burik Arikan makes My Pocket (2008) available for "self-surveillance". "My Pocket" transgresses the division between data visualizations as parts of interfaces and the approach to the visualized reality: The data of transactions (shopping, bank transfers) are used in "transaction graphs" for predictions adapted from criteria of probability. With the calculated degree of probability all transactions receive an information about the congruency between the actual action and elder actions: "...if readymades are found in the past, predicted objects are found in the future." (Arikan) (3/2013). - Taylor, T.L.: Beyond
Management. Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player
Culture.
In: First Monday. Special Issue Nr.7. October 2006. Taylor mentions four ways to characterise the behaviors of players for integrations into the design and management of MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games): "...players as consumers, (potential) disruptors, unskilled/unknowledgeable users, and rational/selfish actors." She regrets the absence of active participants changing from a passive behavior following the guidelines to the constitution of autonomous players´ cultures with consequences for the ways of playing.
Sony Online Entertainment cooperates with players to develop EverQuest. Festivities for gamers are partly promotional events and partly meetings between designers and players. Taylor criticises the practice to integrate people with attention provoking ways of playing into a "strong participatory design": With players obligated to their employers the autonomy of gaming cultures and their context-specific background become lost perspectives.
As an example for this autonomy the author mentions a gamers´ strike in "World of Warcraft" (January 2005) and Blizzard´s response stating "protesting in a game" as not being the "valid way to give us feedback". The accounts of gamers participating at the "warrior protest" have been deleted. The protest on a specific server at a fixed day and time prohibited other gamers to play "World of Warcraft".
Mary Flanagan, Ken Perlin, Jan Plass and a research team developed the project Rapunsel (2003-2006) as a game but not as a MMOG. Nevertheless Taylor suggests the integration of gamers´ behavior in the design process as exemplary: Its "core value set" includes "autonomy, equity, access, creativity, diversity, empowerment and authorship." (7/2009) - Trogemann, Georg: Müssen
Medienkünstler programmieren können?
(Is it necessary for media artists to be able to programme?). In: Fleischmann, Monika/Reinhard, Ulrike (ed.): Digitale Transformationen. Medienkunst als Schnittstelle von Kunst, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Heidelberg 2004. Computer programs appear in "a blurred region of socially coded informations and forms of observation". Examples from the histories of technology and science sustain Trogemann´s plea for an expanded perspective which includes more than software: He presents "the cultural history of the programmable machine" as a knowledge necessary for the interrogation of the programmes´ functions in contemporary life. Artistic programming should follow this expanded perspective. But Trogemann´s proposition of a "cognitive school" for artists excludes social aspects: Artistic media competence as a knowledge of the relations between interface and code doesn´t substitute questions concerning economic and social influences on programming, distribution and the use of programs. Trogemann acknowledges that contemporary artists don´t want to delegate the construction of program codes to specialists. He uses this fact for the demand to investigate digitalization not only on the level of visual perception but on the level of progamme code, too. But Trogemann doesn´t avoid to reduce code to the function to steer projections (6/2006). - Waal, Martijn de: Towards
a Myspace Urbanism?
In: Lange, Michiel de/Waal, Martijn de: The Mobile City. Blog Archive, 12/22/2008. De Waal discusses sociological criteria explaining the development of urban culture from 19th century to the present. In 19th and 20th century the public urban space was the platform for observations of social differences and for arrangements with them. De Waal explains the change from this "boulevard [BLVD] urbanism" to a plurality of publics characterized by uses of computers, gadgets, internet and mobile telephony, splitting the public space from its former social function to privatisations, exclusions and reduced action forms. The distanced observer in motion was a fundamental part of the BLVD urbanism. The restrained self performance of the passers-by in boulevards comparing her-/himself with others is transformed into particularizing forms of self performance facilitating exclusions: "Myspace urbanism". The possibilities to communicate via mobile phones and WiFi regardless of distances provokes Danah Boyd, Mark Shepard and others to describe "the urban stage" as "now broadened extensively with the rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, Cyworld or QQ." On the one hand the self performance takes place in virtual spaces and on the other hand these networks are connected with real spaces via platforms like Plazes (since August 2004) or Bliin (since September 2006, see Collected Tips 1, Part 3/Sammeltipp 1, Teil 3): The "tracks and traces" can be actualized in real time and archived continually.
A growing social control supersedes the anonymity in the metropolis of the 20th century. Available informations on city districts are analysed to connect them with classifications of the inhabitants´ lifestyles: Websites of real estate agents like Funda.nl offer properties allocating "three dominant lifestyle categories" to districts. The citizens and the public sphere are replaced by consumers. A "sociology-of-the-market" uses data collections of "lifeblogging and geotagging" activities for its goals.
Passers-by move with mobile phones and iPods. They place themselves in a "virtual bubble" in using these gadgets: "iPhone urbanism".
The coffeehouse as an urban meeting place is transformed by the "Starbucks urbanism" into a "commodified non-place". There the visitors communicate more with "absent others" than with present people.
The "long tail urbanism" confronts us with informations on urban places and friends (Dodgeball, February 2000 - January 2009, see Collected Tips 1, Part 1/Sammeltipp 1, Teil 1) we have never been seeking for: The social networks offer us informations which place, people and things may fit into our preferences: "spaces become heterotopic places."
"Reputation systems" of the "Ebay urbanism" regulate who accepts whom: "capsular spaces".
"Networked urban spaces" connect remote locations via social networks: "...presence is becoming a hybrid experience" by the uses of mobile phones as "a membrane", not as "a portal": "The boundaries between being in public or in private soften." (9/2009) - Whitelaw, Mitchell: Art
against Information. Case Studies in Data Practice.
In: Fibreculture. Issue 11/2008: 7th Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Perth 2007 (perthDAC 2007). Whitelaw selects net projects, sculptures and videos to present them as examples for "data art". He discusses their use of data as external and internal elements of systems. The systems allow or prohibit inferences to the environment. They treat the data as parts of this environment or they try to offer conclusions on it, or they relate them only to metadata and offer the recipients possibilities for interpretations. In other cases they present their results as aesthetic events without informations allowing reconstructions of the used kinds of data processing.
Golan Levin´s The Dumpster (2006) and We Feel Fine (2006) by Jonathan Harris/Sep Kamvar visualise blog posts. All posts are treated as equal regardless of their contents. These data sets liberated from informations supply a "uniform density". The exclusion of the procedures to collect data in visualisations causes a "strangely naive sense of unmediated presentation" and with it a "sense of collapsed indexicality."
Meanwhile Alex Dragulescu´s three-dimensional "structures" (The Spam Architecture series, since 2005; The Spam Plants series, 2006) appear "uncanny" without informations on the processing of data in spam mails, Lisa Jevbratt visualises the net data as a whole in "1:1" and its interface Every (1999/2001). The recipients can connect themselves to the websites using the access dates integrated in the project. The origins of the data are transparent but it is not shown explicitly how the data visualisation within a rectangle can be used.
In State of the Union (since 2006) Brad Borevitz elicits the frequency of certain terms in the archive of the American presidents´ speeches on the State of the Union (since 1790) with statistic means and visualises them. Meanwhile Borewitz on the one hand presents the origins of data and on the other hand allows to obtain and compare the significance (as frequency) in diagrams, Jason Salavon creates data by abstraction: In "Everything All at Once (Part I-III)" (2001-2005) the colours of videoframes are reduced to one average colour meanwhile the sound remains unaltered. The data origins become "objects" and an "ultimately empty, mass of generic content."
According to Whitelaw the opposition between "data in itself" and information is crucial to data art. Meanwhile the systems of the projects are processing data, they can´t evade their readability as informations (as signs coordinated with meanings via contextualization in relations with other signs and connections to circumstances external to signs). The indeterminacy of the visualized data opens possibilities for interpretations to recipients of data art if relations to their origins and their context are not lost. The "data subjects" can be able to use the reductions in artistic "data agency" to their advantage: Data art is part of the efforts to develop schemes for reading operations. The projects code their metadata and offer guidelines to recipients how to use them: "This metadata must in turn inform us data subjects..." (7/2009) - Whitelaw, Mitchell: Hearing
Pure Data. Aesthetics and Ideals of Data-Sound.
In: Altena, Arie/Stolk, Taco (ed.): Unsorted Thoughts on the Information Arts. A Guide to Sonic Acts 10. Sonic Acts Press/De Balie. Amsterdam 2004. According to Whitelaw, the concept of "pure data" contradicts the practice: "The data is always and inevitably ordered, organized, formatted..." The particular format and its transformation into other formats cause consequences for the next computing processes. In Jason Freeman´s application N.A.G. (Network Aurelization of Gnutella) formats for sounds ("sonification", "auralization") include not only the transported contents but they are integrated into the organization of the search for works in Gnutella (decentralized distribution of mostly auditive data via P2P). The search follows typable keywords. Ben Hanson and Mark Rubin (in Babble online: Applying Statistics and Design to Sonify the Internet) use auditive formats in retrieval systems searching for specific informations in data. Meanwhile transfers of formats via "data bending" use data in an arbitrary and abstract way (<re-encoding>), the "sonification" serves for the information retrieval. Despite this difference data and informations are entwined.
Lev Manovich identifies "data art" with "the anti-sublime" (in "The Anti-Sublime in Data Art", see above) because it offers "manageable visual objects". Whitelaw substitutes "the anti-sublime" by "the computational sublime": Computing processes run external to the observers´ sphere of influence and are able to provoke "simultaneous feelings of pleasure and fear" (McCormack, Jon/Dorin, Alan: Art, Emergence, and the Computational Sublime).
Arstists designing systems are "prototypical data-subjects" demonstrating users their kinds to install "strategies and mappings": "They may show us a way, to hear for ourselves." According to Manovich, the task of art is defined by a "license to portray human subjectivity". Whitelaw substitutes this "single subjectivity" by processes between persons who never could reflect about themselves in other ways than being cultivated as "data subjects, from our GUIs to our ATMs" (4/2007). - Whitelaw, Mitchell: System
Stories and Model Worlds. A Critical Approach to Generative Art.
In: Goriunova, Olga (ed.): Readme 100. Temporary Software Art Factory. Festival for Software Art and Cultures. HartWareMedienKunstVerein, Dortmund/Stadt- und Landesbibliothek Dortmund 2005/Norderstedt 2006 (Book on Demand/.pdf), p.135-154. Whitelaw wants to nullify the opposition between a visually orientated Generative Art and a Software Art criticizing net conditions ("formalism" versus "culturalism"). He proposes to read generative projects as "systems" with a "formal structure" being both models of possible worlds and carriers of signs in a context which supports meaning potentials offering clues for interpretations ("system stories"): "A cultural critique of software art systems is the bridge spanning [Florian] Cramer´s formalist/culturalist duality."
Whitelaw tries to build a bridge between Generative Art and the visualization of informations stored in data bases via communication design (mapping) by his selection of examples: "Golan Levin´s Axis applet abstracts political rhetoric into a database-driven combinatoric."
Some of his examples of a generative, formal oriented art originate from the two platforms Software {Structures} (see above, platforms) and CODeDOC (see above, platforms). Both platforms are part of "Artport" of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Whitelaw mentions Software as a tool for activists´ interventions in data flows at the end of his article only for presenting its outreach as limited, "more local, situated, concrete."
Whitelaw repeats approaches to contextualize autonomous abstract art works in their environments by integrating the conditions of their production and reception into interpretations of formal internal structures. He includes into this method the relation source code – computing process and the paradigm shift (postulated with reference to Lev Manovich´s Abstraction and Complexity) of abstract art from reduction to complexity (4/2007). - Yoshida, Miya: The
Invisible Landscapes: The Construction of New Subjectivities in the
Era of the Mobile Telephone.
Doctoral Thesis. Malmö Academies of Performing Arts, Lund University. Lund 2006. Yoshida defines art for and with mobile phones as an element of a process leading to "invisible landscapes". The shift from the readable to the audible and invisible constitutes the core of her argumentation. For Yoshida the current functions of the phones’ screens are not yet decisive.
She selects five examples out of the group exhibitions "Invisible Landscapes" in Malmö (2003), Bangkok (2005) and Lund (2006) co-curated by her. Two examples (Tony Oursler, Shilpa Gupta) are projects for mobile phones and three further examples use mobile telephony as a subject for presentations in the media installation, video and audio files (Laura Horelli, Annika Ström, Henrik Andersson). Yoshida adds Rimini Protokoll’s "Call Cutta Mobile Phone Theater" (2005) to these examples. Rimini Protokoll shows the practice of telephone services and exemplifies it by employees of a call center in Calcutta navigating tourists in Berlin via mobile phones. In her interpretation of the project Yoshida uses perspectives of Maurizio Lazzarato’s article "lavora immateriale" (1993/97) in a persuading way.
The invisible but audible space of mobile phones (or of a certain use of mobile phones within the spectrum mobile phones – smart phones – PDAs – laptops – home computers) prompts an "injured listening" and a "culture of copy" by creative uses of sound files in the production of music. This culture provokes "iPodjacking" (by sticking ear phones in iPods of unknown passers-by and listening to their archive) and software for the sharing of audio files with mobile devices (TunA and Café Sound Life for PDAs). These uses of sound files exemplify a "psychological flatness" (David Joselit). Yoshida explains this "flatness" and the contacts of telephone services’ employees with clients presented, modified and reflected by Rimini Protokoll as part of a subjectivity (imagination and productivity) forced and functionalized by contemporary management. According to Lazzarato contemporary management expects and uses subjectivity not only by experts but by all employees.
In her arguments on the "juxtaposition" of different spheres of the mobile phone context Yoshida sketches the prehistory of telecommunication, the use of it in art projects as well as the economic and social functions of diggings for Coltan (columbite-tantalite) used for the production of Tantalum (visualized by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann). In microelectronics Tantalum is a necessary material for the construction of compact capacitors with high performance for cell phones, laptops and other technologies.
Yoshida presents the mobile phones as constituents of a controlled and controllable space, and – with Arjun Appadurai – as parts of a penetration of ideo-, media-, ethno-, techno- and financescapes (6/2009; 5/2013 not found). - Zuñiga, Ricardo Miranda: The
Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism.
In: Soundtoys Journal 2003. The possibilities are outlined which the internet offers to a global public as well as to a surveillance guided by economic interests and federal security efforts. In Brooke Singer´s Self Portrait version 2.0 (October 2001-October 2003) the viewer finds her-/himself in the role of "a data-voyeur". Zuñiga marks the qualities of Singer´s project in the realization of the first step to activism by an introduction to the problems of the control society, meanwhile iSEE of the Institute for Applied Autonomy (ab 2002) offers a tool for mobile telephones to realize the second step to actions in public spaces. "ISEE" allows to find the paths with the smallest possible amount of surveillance cameras. It can be used in demonstrations, too, with changing conditions and the necessity to react fast. Activism has to oppose the disappearance of the internet´s "dialogical potential" and its turn into a "decentralized panopticon" (10/2006).
Books on electronic media, hypertext and hyperfiction in IASLonline Rezensionen (book reviews, in German):
- Borghoff, Uwe M. u.a.: Langzeitarchivierung. Methoden zur Erhaltung digitaler Dokumente. 2003. (10/3/2004) (Günther Görz)
- Cubitt, Sean: Digital Aesthetics. 1998. (3/6/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Dünne, Jörg/Doetsch, Hermann/Lüdeke, Roger (Hg.): Von Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten. Raumpraktiken in medienhistorischer Perspektive. 2004. (07/11/2005) (Anja Kerstin Johannsen)
- Faßler, Manfred: Cyber-Moderne. Medienevolution, globale Netzwerke und die Künste der Kommunikation. 1999. (4/11/2000) (Oliver Jahraus)
- Greber, Erika et al (ed.): Materialität und Medialität von Schrift. 2002. (2/16/2003) (Hilke Achten)
- Hachenberger, Jan: Intellektuelles Eigentum im Zeitalter von Digitalisierung und Internet. Eine ökonomische Analyse von Missbrauchskalkülen und Schutzstrategien. 2003. (11/4/2005) (Stefan Haupt)
- Haldemann, Alexander: Electronic Publishing. Strategien für das Verlagswesen. 2000. (9/11/2001) (Margit Roth/Michael Meier)
- Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas/Stockmann, Ralf (ed.): Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon. Games without Frontiers – War Without Tears. 2008. (3/15/2009) (Jan-Noël Thon)
- Jakobs, Eva Maria et al (ed.): Textproduktion. HyperText, Text, KonText. 1999. (3/6/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Link, David: Poesiemaschinen – Maschinenpoesie. Zur Frühgeschichte computerisierter Texterzeugung und generativer Systeme. 2007. (10/3/2007) (Thomas Kamphusmann)
- Manovich, Lev: The Language of New Media. 2001. (9/16/2002) (Rembert Hüser)
- Mahne, Nicole: Transmediale Erzähltheorie. Eine Einführung. 2007. (01/15/2008) (Nina Heiß)
- Noeth, Winfried und Wenz, Karin (ed.): Medientheorie und die digitalen Medien. 1998. (3/6/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Simanowski, Roberto: Textmaschinen – Kinetische Poesie – Interaktive Installation. Zum Verstehen von Kunst in digitalen Medien. 2012. (1/27/2013) (Norbert Bachleitner).
- Stanitzek, Georg und Vosskamp, Wilhelm (ed.): Schnittstelle. Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation. 2001. (9/18/2001) (Isabelle Siemes)
- Suter, Beat: Hyperfiktion und interaktive Narration im frühen Entwicklungsstadium zu einem Genre. 2000. (7/3/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Weiman, Gabriel: Terror on the Internet. The New Arena, the New Challenges. 2006. (10/25/2006) (Hans-Jürgen Krug)
Blogs (B), Portals (P), mailing lists (M; with archive: P, M) and newsgroups (N) with articles and/or news on NetArt (NA), net conditions (NB) and activism (AK):
- Armin Medosch´s Blog (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods (P, NA, NB, AK)
- artificial.dk (NA)
- Born Magazine (NA)
- Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies (P, NA, NB)
- Continental Drift: The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization (Brian Holmes) (B, NB, AK)
- Creative Applications Network (B, NA, NB)
- Ctheory.net (P, M, NA, NB)
- Dichtung-digital (P, NA)
- Digicult (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Electronic Civil Disobedience (P, AK)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (P, M, NB, AK)
- Fibreculture Journal (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Furtherfield.org (P, NA, AK)
- Heise online news (P, NB, AK)
- Hz-Journal (Fylkingen´s Net Journal) (P, NA)
- Independent Media Center/Indymedia (AK)
- Information Aesthetics (B)
- Institute for Distributed Creativity (Trebor Scholz): Blog, Mailing List (B, P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- Institute of Network Cultures Weblog (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Intelligent Agent (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Magazine électronique du CIAC/ CIAC´s Electronic Magazine (le Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC)) (P, NA)
- Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net (P, NA, NB, AK)
- NeMe (P, NA)
- net critique by Geert Lovink (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Netbehaviour – a Networked Artists Community (P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- nettime (P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- neural.it (P, NA, NB, AK)
- NewmediaFix (B, NA)
- Pasta and Vinegar (B, NA, NB)
- Random Magazine (P, NA, AK)
- Remix Theory (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Rhizome.org (P, M, NA)
- Rohrpost (P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- ®TMark (P, AK)
- SWITCH (P, NA, NB)
- SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe (P, M, NA)
- Stunned.org (Conor McGarrigle) (P, NA, AK)
- Telepolis (P, NA, NB)
- Textz.com (P, NB, AK)
- The Next Layer: Art, Politics, Free and Open Source Software (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Turbulence: networked_performance (B, NA, NB)
- Vague Terrain (B, P, NA, NB)
- Visual Complexity (P, NA)
- we-make-money-not-art (B, NA)
- Webartery (N, NA, NB, AK)
Databases about and with (works of) Intermedia Art:
- Computerfinearts Collection
- Database of Virtual Art
- DVblog: Video Blog for Quicktime Movies
- Histories and Theories of Intermedia
- Medien Kunst Netz / Media Art Net
- Net.Art Connexion
- runme.org
- Vimeo
Links refer to texts with informations on the history of NetArt and web specific, for NetArt relevant problems since April 2002. The list was expanded in March 2003 with links to platforms, portals, mailing lists and newsgroups with actual informations on NetArt, net conditions and activism, databases for Intermedia Art and book reviews in "IASLonline Rezensionen ". Subject-oriented websites are considered as platforms if they are more than curated links and contain artistic projects in their database. The links to articles on actual aspects of NetArt are added since February 2004. The dates of the entries are listed in brackets (month/year).
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