IASLonline

NetArt: Links (chronology)

Thomas Dreher


auf Deutsch

in alphabetical order

Plattforms for NetArt:

  • 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)

  • 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; 1/2020 no longer accessible in the network).

  • 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).

  • 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. In May 2015 the URL-address of the former platform only contains the source code of Carnivore; 1/2020: "Version 8" with a "Processing library")

  • 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, 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, 5/2015).

  • 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; no longer accessible in the web). 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; 1/2020: only the version of the Dutch Electronic Festival in 2003 (DEAF 03) is accessible on the web).

  • 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).

  • 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 CODEDOCII for the Festival Ars Electronica 2003 in Linz (Ars Electronica Center 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).

  • 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 of the Interactive Advertising Bureau 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).

  • Illegal Art:
    From November 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: Films stored in the Internet Archive)

  • 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 included already 133 projects (from December 2002 to February 2004). A wider part of the projects used software for games and animations. The works illustrated Bush's war world 'overaffirmative' (f. e. lokiss) or parodied it (entropy8zuper!, Evgenij Vasilev). Other contributions ranged in the critical field 'estheticizing of politics' (microbo und bo130). The movement of anti-war activists was presented in some projects as motivation for further actions (Ruth Catlow). Some artists used the chance to download their works on the server of the "Wartime Project". Other artists placed links to anti-war projects which are installed on their own sites. The project was an important part of the Anti-War Web Ring (3/2003, 8/2003, 2/2004, 10/2009: Site temporarily not available, 5/2015: Server unavailable; 9/2022: accessible on the web).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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. Pogramming instructions in book form are also offered. Daniel Shiffman's "Beginner's Guide" is published as book and as website (6/2004, 10/2006, 9/2009, 9/2022).

  • 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. "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; 5/2015, 1/2020: site under renovation).

  • 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: 1/2020: The original website with the web version reports "temporarily closed". An announcement of kunstradio.at contains an audio-file in an .m3u format of the radio version. The Internet Archive stored only some web pages of the project. Beat Suter's report The Making of 'The Famous Sound of Absolute Wreader's documents the project).

  • 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; 1/2020: Server not accessible. The curatorial activities between 2008 and 2010 are documented on Vimeo).

  • 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).

  • 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; 9/2022: blog actualized) 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 not accessible).

  • {Software} Structures:
    In June 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).

  • 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 not accessible. See Internet Archive).

  • 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 criticised 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 in Contributions to the History of NetArt) 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 in Contributions to the History of NetArt) 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).
    Since February 2011 the website Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two is accessible. In February 2016 Volume Three was launched.
    In 2012 Florian Cramer criticised in "Post Digital Writing" the Electronic Literature Organization's criteria for the selection of works (see below in Texts on Actual Aspects of NetArt; 10/2009, 4/2015, 1/2020).

  • NETescopio:
    Since 2008 a database with examples of net art is developed by the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz/Extremadura, Spain). The works being selected and stored on the museum's server integrate important international examples into a documentation of Spanish and Ibero-American net projects. The works are featured in short descriptions. The source codes of some works require reconstructions for the accessibility of their functions on contemporary browsers and plugins/apps (s. Dekker, Annet: Assembling Traces, 2014, see below in Texts on actual Aspects of NetArt).
    The archive is open for inclusions of further works. Proposals are wanted. After being evaluated positive the proposed works will be integrated into the database (4/2015).

  • or-bits.com:
    From 2009 to 2012 Marialaura Ghidini curated eight exhibitions on subjects like "Acceleration", "On-Looking" or "Simplicity". Although many contributions by artists are not net-specific, nevertheless for the distribution on the net the works have to consist of dates storable on the platform's server and to be accessible by users via World Wide Web.
    In her texts accompanying the exhibitions Ghidini explores the ways to observe the world changed by the internet. She reflects for example in Acceleration on the ways of observing the world and how far they are transformed by the accessibility of films via internet. Although films are not a network-specific medium, nevertheless, via the net distribution their perception is changed by the possibilities to jump backwards and forwards.
    In his contribution to On-Looking Andrew Venell makes Google's algorithms for Ad-Sense a subject of discussion by the integration of this kind of ads into Ghidini's curatorial contribution. In his statement Venell discusses the problem to use such algorithms in searches for web pages offering adequate contexts to embed ads. He plans to use the profit from the advertisements on his own web pages for his own ads on other pages.
    In a world observation guided primarily by ways to use the internet Ghidini's platform demonstrates how seldom the differences between network-specific ways and offnet ways of observing are recognised: They merge to one worldview. When the "post-medium condition" (Krauss, Rosalind: Two Moments of the Post-Medium Condition. In: October, Nr.116/Spring 2006, p.55-62) came up then the reflection of media specific ways of observation lost its central value for artists' concepts. Since then the artists thematise the impact of contemporary mediascapes upon world observation in different combinations and constellations of media. With their projects artists try to provoke reflections and discussions about the relations between media and observation. Inevitably the contributions to or-bits.com demonstrate how far the contemporary artists modify media configurations developed for the first time in works of the seventies (4/2015).

  • The Widget Art Gallery:
    Since 2009 Chiara Passa presents each month a new contribution of an artist in her virtual gallery space. The project of the web-based App cross platform are available on a blog, as widgets in the dashboard of Mac OS as well as an app for iPhones and iPods. Many artists placed a moving object in the center of the "mini single art gallery room". Up to now works are realised by Anthony Antonellis, Andrew Benson, Marco Cadioli, Jon Cates, Jennifer Chan, Flavio Doricchi, Alberto Gulminetti, Rea McNamara, Bill Miller, Prosthetic Knowledge, Daniele Puppi, Yoshi Sodeoka, Caterina Stratti, Chris Timms, Rodell Warner and others (4/2015. 1/2020: New contributions usually follow in 2 to 3 months).

  • Remixthebook:
    Mark Amerika's print version of "Remixthebook" (Minneapolis/Minnesota 2011) is supplemented by a website. It contains 25 contributions realised by artists and critics with remix strategies and complemented by comments. In the video Isarithm the site's cocurator Rick Silva shows how the opportunity can be grasped to use the book as source material for a remix. In Food Remix Michelle Elsworth resists this source material and discusses the remix possibilities offered by a supermarket. In two video recordings she documents and comments simultaneously remixes of the supermarket's product range (or product mix) realised in situ.
    Many contributions are stored on the platforms Vimeo, Issuu and Soundcloud, meanwhile only a few of them are archived on the server of the site "Remixthebook". The Art of Walking by Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark is one of the works stored on the site's server. The artists remixed their own visual and text material in three films. The simultaneous presentation of the three variants (not integrated into one film) did not fit into the download schemes of the platforms mentioned above. On the other hand MTAA (Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden) prefer to use photos sorted by other authors on Flickr as source material and to publish a description of their procedure on the site "Remixthebook". MTAA inserts a still of the trailer of Mark Amerika's book into images of interiors found on Flickr and stores these mixed images again on Flickr. The artists' contributions to the site "Remixthebook" show not only different kinds of remix strategies, but simultaneously different kinds to use (distributed) platforms, too.
    On the About page Mark Amerika points to the possibilities of remix practices to transgress the limits between artistic procedures and discourses. Curt Cloninger uses this proposal in his text editing performance Twixt The Cup And The Lip #3 (with Microsoft Word Screen) to vary Amerika's expression "letting the language speak itself". Partially he writes and draws with a software to produce notepads. In Creativity (Capital C) has been hijacked by the artists Janneke Adema in turn deals with some pages of Amerika's text by the substitution of terms. In her artist's statement she defines this procedure as "scholarly critical method".
    Yoshi Sodeoka repeats himself simultaneously in his film contribution An Artist Yupping About Some Art Stuff X4. He defamiliarizes the audio document of a lecture by Mark Amerika via accelerations and multiplications of voices: Sodeoka accepts Amerika's commission to remix the audio document of a lecture on remix strategies and rejects the task by alienating the source so far that it is becoming a substitutable material for artistic procedures. Sodeoka shows with his digital version of sound poetry that digital procedures usually transform the remixed to provoke reinterpretations, but they don't pick up (neo-)avantgardistic deconstructions of semantics. Sodeoka subverts the platform's advertising function to stimulate the purchase of the book with the promise that buyers will learn to be be able to differentiate between the remixed and the remix (4/2015).

Contributions to the history of NetArt:

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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, June 1995). 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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: URL not accessible; 8/2013: Internet Archive).

  • Bosma, Josephine: Between Moderation and Extremes. The Tension between Net Art Theory and Popular Art Discourse.
    Lecture, "MachineMachy: pro or against the machines?", Pro @ Contra Conference, Russian State Humanitarian University, Media Institute, Moscow, Mai 2000. In: Switch. Vol.6/No.1. CADRE Laboratory for New Media. The School of Art and Design. San Jose State University. San Jose 2000. Original URL: http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v6n1/articleb3.htm. Josephine Bosma locates net art in a dense mesh of media aspects resulting in a media landscape. This mediascape constitutes a field for net artists working with it and situating themselves in it.
    On the one hand Bosma understands net art as a part of a discourse on the social changes caused by new media, and on the other hand she doesn't want to leave aside discussions on the contemporary conceptions of art. Rearticulations of former media experiences Bosma wants to be replaced by wild, unpredictable and experimental net projects. In exploring its possibilities net art remains not only related to the internet but looks for the possibilities to locate itself within the broader context of technical and social changes.
    With the difference between "Net Art" and "Web Art" Bosma points to the early history of the internet as well as to artistic experiments with it before the first browser and the World Wide Web have beein introduced. The evolution of net art before the web and the precursors of net art provoke Bosma to understand the "unstable, intangible value of the art object in the age of new media" as the result of "a manipulation, a theoretical construction".
    The internet causes Bosma to imagine a "re-evaluation" of art without needing the museums and the art market in their present states. For Bosma net art is "never depending on representation in institutions", contrary to Tilman Baumgärtel. Art museums are able to react to the situation created by net art in reconceptualizing themselves as "art spaces" serving for the "presentation, selection and exchange of ideas and norms". Under the conditions of web 1.0 mailing lists like nettime (since 1995) offered opportunities for such exhanges. In introducing a moderation, according to Bosma, nettime has marginalised the artists who were participants since its formation: Now experimental contributions by artists are impossible.
    The "by now near total internalization of the Internet" creates a situation of "post-network" and "post-network art" reacts not only to this medial situation but acts as a part of it. So it constitutes a part of an "era of instability" (1/2020).

  • 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 (ed.): netzliteratur.net_Netzliteratur//Internetliteratur//Netzkunst 2000. Print version in: Gendolla, Peter/Schmitz, Norbert M./Schneider, Irmela/Spangenberg, Peter M. (ed.): 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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: Dichtung-Digital, 7/27/2002. URL: https://mediarep.org/handle/doc/18501 (1/13/2020; 9/26/2022); 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, 22/2002. URL: https://mediarep.org/bitstream/handle/doc/18469/Dichtung-Digital_22_1-14_Idensen_Sprache_der_neuen_Medien_.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y (1/13/2020; 9/26/2022); 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: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/film.2003.0055 (5/6/2013; 9/2022); 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) (10/1/2006; 1/2020).

  • 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).

  • 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; 1/2020).

  • 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).

  • 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 tensions which can be modified via action and reaction (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).

  • 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).

  • 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. Magnusson 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).

  • Heibach, Christiane: Oszillationen//Netzkunst/Netzliteratur.
    (Oscillations//Net Art/Net Literature). Lecture, Municipal Bibliothec Stuttgart, 10/10/2002. In: Auer, Johannes/Heibach, Christiane/Suter, Beat (ed.): 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • Fritz, Darko: A brief Overview of Media Art in Croatia (since 1960s).
    In: culturenet.hr. 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; 9/2022 no longer stored in culturenet.hr).

  • 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; 1/2020: Print version accessible on the web).

  • 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).

  • 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.226f.).
    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; 1/2020).

  • 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; 1/2020).

  • Arns, Inke: Social Technologies. Deconstruction, subversion and the utopia of democratic communication.
    In: Daniels, Dieter/Frieling, Rudolf (ed.): 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).

  • Bosma, Josephine: Constructing Media Spaces. The novelty of net(worked) art was and is all aobut access and engagement.
    In: Daniels, Dieter/Frieling, Rudolf (ed.): Medienkunstnetz. Medienkunst im Überblick: Gesellschaft. Goethe-Institut, München/ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe/Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst, Leipzig 2004 (website; book: Daniels, Dieter/Frieling, Rudolf (ed.): Medien Kunst Netz 2/Media Art Net 2: Thematische Schwerpunkte/Key Topics, Vienna/New York 2005, p.264-308). Public Domain signifies freely accessible zones liberated from access restrictions like copyrights or others. "Public Domain 2.0" means free access to technical media. Net cultures are examples of Public Domain 2.0 if they are combining connectivity to people, media channels, technical means and knowledge without restrictions.
    For Public Domain 2.0 artists created projects with new kinds of internet access in environments and performances, amongst others. They also initiated platforms and meeting points on the internet: Bosma presents the history of platforms such as The Thing, Public Netbase, nettime and Rhizome followed by a "new diversity" in other platforms like Sarai, Furtherfield, Netartreview and Empyre.
    The primary goal was to experimentally explore and simultaneously practice the new communication medium internet. Artists temporarilly understood self-initiated platforms as works of art, but then distanced themselves from their attribution of the status of art in view of the consequences of the dialogue about what had been achieved and what was planned that went beyond art issues.
    The search for new ways of communication via the use of new technical possibilities resulted in an avant-garde aspiration that was put into practice in dialogues with companions instead of isolated struggles by lonely fighters: inclusions instead of exclusions. Sometimes the focus was on artistic projects, sometimes the discussions thematised technical, social and legal problems and their siginificance for the future of the internet.
    The platform Runme (since 2000) offered links to artists' software being available as Open Source and being discussed at the Readme 100 festivals (2002-2005). The software provided algorithms for further art projects, Open Source was its legal basis, and non-proprietary software, its applications and further developments made it possible to act for social changes beyond net art at the beginning of the 21st century: "...I would argue that most software art is part of the public domain 2.0..."
    Bosma presents in detail the interrelationship between art and communication in the platforms, especially in nettime. In these platforms the role standards of artist, critics, curators and reipients were undermined by participation at all levels: "This means we have to look for new professional relationships with the arts...The new arts are about engagement. This engagement asks for a more conscious approach of the mediated environment artists, audience, but also critics and art institutions now work in...Art in the Public Domain 2.0 is therefore first and foremost a site of media awareness and power struggles."
    The earlier commitment to a jointly developed communication practice thematising web conditions to be created in the near future with the same or more emphasis than for art projects has been replaced by filter bubbles. Bosma's article reminds us of this again (1/2020).

  • 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. Cat. exhib. Ars Electronica Center Linz/Ostfildern 2004, p.153-159. 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 Internationale 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).

  • 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" (kein fehler im 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).

  • 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).

  • 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:
    1. 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; Words Made Flesh, see above, 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.
    2. 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)
    The program "POE" (1990) of Ferdinand Schmatz and Franz-Josef Czernin is used by Cramer as an example for the failure of computer-generated poetry. As subtle as computing processes may ever be programmed, they can't construct artificial intelligence (pdf p.298ss./print p.296): "In history the disappointment caused by such promises lead to repeated collapses of technocentric art programs." (pdf p.302/print p.298) Either the possibilities of programming are loaded with phantastic expectations, or programs become elements of phantastic conceptions: "Self-executing scripts from magic spells to computer program code are technique as well as phantasm." (pdf p.7/print p.9) (2/2013).

  • 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)

  • 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 above) – 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 Literature": "...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).

  • Fourmentraux, Jean-Paul: Les dispositifs du Net art. Entre configuration technique et cadrage social de l'interaction.
    (The dispositives of net art. Between technical configurations and the social frameworks of interactions). In: Techniques & Culture. Revue semestrielle d'anthropologie des techniques. No. 48-49. Janvier – décembre 2007, p.269-302 (slightly modified version of the «Chapitre 3» in «Art et Internet. Les nouvelles figures de la création», Paris 2005, p.77-107). Fourmentraux explains his typology of net art as "dispositives" with technical configurations and social action fields constituting each other mutually. Projects by mostly French artists (Valéry Grancher, Reynald Drouhin, Antoine Moreau, Grégory Chatonsky et al.) are featured as examples by Fourmentraux in his discussion of the «dispositifs à exploration»: In the configurations of non-participative works he recognizes five modes. Meanwhile here Fourmentraux contents himself with a systematisation of technical possibilities he succeeds in using a wider framework for the categorisation of re- and interactive projects. He explores three kinds to integrate actions by recipients into a project's system:
    1. the activation («une activation») of a programmed function,
    2. the «altération» of a contribution within a sequence of contributions, and
    3. the «alteraction» reacting to the contributions of other participants.
    (4/2015).

    Types d´oeuvres interactives

    «Types d'oeuvres interactives» (types of interactive works)

  • 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" ("soziotechnische 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).

  • 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.57,64ff.,212f./print p.102f.,116ff.,358f.). 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; 1/2020).

  • 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 version: 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)

  • 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 Zones" (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).

  • 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 addresses 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).

  • 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.Stallabrass points to the barriers between the history of art and net art as well as to the possibilities to break them down. Stallabrass sees an art criticism that attempts to define the boundaries of art and mainstream art, which was booming in the art trade until 2008, as being closely linked, while net art eludes such demarcations and at the same time transgresses the boundaries that are still customary in established art in an activism that no longer acts merely symbolically (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; 1/2020).

  • 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; 1/2020).

  • Quaranta, Domenico: From Context to Content. On the Preservation of Net-based Art.
    In: Sgamellotti, Antonio/Brunetti, Brunetto Giovanni/Miliani, Costanza (eds.): Science and Art. The Contemporary Painted Surface. London 2020, p.452-476. Quaranta demonstrates the significance of the media context for net art projects. The medial context includes the technical conditions of the Internet - the server capacities, transmission speeds, and browsers - as well as the social conditions. The technical conditions of Web 1.0 were constituted by a slow image build-up and the browsers of the time. It is impossible to reconstruct these conditions. HTML Art such as Alexei Shulgin's Form Art (1997) is still accessible today in current browsers, but the screen rendering has changed (p.452-455). In 1997 explorations of the possibilities offered by HTML had a meaning for Web Art that is difficult to comprehend today: For Quaranta "Form Art" was a continuation of self-reflexive modernism that is "completely outdated" under conditions of "post-media" (p.454). As an example of artists reconstructing their temporary interventions in exhibitions, Quaranta chooses Vote Auction (2000) by James Baumgartner and Übermorgen: After the presidential election Übermorgen documents the former website in exhibitions via printouts of user reactions (p.458ff.). Constant Dullaart's “YouTube as Subject“ (2008) addresses lost properties of YouTube and presupposes a status of amateur videos that they no longer have (p.462). Reviving older network projects requires reconstructions, on different levels, of the network conditions under which they were created and have been first accessible. As the most far-reaching projects of reconstructing the technical conditions, Quaranta presents two projects of "Rhizome": Webrecorder, a kind of extended Internet Archive, and the Net Art Anthology, which makes web projects accessible again via emulations and provides information about the reception conditions in Web 1.0 (9/2022).

  • Lialina, Olia: From My To Me.
    In: Interfacecritique, 2021. PDF in: Lialina, Olia: Turing Complete User. Resisting Alienation in Human Computer Interaction. Heidelberg 2021, p.126-193. In using websites of the provider GeoCities (1994-2009, in Japan until 2019) being archived in 2009, Olia Lialina shows the change from topic orientation ("My" subject) to self-presentation ("Me"): More and more frequently the "About Me" link on the homepage appears at first place (p.181-191). Furthermore, Lialina points out the supporting function of links at the beginning of the Web and how this has been pushed back (p.156ff.). Effects, such as sound files (MIDI) loading with web pages, animated GIFs, running text, and 3D logos were commonly used on websites, but were rejected by web designers: Amateurs were encouraged by web designers to build their own websites, but at the same time their preferences were frowned upon (p.137ff.) (9/2022).

Texts on Actual Aspects of NetArt:

  • 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: 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 below) 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).

  • 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 integrates 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).

  • 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).
    If codes reproduce legal limitations (resp. limitations caused by the legal code) in the source code then it results in "coded performativity" (2/2004).

  • 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; 1/2020: the text is only accessible in a slightly modified version with the title Data Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime).

  • Fuller, Matthew: Behind the Blip. Software as Culture.
    In: Nettime, 1/7/2002. Print version: 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)

  • 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; 1/2020).

  • Cramer, Florian: Zehn Thesen zur Softwarekunst.
    (Ten Theses on Software Art). 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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 Narula) 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).

  • 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 (since 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).

  • 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. New in: Cramer, Florian: Anti-Media. Ephemera on Speculative Arts. Rotterdam 2013, p.102-112,250s. 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-data (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).

  • 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).

  • 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; 1/2012: the former URL-address is not accessible anymore).

  • Holmes, Tiffany: Arcade Classics Spawn Art? Current Trends in The Art Game Genre.
    Lecture 5/20/2003. Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, May 2003. Print version: Miles, Adrian (ed.): Melbourne DAC streamingworlds, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Melbourne 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 a 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; 1/2020)

  • Munster, Anna: Compression and the Intensification of Visual Information in Flash Aesthetics.
    Lecture 5/22/2003. Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne. Print version: Miles, Adrian (ed.): Melbourne DAC streamingworlds, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Melbourne 2003, p.150-159. 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; 1/2020: not accessible anymore on the web; 3/2021 found in the Internet Archive after a reference by Benedikt Merkle).

  • 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. Print version in: Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship. Vol.11/Nr.1-2, p.104 - 131. 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; 1/2020).

  • 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; 1/2020).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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).

  • 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 possess not only the transported contents but they are also used in the organization of the search for works in Gnutella (decentralized distribution of mostly auditive data via P2P) ("sonification", "auralization") whereby the search follows keywords that can be entered. 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 closely interlinked.
    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; 1/2020).

  • 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. Print version: Kuda (ed.): Umetnicka praksa u vreme informacijske/medijske dominacije/Art practice in the time of information/ media domination, Novi Sad 2004, p.39-48. 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..., 2001, see above). (6/2004; 1/2020: The text version was not found on the net, but a video of the lecture. Now the text version is only available as print).

  • 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 military origins of both information systems and the political problems of the "digital divide" 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; 1/2020).

  • 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 Lev Manovich's articles "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art" (2002, see above) 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).

  • 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).

  • Whitelaw, Mitchell: System Stories and Model Worlds. A Critical Approach to Generative Art.
    Lecture, Readme 100, Software Art Factory, Stadt- und Landesbibliothek Dortmund, 11/5/2005. 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).

  • Mateas, Michael/Montfort, Nick: A Box, Darkly. Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics.
    Lecture, "6th Digital Arts and Culture Conference", IT-Universitetet i Křbenhavn, Copenhagen, 12/2/2005. Print version: Proceedings of the 6th Annual Digital Arts and Culture Conference. IT University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen 2005, p.144-153. Programmers follow the ideal to develop codes for tasks with as much "elegance and clarity" as possible. In "Obfuscated Programming" the opposite rule is followed in efforts to develop codes complicating the deciphering of the task.
    Although these codes are machine-readable, nevertheless they are developed primarily for a readability by humans. A code written in the programming language C to start the print of the words "Hello World" is used by the authors Mateas and Montfort as an example to show extensions of the code by "layers of obfuscation". Since 1984 juries of the "International Obfuscated C Code Contest" (IOCCC) select contributions presenting the "dark side of computing" at its best.
    Since 1996 "The Perl Journal" organises the "Obfuscated Perl Contest". At least as well as C the programming language Perl is appropriate for the development of codes difficult to read because it offers several alternatives for the navigation of computing processes. Due to the fact that the commands integrate many terms of the ordinary language Perl is appropriate for a "double coding" using commands ("procedural meaning") for computing being readable as texts ("textual meaning"). Even though Perl poetry uses "double coding" its authors care more about its textual than its procedural meanings.
    "Weird" or "esoteric languages" are programming languages with only a few basic elements. These languages fulfill the requirements of Turing machines for universality, however they are not easy adaptable to various tasks. "Brainfuck" and "OISC" ("One Instruction Set Computer") are presented as examples of "minimalist languages...comment[ing] on computer architectures as well as the nature of computation."
    Mateas and Montfort show the meanings of "double coding" and the "puzzle-like nature of coding" "for any theory of code" because they are "present in all coding activity" (4/2015).

  • 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 websites. 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).

  • Paloque-Bergès, Camille: Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique.
    (Poetics of Codes in Information Networks: A Critical Investigation). Research project for a Master 2 de Lettres Modernes, l'Ecole Normale supérieure Lettres et Sciences humaines de Lyon, 2005-2006. Print version: Éditions des archives contemporaines. Paris 2009. Paloque-Bergès presents literary experiments with codes as a field ranging from text generators to code poetry – from the development of programs for text generators to the text forms of code poetry being inspired by codes without being machine-readable. The author restricts herself to works being published on the internet or realised as net art.
    In her introduction Paloque-Bergès refers to Florian Cramer's thematisation of codes being not only executable by computers but being readable by humans, too. The written code contains characteristic features of texts («performativité», «textualité»), normally hidden by Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) and recognisable only indirectly by the screen presentations as they are caused by computing processes. Paloque-Bergès discusses several artistic strategies in thematising the relations code-text and code-computing-presentation (resp. output).
    In discussing her methodological foundation she refers frequently to Gary Lee Stonum's discussion of the relations «message/code/bruit» (S.133; Stonum, Gary Lee: For a Cybernetics of Reading. In: Modern Language Notes. Vol.92/Nr.5. December 1977, p.945-968) and to Michael Riffaterre's reference theory. Riffaterre explains the possibility to refer in utterances to extralinguistic phenomena as caused by intertextual relations: Reference is constituted by internal linguistic processes (p.133f.; Riffaterre, Michael: Sémiotique de la Poésie. Paris 1983). Meanwhile the author presents Stonum's explanation of «bruit» as «un code virtuel, à faire emerger» (p.55,133), she renounces to introduce her readers to Riffaterre's conception of an internal linguistic constitution of "mimesis". In contrast to the code built potentially out of «bruit» (emergence), Paloque-Bergès explains the code constituted by the «mimesis elle-même mimée» (self-imitation) and distinguishes it from self-referring, formal and non-mimetic languages (p.80).
    The experimental literature combines language and programming in different ways:
    1. Charles O. Hartman (Projekt Virtual Muse, 1996, p.23-26,29f.,38f.) and Jim Carpenter ("Electronic Text Composition Project, Public Override Void", 2005-2006, p.36-39) use generative procedures to produce texts. Carpenter emphasises the program prior to the computed texts and ascribes the status of an art work to the program. Meanwhile Hartman takes away the irritating aspects of his generated texts by handwritten transcriptions and revisions, Carpenter exhibits the generated result.
    2. «Languages ésotériques» like Ook by David Morgan-War (since 1990, p.59) or Brainfuck by Urban Müller (1993, p.56) are programs constructed with from two to eight basic elements. The goals of the authors were not the usefulness to execute functions but a presentation of the "art" to invent programs (with Donald E. Knuth: «l'art de la programmation», p.12,41f.,80s.).
    3. Competitions encourage the development of codes based on programming languages like C or Perl. Juries judge the best proposals to reach specific goals. Each year the jury of the "International Obfuscated C Code Contest" (IOCCC, p.50f.) looks for contributions with codes making it more difficult than others to reconstruct their task (grand prize/Best of Show winners): The machine readable codes of the contributions should be ingenious in the manners to cause difficulties to the readers' efforts to reconstruct the control of the computers.
    4. Paloque-Bergčs selects examples of net art – by ASCII Art Ensemble, Giselle Beiguelman and Jodi, amongst others – suggesting or mimicking disturbances. Pseudo-disturbances dominate the reception of these works, not experiments with computing processes: «Les net.artistes jouent à mimer la complexité de l'environnement informatique en faisant des manipulations de surface pour faire signe vers les <profondeurs> du code.» (p.90)
    5. Meanwhile in "Perl Poetry" the programming is determined by poetic questions (Larry Wall (Just another Perl Hacker, March 1990, p.61) and Perlmonks (life.pl, 2005, and Hard Times, 2005, p.61f.)) and the machine readability is maintained, in "Code Poetry" spellings of codes are integrated into texts not only causing uncommon sequences of letters, but interrupting the machine readability, too: «Le code est transformée en pseudo-code» (p.113). As a source for codeworks MEZ Breeze, Alan Sondheim or Pascale Gustin (p.114-119,122f.,126-130) used the context of computer programming with its specific combinations of letters. For readers the computer context can be a source of inspiration to develop further possibilities of decoding, because many works were invented for this kind of reading.
    Paloque-Bergès uses often the terms «double codage» (p.56,60,63f.,66,80,86,118,131) and «mimesis» (p.38,80,113 with ann. 375) in her analyses of the field of conflict between "obfuscations" of codes, a net art only refering to characteristics of codes instead of experimenting with codes, and code poetry. The term «mimesis» stands for sought-for affinities between the characteristics of programs and texts (p.113:«le...pseudo-code [des codeworks] mime le language de programmation mais qui perd sa fonction d'instruction au profit de la fonction expressive.»), meanwhile the term «double codage» designates codes being readable by machines as well as by readers, but with different kinds of reading for the different objectives computing («fonctionnel», p.57) and 'meaning' («naturel»: «un autre sens pour le lecteur humain», p.57. Cf. Mateas/Montfort: A Box, Darkly, see above). Paloque-Bergès analyses this problem area of the performance of codes and texts. Furthermore she discusses the internet forms used for the internet distribution.
    Authors distributed their codeworks in mailing lists. In these lists the authors were treated as outsiders because their contributions did not fulfill the criteria of discursive or dialogic text forms. The senders of codeworks were confronted with complaining mails. Furthermore numerous receivers unsubscribed their email addresses from the lists flooded with codeworks.
    Paloque-Bergès features the strategies of Jodi and NN Antiorp to provoke the readers and administrators of mailing lists. In the cases of the flooding of the lists "Syndicate" (1996-2001) and "nettime" by NN Antiorp (p.108f.,111f.) the provocations ("spam art") contained not only texts similar to codes alarming the programs filtering suspicious codes and receivers of the mails, but included attacks on the conventional forms used by participants to communicate with each other: NN Antiorp plumbed the possibilities to send counter-attacks reacting to the complaints by the participants of a list. In her analysis Paloque-Bergès does not recognize a goal of the counter-attacks by NN Antiorp beyond the destruction of the communication between the participants of internet forums.
    In contrast to the contributions of MEZ Breeze and Alan Sondheim enriching the mailing list "webartery", with the mails attacking the subscribers of "Syndicate" the group NN Antiorp calls into question its own communication basis: With the end of the mailing list its archive is deleted except it will be stored as a document.
    «Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique» is an in-depth study of the digital literature offering the relations between the presentation forms and the codes as guideline. Unfortunately the author's reduction of arguments to scarce remarks complicates it for readers to follow her explanations of seldom noticed aspects of digital literature and to recognize her interpretative approach (4/2015; 1/2020: not accessible anymore on the web).

  • 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 an uncommon cause for recycling as light breaker: 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).

  • 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: Notes on Surface. In: Art History. Vol. 23/No. 1. March 2000, p. 19-34). 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).

  • 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; 1/2020)

  • Nitsche, Michael: Claiming Its Space: Machinima.
    In: dichtung-digital.org. Nr.37/2007. Nitsche outlines the development of animations created with game engines since 2001 and distributed on internet platforms. The author points not only to the integration of cinematographic elements into the animation vocabulary, as it is determined by games like "Doom", "Stunt Island", "Quake", "Halo", "World of Warcraft", "The Movies" and "The Sims", but he also mentions the "performative aspect" (Aarseth, Espen J.: Cybertext. Baltimore/Maryland 1997, p.21) of selections made from a preprogrammed virtual world in following dramatic criteria (Laurel, Brenda: Toward the Design of a Computer-based Interactive Fantasy System. Dissertation. Graduate School of Ohio State University, Columbus/Ohio 1986, p.21).
    Nitsche explains machinima productions as successors of no longer-offered possibilities to store demo files documenting the players' game histories. When players reactivated the game history stored in the system of a game then the player's performance was presented like a film presentation. According to Nitsche with this transition from the stored game play to film presentations the demo files anticipated the later machinima productions.
    Nitsche selected three examples to discuss how "in-game topics" of "World of Warcraft" are thematised in machinima productions: Their plots contain actions well known to the game's players. Furthermore the interfaces of computer games can themselves become elements supporting the plot (f.e. Pals for Life: Leeroy Jenkins, 2005. Until 10/24/2014 it received 41 million hits on YouTube; 9/2022: not found in YouTube).
    From these "inside-out"-productions the "outside-in"-productions can be distinguished. An example for the last one is Katherine Anna Kang's "gothic fairy tale" Anna (2003) using the animation vocabulary of game engines for "stand-alone animation pieces". Meanwhile Kang revives well known literary-filmic topoi, technically and aesthetically new ways to create machinimas are developed in "friction zones" between "game", "play", and "presentation".
    In "Machinima as Media" (in: Lowood, Henry/Nitsche, Michael: The Machinima Reader. Cambridge/Massachusetts 2011, p.113-125) Nitsche points to the problem that the win of new possibilities to produce machinimas via "screen capture and postproduction techniques" heightens the dangers "for the identity of machinima as its own format" (4/2015).

  • 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).

  • 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 visualisations 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)

  • 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; 1/2020: only the publication in "Fibreculture Journal", Issue 14/ 2009 was yet accessible in the web).

  • Sentamans, Tatiana/Fabre, Mario-Paul Martinez: 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.51-77. 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; 1/2020).

  • 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; 1/2020; 9/2022: page not found on the Web).

  • Flanagan, Mary: Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.
    In: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Perth, September 2007 (perthDAC 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).

  • Whitelaw, Mitchell: Art against Information. Case Studies in Data Practice.
    In: Fibreculture. Issue 11/2008: 7th Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Perth, September 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; 1/2020)

  • 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).

  • Cubitt, Sean: Immersion, Connectivity, Conviviality.
    Lecture, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MUMOK), Vienna/Donau-Universität Krems, Department für Bildwissenschaften, Telelecture, 11/8/2007. 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; 5/2015: not anymore accessible on the web).

  • 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 Manovich 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 above) 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; 1/2020).

  • 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 naive error)..."(7/2009)

  • 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)

  • 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).

  • 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)

  • 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).

  • 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 about 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; 1/2020: "Plazes" and "Bliin" not accessible anymore on the web)

  • Helmond, Anne: Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.
    In: Bray, Anne/Dockrey, Sean/Green, Jo-Ann/Navas, Eduardo/Torrington, Helen (ed.): 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 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; 1/2020: These sites are not acessible anymore on the web: Storytlr, your.flowingdata.com, Twitter Counter, Twitter Analyzer, IkRip; 9/2022: not found on the Web: Google Flu Trends).

  • 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 ShiftSpace (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; 1/2020: "ShiftSpace" is not accessible anymore on the web; 9/2022: text not found in the Web)

  • 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; 1/2020: Stamen Design's "Oakland Crimespotting" is not accessible anymore on the web).

  • 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).

  • Picot, Edward: Play on Meaning? – Computer Games as Art.
    In: Furtherfield Review, 4/30/2009; 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; 9/2022: not found in Furtherfield Review).

  • 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; 1/2020: The website of "Superstruct" is not accessible anymore).

  • 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).

  • Arvers, Isabelle: Cheats or Glitch? Voice as a Game Modification in Machinima.
    In: Neumark, Norie/Gibson, Ross/Leeuwen, Theo van (ed.): Voice. Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media. Cambridge/Massachusetts 2010, p.225-242. Arvers discusses the relations between images and sounds in Machinima videos. They are offered as well as often viewed and downloaded from websites like Machinima.org, The Movies, YouTube or Dailymotion. Arvers interviewed authors and collected their statements on intentions and technical problems.
    Game engines are programs constructed for the development of a game's animation and constitute the system for the control of the gameplay. Game Engines are used in the production process of Machinima videos. Because these engines don't include databases for facial expressions the independently created sounds (voices) take over the function of individualisation. In some examples sounds and images are applied as separate elements meeting each other sometimes in 'bizarre' ways. In some videos the represented persons move restless like game figures meanwhile simultaneously they keep talking with each other: Only on the audio level the dialogic modes of expression are presented.
    Figures with helmets undermine expectations concerning visual individuation (for example The Ill Clan: Apartment Huntin', 1988; Chris Burke: This Spartan Life, Episode 1, Module 3, 2005). In "Bill & John" (Episode 2, 2006) Bertrand Le Cabec and others use images and sounds as complementing each other without necessity to present faces: The configurations of combat fighters (in exterior views) were taken from the game "Lock on Modern Air Combat". When these configurations are presented then the pilots communicating with each other can be heard. When the communication about actual combat situations can be heard meanwhile these situations are shown then this prevents often expectations to see the pilots' faces. In other videos the figures' typification of mask-like faces causes unconventional film aesthetics (Alex Chan: The French Democracy, 2005; Eddo Stern & Jessica Z Hutchins: Landlord Vigilante, 2007). However in 2007 Paul Marino uses in I'm Still Seeing Breen the software FacePoser to accomodate the facial features of his protagonists to the spoken words (4/2015).

  • Paloque-Bergès, Camille: Remediating Internet Trivia. Net Art's Lesson in Web Folklore.
    In: ESSACHESS – Journal for Communication Studies. Vol.3/No.2 (6) 2010, p.117-129. With the "many-to-many communication" in the internet the regulating power of gatekeepers was dropped. In the World Wide Web a "pioneering crowd" (p.19) trained itself to be able to use the new technical possibilities. With the web 1.0 a "homepage culture" (p.119) occured. It was shaped by an "intensive and repetitive use of fixed-forms iconography such as Webpage wallpapers, animated gifs, midi music, shiny buttons, moving arrows, customized Webforms" (p.120).
    A "vernacular Web" (p.120) came up with the wider use of the web. Instead of considering these webpages as part of a "low culture" and to exclude it from information flows and cultural mediations, Paloque-Bergès proposes an understanding of "triviality" deviated from "trivium". She chooses Yves Jeanneret's explanations of "trivium" as a basis for a renewed version of the three-way connection grammar, rhetoric and dialectics. With these insights the attention can be directed to heterogeneous exchange processes ("crossroads", p.120) between the members of a community and to the resulting forms of communication: Social mediation processes replace normative aesthetics and their high-low dichotomy.
    In c. 2005 net artists started to publish link lists pointing to their selections of the best web pages according to their tastes. They selected without any restrictions by themes and presented found pages of the "vernacular Web": Olia Lialina, Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Paddy Johnson and the author (in "Nasty Nets") proved to by "professional surfers" (S.122f.) by presenting their selections without using any secret search algorithms and responding to search engines with "human indexing" (p.123). Further variants of the "vernacular Web" are blogs and animated.gifs.
    The limits between publications of found pages, self-made conditions and the documentation of takeovers (of the self-made contribution by others) are blurred in the internet practices of Olia Lialina, Tom Moody and Michael Bell-Smith: One's own creations are realised to be integrated into webpages created others and stand the test in various contexts. To the reception of one's own creations in external contexts authors can react by their own contributions and takeovers (of their own creations alienated by others; 4/2015).

  • Parikka, Jussi: Ethologies of Software Art: What Can a Digital Body of Code Do?
    In: O'Sullivan, Simon/Zepke, Stephen (ed.): Deleuze and Contemporary Art. Edinburgh 2010, p.116-132. The discourse created by Gilles Deleuze's explanations of the term «devenir imperceptible» ("becoming invisible") is Parikka's starting point in his investigation of the disguise of codes and artistic strategies to make visible the hidden elements to navigate computing processes. Due to the unseparability of the code(s) and its cultural context(s) Software Art as well as Tactical Media offer mutually reinforcing approaches being useful in efforts to develop a media criticism.
    Artists like Übermorgen, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico thematise these interrelations in developing "micropolitics" (p.118,125,130) with strategic software applications in the projects GWEI (2005) and Amazon Noir (2006, p.126). These don't intervene in established relations between technology, economics and culture but reveal them humorously.
    In 2001 during the Venice Bienniale 0100101110101101.ORG and EpidemiC published the code of a harmless virus (biennale.py) in distributing it on T-Shirts and other carriers. According to Parikka the interdependencies between the perceivable and the hidden code are shown to demonstrate the superimpositions of the technology and social affairs as an area of conflict transgressing the art world.
    Parikka outlines the control of computing processes and their effects in social constellations in using the terms "the relationality, polymorphism and contex[t]uality" (p.124). In my view the terminology taken from Gille Deleuze's writings results in constellations of terms not usable for a differentiated discussion of "Software Art" as "tactical move" (p.117) in simultaneously technical as well as social environments: Parikka's use of terms taken from Deleuze's philosophy demonstrates a limited potential of this approach to develop a contemporary theory of media. The semantic fields of terms like "affects, sensations, relations and forces" (p.116) and "abstract machines" (p.121) are over-general and don't offer differentiations for descriptions of technical and social processes: These terms encompass too much relations and Deleuze's writings obviously offer not enough relevant approaches for differentiations in analyses of digital art (4/2015).

  • Vierkant, Artie: The Image Object Post-Internet.
    (2010). Authors like Gene McHugh (Post Internet Blog, 2009-10) use the term Post-Internet to designate the evolution of the internet from innovation to banality. In the view of Vierkant the "social condition at large", as it is determined by this banality, can be outlined with criteria like "ubiquitous authorship", the attention economy, the end of the priority given to distances in real spaces, the infinite reproducibility and changeability.
    The digitalisation leads to constantly changing media landscapes. Within a project this causes a pluralisation of the media and media (combinations) varying between different presentation environments: "...projects which move seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation..." The projects transmute a culture developed by 'them' ("they") into a culture with 'our' ("we") participation as "reader-author". In 1996 the members of the Critical Art Ensemble required a "community-based art" acting against the established "bunker consciousness" in On Electronic Disobedience (1996, p.39).
    According to Vierkant the Post-Internet artists take up the roles of "interpreter, transcriber, narrator, curator, architect". Decisive factors to change points of view are not so much the content of the appropriated but the new interrelations in a project and the context of its distribution. The "one-to-many hierarchy of mass media" is replaced in the contemporary World Wide Web by "new hierarchies of many-to many production".
    If artists communicate on net conditions via "visual representations" then they enable themselves "to think beyond the fixity of 'mediums'". That's a method to transgress the "grossly limiting [internet] architecture" of the "search terms, keywords, tags" (4/2015).

  • 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 struggles in provoking its latent violence and exposing oneself to it.
    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 provokes 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; 1/2020: Adult Swim's Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself) is not accessible anymore on the web).

  • 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).

  • Menkman, Rosa: The Glitch Moment(um).
    Network Notebooks Nr.4. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam (University of Applied Sciences). Amsterdam 2011. Menkman features the procedures of databending, datamoshing and circuitbending (p.23,37f.,47ff.,53ff.,65). By means of various examples she shows how artists of Glitch Art use these procedures.
    First, according to Menkman Glitch Art is a reaction to the fiction to produce a noise free playback medium via digitalisation. The techniques to disturb data stored as audio, sound and film media show characteristics of the formats because, for example, with JPEG or BMP very specific effects can be produced. Second, Glitch Art is "cool" (p.44; see Liu, Alan: What's Cool? In: id: The Laws of Cool. Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago 2004, p.176-179) only in phases of transition, as long as its effects can be observed as disturbances of the established media usages.
    The Glitch artists develop strategies to intervene in a technology development hiding characteristics of media to users in favour of the investors' interests: In removing technical barriers the artists enable themselves to manipulate hard- and software. With these strategies the artists disturb the fictions of media being adapted to the needs of their users until they don't perceive these media: In practice the illusion of transparency hides the construction of the medium against their users and disables them to control computing processes. To this immaturity forced by the investors "prosumers" (p.58) respond with cooperative developments of Glitch strategies. With "Glitchspeak" net communities react to situations comparable to George Orwell's "Newspeak" (in "1984", 1949): In their relations to governmental authorities Orwell's citizens are kept in uncritical mental states (p.43; 4/2015).

  • 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 via 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 images produced by fMRI are suitable "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).

  • 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; 1/2020)

  • Reichert, Ramón: Dating Maps. Mapping Love in Online Dating Communities.
    Lecture, Conference "Mapping Maps: What's new about Neocartography?", Artur-Woll-Haus, University of Siegen, Siegen, 1/21/2011. In the web 2.0 the combination of data gathering and data storing, the structuring of databases via software, the distribution of these data via the internet and its visualisation in interfaces for networks result in systems used mutually by participants for their lifestyles: The participants create data (input) and use the systems' output in specific ways. With their uses of the output the participants create new input. These "feedback loops" are used by program developers to find new tasks for the modification of the social networks' systems to be able to adapt them to the users' needs as well as to the demands of paying customers.
    Instead of an investigation of the economic aspects Reichert offers a discussion of the possibilities for users and features examples: Corresponding to the developments of programmers users find new ways to organize themselves via "practices of evaluative self-observation" in an everyday life determined by data. The self-adaptation to changing environmental conditions (everyday life including the infoscapes) is elevated to a guiding principle: "The control technology of 'gentle adaptation' attempts to set an interminable dynamic of self-determination in motion..."
    In liberal-democratic societies "inspection procedures" dominate the organisation of knowledge. This organisation of knowledge causes a "conduct of conduct" constituted by a "feedback-driven self-control". This control is a strategy of self-organization enabling individuals to take over and apply practices of power to control social and economic systems, as Reichert argues with references to sociocritical texts by Giorgio Agamben (see ann.10) and Michel Foucault (see ann.14).
    Reichert shows these interrelations using the "Touchgraph Facebook Browser" (TouchGraph Navigator) as an example. This "ego network" locates users not only in the center of their Facebook friends but enables them to locate themselves at other places, too: "Thus the ego primarily appears as secondary observer of social networks letting the structural position of the ego seem permanently changeable and fluid." Users observe themselves as a part of the "aggregate state of the network structure" and, according to Reichert, they leave the classic conditions of social legitimation being documented by family trees and family images (4/2015).

  • Manon, Hugh S./Temkin, Daniel: Notes on Glitch.
    In: World Picture Journal. Nr.6/Winter 2011. For Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin Glitch Art is both a part of the "digital culture" (§ 22) and is influenced by precursors realised in analogue media. These precursors provide suggestions against the sterile products of digital technologies. Yet the creation of "the wilderness within the computer" (§ 55) requires specific procedures.
    Artists create disturbances on digital images by interventions in codes. Nevertheless the codes remain readable for computer programmes. Specific transformations occur only in specific image formats (f.e. JPEG or BMP; § 41): On files in the formats JPEG and BMP cornered forms ("blockiness", "crystalline fragmentation", § 31) are the results of disturbed transformations from the analog to the digital. Unlike the analogue disturbance procedures (§ 21) the digital disturbances are reversible because the files are stored before the glitch will be done and because of the function "undo" (§ 23,27). Therefore the glitch procedures can be associated neither with the concepts of a modern art reflecting its medial foundations as presentations of irreversible material processes (§ 24,42) nor with Paul Virilio's explanations of a "real sabotage" (§ 25). In found as well as produced glitches the transformations of codes constitute an integral disturbance being presented instantaneously ("instantaneous fracturing", §31, vgl. § 17), meanwhile disturbances in analogue procedures are unfolded as material processes (§ 29).
    Because the disturbance doesn't stop the programmed process the effects of disturbances appear in contexts of transformations with fewer disturbances and in the surrounding of undisturbed codes. With this "semilegibility" the digital glitch is not totally disturbed but shows results of a "logic of 'almost, but not quite'" (§ 34; 4/2015).

  • Manovich, Lev: Trending. The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data.
    In: Gold, Matthew K. (ed.): Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis/Minnesota 2012, p.460-475. Manovich differentiates between "'deep data' about a few people and 'surface data' about lots of people" (PDF p.2). He raises the question if in times of "big data" stored on servers of companies and governments the humanities could not offer more data for investigations than only "surface data" or if these data constitute "the new depth" (PDF p.13).
    Manovich points to two problems of researchers in the humanities if they try to use these dates:
    First: How can the researchers get access to data of internet groups like Google or Twitter?
    Second: How can they get the technical competence enabling them to use the APIs (application programming interfaces) of these internet groups?
    Frequently these APIs give accesses to statistics but not to the evaluated sources. If researchers are employees of one of these groups then they get accesses to their databases and the stored data. Only governments like the one of the United States of America make available more and more data via APIs (Data.gov, Health.gov) and allow to use "big data" with specific software applications for far reaching conclusions. Manovich points to the Software Studies Initiative of the University of California in San Diego (UCSD; Site: softwarestudies.com) and its steps to the analysis of "big data".
    Manovich outlines a three-class society: The amount of people using internet and mobile telephony is faced by the minor group of proprietors of the means to store "big data", and by a smaller number of experts capable to analyse the stored data: "We can refer to these three groups as new 'data-classes' of our 'big data society'" (PDF p.11).
    The interests of the groups using analyses to obtain results "for specific business ends" are in conflict with the interests of researchers in the humanities to win new insights "about human cultural behavior in general" (PDF p.11). But the researchers in humanities still lack analysis instruments and accesses to data (4/2015; 1/2020).

  • Simanowski, Roberto: The Compelling Charm of Numbers. Writing for and thru the Network of Data.
    Lecture, ELMCIP Conference on Remediating the Social, Edinburgh College of Art, 11/2/2012. Print version 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 Simanowski regards 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 Facebook's Timeline "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; 1/2020).

  • Cramer, Florian: Post-Digital Writing.
    Keynote Lecture, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, West Virginia University, Morgantown/West Virginia, 6/22/2012. In: Electronic Book Review, 12/12/2012. New in: Cramer, Florian: Anti-Media. Ephemera on Speculative Arts. Rotterdam 2013, p.227-239,259s. In the "Keynote Lecture" for the "Electronic Literature Organization [ELO] Conference" Cramer summarises the history of hyperfiction in short and in a critical perspective. Meanwhile in countries like Germany "literary writing" never became a subject of academic discourses and the development of electronic writing ended after a boom in the late nineties, in the United States this art form was and is supported in the academic environment by "ELO initiatives like 'Born Again Bits' and 'Acid-Free Bits'". Nevertheless its possibilities were reduced to closed and downloadable systems without regards to webness and its manifestations in link systems and "communication streams". Furthermore Cramer points to failures of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) to react to new art forms using filesharing and the distribution of files via telecommunication.
    The kind of literary criticism prefered by the ELO presupposes works marking themelves as "literary" and disables itself to react to transgressions of the limits between "amateur and professional writers".
    According to Cramer the development of net art after 2000 went ahead quite similar to electronic literature. Contemporary artists use the internet as a distribution medium only and not anymore as an artistic medium with its own possibilities. Connections between net art and activism in "hacktivism" and copyleft initiatives are today integrated in the mass culture (correction of Cramer's critique: If mass culture highlights alternative movements then these movements must not be successful in their efforts to move from the periphery to the center and the engaged groups must not be able to persuade politicians and a sufficient number of voters for their goals). In the view of Cramer on the one hand the possibilities of the internet are not explored further, on the other hand the "hactivism" is too well established.
    Cramer outlines his point of view in criticising Kenneth Goldsmith's comments on "plunderphonics" (in "Uncreative Writing", New York 2011). Meanwhile Goldsmith uses net cultures as sources for his artistic activities, nevertheless he remains a distanced observer unable to transgress the dichotomy creative/uncreative.
    Furthermore the neoliberal "Creative Industries" can't be called into question from Goldsmith's point of view: "It is tempting to maintain notions of 'literary writing' or '(un)creative writing' out of resistance to these developments." Yet according to Cramer "uncreative writing" should be practiced with a "clever inventiveness" to provoke and question established "creative industries".
    In the view of Cramer the contemporary developments of digital media provoke a new evaluation of the analogue procedures and media: He characterises this tendency as the hallmark of the "Post-Digital". Cramer regards a return to the "publishing of self-made books and zines" as a possibility to practice alternative forms of "social networking" beyond the control of the "four corporate players" (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook).
    He mentions Annette Knol's book "Colors – Simply Hiphop" (undated) as an example for a "DIY [Do-it-yourself] printmaking" undermining ELO's criteria in a twofold manner with its appropriation of lines from Hip Hop lyrics (net finds from sites archiving lyrics): with its artistic strategy and with its distribution. According to Cramer Knol and "DIY printmaking communities" return to the origins of the "home computing and to home pages in the literal sense of the word."
    Cramer's criticism of the digitised mass culture is based on the criticism of mass culture by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Max Horkheimer ("Dialectics of Enlightenment", New York 1972 and Stanford 2002/"Dialektik der Aufklärung", Amsterdam 1947). With his evasion to the self-made analogue Cramer can show a place of retreat but he can not outline ways out of the stated crisis as well as earlier the classical criticism of culture by the Frankfurt School was not able to offer a concrete utopy.
    In Prehistories of the Post-digital Geoff Cox reacts to the problem of the relations between art, media and society – as it was outlined by Cramer – with a sketch of a prehistory of the "global contemporaneity". Cox features the "Post-Digital" as a simultaneity of "different geopolitical contexts" being "badly known": Cox reacts to Cramer's positive evaluation of the "Post-Digital" with a negative one. Cramer and Cox demonstrate how the term "Post-Digital" can be used as a categorisation of contemporary phenomena, nevertheless new approaches for a criticism of its causes remain missing that can be used as a point of departure for the development of a perspective toward an alternative practice of art (4/2015; 1/2020).

  • Shanken, Edward A.: Investigatory Art. Real-Time Systems and Network Culture.
    In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies. Nr.2/Autumn 2012. In lectures and texts written from 1968 to 1970 Jack Burnham featured contemporary art works integrating "real time systems" as well as works being connected to such systems. Although Shanken takes up Burnham's argumentation nevertheless he is less interested in works documenting processes in and with systems or demonstrating their function in installations (comparable to experimental test set ups). Shanken focuses the attention to works intervening into processes being controlled by systems: Their strategies to feature aspects of systems or to document them cause more counter-reactions by decision-makers of the art world than by recipients. After the realisations of his visitor surveys (in the exhibitions "Software" at the Jewish Museum and "Information" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) Hans Haacke experienced the trustees' successful efforts in preventing the presentation of his works. These incidents provoked Haacke to study in many later works the interests of collectors and sponsors in the art world. He could document that for the sponsoring companies art is useful to support their corporate identity: Art is used to distract the attention of observers (as potential clients) from business fields contradicting the corporate identity.
    Haacke's contribution "Visitors' Profile" to the exhibition "Software" (curated by Burnham) consisted of a digitised information system actualising itself in real time.
    According to Shanken Haacke's use of digitised means in "real time systems" anticipated net projects by artists like Heath Bunting (Own, be Owned, Or Remain Invisible, 1998), Josh On (They Rule, 2001, actualised in 2004 and 2011), Übermorgen in cooperation with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio (Google Will Eat Itself, 2005), Beatrice da Costa (Pigeon Blog, 2006) and Michael Mandiberg (Real Costs, 2007) being connected to information systems and demonstrating their functions as well as their effects in ways affecting the interests of the systems' operators. Thus Google's operators installed counter-measures against the net project "Google Will Eat Itself".
    In the projects mentioned above artists realised strategies to use the new participation possibilities by methods of self-embedding into the evolution of digital information systems.
    In his remarks Shanken points to a critical and reflective (thus conceptual oriented) use of the new participation possibilities, but not to direct interventions with an activitistic goal. Shanken's interpretations demonstrate how the participatory aspects of the artists' projects can change the recipients' ways of life. In his final remarks Shanken chooses a quote by Saskia Sassen as conclusion although it doesn't include an approach being useful for artistic strategies in the future: "Through this embeddedness the digital can act back on the social..." (Sassen, Saskia: Territory, Authority, Rights. Oxford 2006, p.344) (11/2014).

  • 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)

  • 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 determined 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)

  • Lichty, Patrick: Variant Analyses. Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture.
    Theory on Demand Nr.12. Institute of Network Cultures. Amsterdam 2013. Lichty has chosen media reflective texts written between 1994 and 2012 and presents them in the book "Variant Analyses" as elements of an analysis of art, internet and activism. Most of Lichty's articles highlight the social effects of the internet's evolution to a central medium of information and communication.
    In his analyses of the internet, the net activism and net art Lichty uses the time diagnoses of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari not only in his first and eldest text ("Haymarket RIOT's Machine", 1994, co-author Jonathan S. Epstein), but in many texts written later, too. The acceleration of the traffic, trade and information exchange caused a delimitation of all spheres. The consequences include mutual takeovers and approximations between media (forms). Within these developments photography and video achieved the positions of key media according to Baudrillard and Virilio (p.14,35). After this phase follows the internet as a separate "referent from which to operate" (p.15). In the course of the evolution of the web 2.0 digital images gain a new importance as Lichty demonstrates in "Art in the Age of Dataflow" (2009). There he draws the attention to two blogs of Manik (Marija Vanda and Nikola Pilipovic) and Nasty Nets (with Marisa Olson and Camille Paloque-Bergès, see her "Remediating Internet Trivia" (2010)): The images presented in these blogs are "found footage" (p.18f.) modified partially with commenting intentions. Artists create projects in the web 2.0 not only increasingly in and with data flows, furthermore they visualise these information processes in digital presentation forms (examples by Martin Wattenberg, Golan Levin and Ben Fry, p.142,154ff.).
    In "Art in the Age of Dataflow" Lichty outlines an evolution of artistic activities: After the breakup of the "narrative closure" (p.145f.) by exponents of the literary avant-gardes new textual forms arise in hypertext projects branched by links. Finally the participants of data flows were enabled to cooperate in the development of ways to visualise these flows: "art's journey from structure to flow" (p.142).
    Lichty discusses the breakup into the "molecular" (p.55, refering to Felix Guattari) and the "flow" in and between milieus (p.154, refering to Deleuze/Guattari) as inseparable movements offering chances to conduct the evolution beyond Baudrillard's diagnosis of the fractal stage of simulations.
    In the view of Lichty an activism becoming amorphous reacts to the power hierarchies maintaining themselves in societies with amorphous boundaries between social spheres ("On Amorphous Politics", p.158). Lichty discusses "indeterminacy" (p.141,144) not only as a characteristic of the artistic and literary avant-gardes but also as a property of the "openness" (p.144) of a collaborative (p.112-120) and communicative (p.134,137f.) artistic practice being realisable simultaneously as social practice and as activism.
    According to Lichty Occupy and the group Anonymous with origins in the "image sharing community 4chan.org" (p.57,159) are examples for a collaborative use of the internet and mobile telephony provoking observers to change their self location in the real space ("Building a Culture of Ubiquity", 2000, p.94-104). In the mutual penetration of real and simulated spaces, amongst others by "Ubiquitous Computing" (p.94-104) and "Second Life" (S.132), possibilities arise for alternatives being not yet conceivable for the postmodern diagnosis of media changes and being realisable in artistic experiments (p.30).
    In some chapters Lichty presents his contributions to collaborative projects. They encompass the areas net activism (RTMark, The Yes Men, p.39f.,43), ubiquitous computing (p.103) and net art with social media (Second Front in Second Life, p.117f.,130f.; 4/2015).

  • 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) Registrations cause users to transfer their 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).

  • Sanchez, Michael: 2011: On Art and Transmission.
    In: Artforum. Vol.51/No.10. Summer 2013. Sanchez notes repercussions from the reception of art in websites, as they are mostly accessed via touch screens, on forms of artworks and their presentations in exhibitions. This allows to draw conclusions about changes in the connections between the art production and the art world. In referring to Giorgio Agamben's concept of the apparatus Sanchez concludes that the notion of the artistic subject, as it has so far been promoted by the art world, is dissolved by the "'desubjectifying' effects of apparatuses": "Both the informational form and the affective content of contemporary art are optimized for an apparatus that is increasingly dominated by feedback between the iPhone interface, the feed, and the aggregator, not the institutional structures of the gallery and museum."
    Therefore Sanchez calls for contemporary art to be understood not as one of the "institutions producing subjects", but as as one of the "apparatuses capturing organisms", since art is produced and distributed in a way to which Richard Dawkins' comparison of the dissemination of memes of biology with the dissemination of "nongenetic data" applies (1/2020).

  • Parikka, Jussi: Dust and Exhaustion. The Labor of Media Materialism.
    In: C Theory. 2nd October 2013. Parikka writes a history of the media as a history of materials with the subject "dust". Dust is penetrating and destructing the lungs of workers, as it happens f.e. in coltan mining to extract the precious metal Tantalum being necessary for the production of the chips for mobile phones. For Parikka the labour to extract minerals is an example of the connections between essential body functions and non-human materials. Meanwhile the exploited materials and the places of exploitation changed in the technical evolution from analog to digital media the life-threatening conditions have not improved: Particles penetrating the bodies of workers via the respiratory tracts remained a constant factor.
    The games Phone Story by Molleindustria (2011, Google Android and Web) and "iMine" (2010, Google Android and iPhone) as well as YoHas (Matsuko Yokokoji, Graham Harwood) installations Tantalum Memorial (2008) and Coal Fired Computers (2010) thematise the relations between the working conditions at the extraction of materials and the production of hardware.
    The body becomes its own "inscription/writing system" (Kittler, Friedrich Adolf: Aufschreibesysteme 1800-1900. Munich 1985). The body's ways to react and to store its reactions as changes of the organs make it possible to decipher the conditions of the workers producing technologies as well as the effects on the environment. Despite the technological development breathlessness caused by time pressure, oxygen deficiency and narrowing of the airways are constant characteristics from the 19th to the 21st century.
    In his explanation of a continuum from the early modern times to the (post)modernism Parikka uses quotations from Georgius Agricola's "De Re Metallica" (1556) as supporting documents: "...the book reads like a distant warning of that connection between wealth and its price, of ill – health and sacrifice. It is a sort of psychogeographics..." (4/2015).

  • Moss, Cecilia Laurel: Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu.
    In: Rhizome, 19th December 2013. Moss proposes "Expanded Internet Art" as a term for works addressing the "informational dynamics" changed by the internet. Artists address these dynamics in media on as well as beyond the internet which is why Moss proposes the term expansion. She does not explore the prehistory of the term, its use in the sixties and seventies (by Gene Youngblood, Rosalind Krauss, and others) for transgressions of the borders between old art media and new forms of works as well as for marking the transition to new (respectively technical) media and to intermedia art. After the art media have been replaced by new media for Moss the replacement of media-specific characteristics by data flows is in the foreground of the current "informational milieu". Moss draws on the term "informational milieu" introduced by Tiziana Terranova and turns it against the concept of information and the sender-receiver model of cybernetics in using Gilbert Simondon's concept of the milieu: "...Simondon posited that there is no content proper to any elements within a system, and form (as signal) is never abstracted from matter (as noise)...Matter is not inert, but a potential."
    Working methods of, in and with information flows – as used by Kari Altmann and Brenna Murphy – serve Moss as proofs of an art that works with "resonances" (Simondon) in the "informational milieu" and that provokes resonances in the observer. Moss expects from an art dipping into the contemporary milieu that it is able to unveil potentials of this milieu but she leaves open how this is to happen (1/2020).

  • Betancourt, Michael: Critical Glitches and Glitch Art.
    In: Hz Journal. Nr.19/2014. Betancourt is not satisfied by studies reducing Glitch Art to the formal differences of glitches on the one hand as maloperations and on the other hand as modifications looking like maloperations ("glitch-alike", see Moradi, Imani: GTLCH Aesthetics. Dissertation The University of Huddersfield. Huddersfield 2004, p.10). He points to the observers and their ways to give meanings to the works produced in one of the ways mentioned above by locating them in their actual social context.
    Betancourt's rejection of interpretations understanding each glitch as "inherently critical" is based on Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's comments on autonomous art and their bourgeois refunctionalisation. Recipients will open up "the potential for a critically oriented practice" by their capacities to interpret technical processes with their knowledge of normal uses and interruptions. In selecting glitch procedures artists should be able to anticipate the interpretive horizons of their recipients – for example by their ways to relate disrupted as well as non-disrupted parts with each other (4/2015; 1/2020).

  • Bosma, Josephine: Post/Digital is Post/Screen. Arnheim's Visual Thinking applied to Art in the Expanded Digital Media Field.
    In: A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research. APRJA. Vol. 3/Issue 1. 2014. According to Bosma the term "post-digital" highlights a reorientation: Although digital media spread faster than ever, actual analyses of the social and cultural consequences of technological developments aren't primarily focused on digitalisation. Contemporary artists react to these reorientations by focussing the attention not longer only to digital processes but to the aspects being neglected until now.
    In the view of Bosma arguments in Rudolf Arnheim's discourse on the function of the model formation in perception and cognition (id.: Visual Thinking, Berkeley 1969) can be expanded to a conception of post-digital tendencies. The perception is based on the reduction of complexity made possible by modeling schemes, because an unfiltered registration and memorisation of sense-data surmounts human capabilities. Arnheim pleas for a holistic method of thinking in offering possibilities for the reduction of sensory stimuli by a comprehensive structuration of the perceived. On the one hand he mentions early scientific "models for theory" as examples for models being constitutive for the perception processes ("Visual Thinking", chap.15), on the other hand he highlights psychological processes.
    As an example for a theory-laden change of a point of view Bosma points to the discourse led since the Renaissance between the arts and the natural sciences about the ellipse explained either as a deformed circle or as structured by its own relations between the center and the periphery: "A shift of the perspective can apparently enrich the way we approach things, even if not every detail of this new view is in line with the reality it reveals."
    Bosma recognizes similarities between Arnheim's approach to explicate the basics of visual perception as crucially constituted by more than only visual elements and Alexander R. Galloway's criticism of "The Interface Effect" (book, Malden/Massachusetts 2012) highlighting computing processes beyond the signs visible on screens ("the digital as a complex structure of forces obscured by a focus on the screen"). Relations between computing processes and screens are central in Lev Manovich's analysis of new media. Bosma regards Galloway's criticism of Manovich's focus on screens as an important source for the development of a "post-digital approach" by transgressing limits of the critical focus on screens.
    In the view of Bosma the following works present results of this "approach": As an example of "Code Art" she presents Jaromil's "Forkbomb". The alternative network "Netless" by Dania Vasiliev stands for networks integrated into installations and performances. Furthermore Bosma features actions by "The Yes Men" as "Post-Internet Art" because she understands their engagement in investigations of established imaginations of the digital as a development towards a concept of "the post-digital". The Yes Men's lectures are distributed as video documentations. With their hidden provocations of the audience the Yes Men highlight "different dimensions of reality" and discuss an "in-between space" being "a physical space, a technological space, and a conceptual space at once".
    Because The Yes Men combine media strategically to reach the goals of politically motivated actions as activism always did it, installations with integrated networks and/or internet access would have been more convincing as examples demonstrating hitherto unknown qualities of an "in-between space".
    Furthermore with her Arnheim inspired approach trying to explore levels of reality Bosma renews an elder subject of the artistic avant-garde of the the 20th century. Although Bosma doesn't want to return to a renewal of pre-digital media uses and concepts – she calls the pre-digital investigations of the cinema and the television problematic –, nevertheless she arrived there.
    With her absorption of examples from Code Art and activism into the actual paradigm of art criticism Bosma gives the label "post-digital" afterwards to these media forms and strategies originating in the web 1.0. With her efforts to demonstrate the term "post-digital" as an offer to wider insights Bosma's discussion does not get more than a mere dichotomisation between pop versions of the digital and the abandonment of this culture. Bosma reduces this discussion to the problem "screen" versus "post-screen" and highlightens alternatives to dominantly screen-related projects. These alternatives existed already before the popular multiplications of mobile computers and mobile phones with touchscreens.
    But what has been changed between the criticism of graphical user interfaces of standard operating systems for personal computers and the media constellations of web 2.0 determined more dominant than ever before by global players? An approach integrating the evolution of interfaces and its connections to the technologies for screen presentations could be more promising for investigations of artistic projects with the goal to provoke a media criticism than a simple avoidance of screen presentations, while most recipients only experience these "post-digital" projects by photos and film documents distributed on the internet and presented on screens (4/2015; 1/2020).

  • Grosser, Ben: How the Technological Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits Personal Representation.
    In: Hz Journal. Nr. 19/2014. In the view of Grosser the social network Facebook unnecessarily restricts the possibilities of its users to install their own pages. Without software changes it would be possible to offer three genders instead of two. However for the choice of a third gender it is possible to circumvent the Facebook-settings restricting the choice of gender-related dates.
    Furthermore Facebook standardises the input for languages and does not permit alternative spellings. Likewise some languages are ignored although they are the medium of the communication between members of wider social groups.
    Grosser recognises in these settings the world-views of a white middle class dominating Facebook's management. He recommends to modify this one-sidedness and to favor a wider variety of users' possibilities to decide between alternative self-definitions concerning the criteria of gender and race. Facebook also should do so in cases disturbing the interests of advertising clients and their wishes to use archived user data for interpretations of clients' attitudes.
    If the majority of black youngsters use MySpace for messages then this possibly is the result of Facebook's failure to consider the interests of wider population groups accordingly. This non-consideration contradicts Facebook's position as the dominant platform for messages useful for communications about themes transgressing the interests of specific groups. One of these themes comes up with the problem how to take into consideration general questions of an adequate treatment of minorities.
    Grosser recognises Facebook's non-considerations as parts of a tendency to "homogenise" the identity of "friends" in a discriminating manner. This contradicts the demand of tolerance claimed in social networks and on the streets by participants of the recent social revolts (In February 2014 Facebook changed their gender settings for users of its American version and in September 2014 for users of the German version; 4/2015).

  • Mansoux, Aymeric: Free Culture Licenses as Art Manifestos.
    In: Hz-Journal. Nr.19/2014. Artists of Mail Art like Ray Johnson 'signed' their letters with a "copyleft icon": It was a copyright logo mirrored or turned upside down.
    The GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) was developed by Richard Stallman for copyright-relevant open source software. A transfer of the GNU GPL to works of art poses problems as Mansoux demonstrates in cases of collaborative internet works.
    Bonnie Mitchell's "Chain Art Project" (1993) is useful to point to the problems caused by a transfer of the GNU GPL to art: The process of contributions by participants in the form of ongoing modifications of image files constitutes a "joint work" (Chon, Margaret: New Wine Bursting From Old Bottles. Collaborative Internet Art, Joint Works, and Enterpreneurship. In: Oregon Law Review. Nr.75/1996, p.257-276).
    The first Copyleft License written for artworks was published in 2000. The authors of this License Art Libre or "Copyleft Attitude" were Bertrand Keller and Antoine Moreau, amongst others. They substituted the "GNU General Public License['s]" unity of manifesto and instruction by a more pragmatic argumentation.
    Modern movements and their goals to change social structures pursue – according to Mansoux – projects of a "free art" trying to establish itself as a "multidimensional, ambiguous object" in contemporary social and legal conditions. In their projects the engaged artists can work out one or some of the four aspects: the supply of "toolkits for artists", "political statement", "legal and technical framework" or "fashionable statement".
    For Mansoux the efforts to position open source "under the overwhelming allencompassing umbrella of free culture" appear today as "mere prototypes of a globalist cultural cooperation mechanism". Mansoux claims that this is "championed by the Creative Commons non-profit organization". Apparently for Mansoux a pragmatic and multi-facetted "free art" fulfilling one or more of the four aspects mentioned above is and will be able to evade his criticism of Creative Commons as long as it remains splitted into alternatives: a pluralistic engaged practice against a unified culture (4/2015).

  • Garcia, David: From Tactical Media to the Neo-pragmatists of the Web.
    In: Aceti, Lanfranco/Jaschko, Susanne/Stallabrass, Julian (ed.): Red Art. New Utopias in Data Capitalism. In: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol.20/No.1, January 2014, p.124-135. Garcia presents the development of net activism from the nineties until now. "Tactical Media" were shaped by the will of the actresses and actors to develop a "liberating power of expression in politics" (p.127) via the web. In the nineties the internet, with its new possibilities for participation, should also make it possible to express a new "ideal of democracy" (p.127).
    Michel de Certeau (in "The Practice of Everyday Life", Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984/1988; original title: L'invention du quotidien. Vol.1: Arts de faire, Paris 1980) explains the "consumer" as tactically dealing with given strategies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, p.xii,xix). For Garcia the "consumer" anticipates the evolution from the "overlapping practices" of "artists, hackers, political activists, independent media makers" (p.127) to the networks of tactical media's developers and users.
    In this evolution to Tactical Media Garcia recognises an "expressivism" unfolding that had been anticipated by the "Romantic rebellion against the rationalist utilitarianism of the Enlightenment" (p.127): He sees parallels in the roles of artists in Romanticism and in tactical media networks, not without taking into account the change in the fields of action as it was caused by the internet (p.129).
    In order to be able to distinguish the possibilities of engaging in Web 2.0 from the Tactical Media of Web 1.0, Garcia draws on Felix Stalder's distinction between a decentralized "front-end" and a centralized "back-end" executed in long-lasting and intransparent plans (Stalder, Felix: Between Democracy and Spectacle: Front-End and the Back-End of Social Web, 2012). Garcia sees a shift in net activism from the former to the latter: from Tactical Media to clicktivism, from independent social interventions planned in collaborations to programmed platforms such as MoveOn and Avaaz which offer programmed functions and no longer scope for tactics. Instead of looking for debates on controversial topics, consensus with many users is perferred.
    Garcia sees his assessment confirmed by this statement by Ricken Patel, the head of Avaaz: "In order to bring about radical change in the world you don't need to be controversial." (Patel 2007) At Avaaz member surveys replace controversy and it is easy to become one of the members who are constantly asked for donations. Les Liens Invisibles have criticized this "armchair activism" with the "online petition service Repititionr" (2010): "Tweet for Action, Augment your Reaction." (p.133. "False signatures" generated by the service are a way to success, too).
    Garcia proposes that failures should be used to recognize opportunities for a renewing of democratic politics in the age of networks (1/2020).

  • Dekker, Annet: Assembling Traces, or the Conservation of Net Art.
    In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies. Spring 2014. Dekker pleas for a not only backward-looking conservation of net art. On the one hand works with a source code not functioning in contemporary net conditions (new browsers for new operating systems) provoke the question if the code can be rewritten. On the other hand contributions should be integrated produced by users acting as participants of the work ("input from visitors") and as agents in the 'context' of a work.
    Since 1996 the website mouchette.org is organised by Martine Naddam. This site is used by Dekker as an example to outline her understanding of a 'context': When the widow of the film director Robert Bresson tried to prohibit references of any sort to his movie «Mouchette» then the participants reacted with mirror sites (see ann.25). These mirror sites documented a specific state in the development of the site mouchette.org.
    According to Dekker the results of preservations or reconstructions of net art are caused by the ways chosen by participants of a net community to archive several states of a project as well as to care for continuations or resumptions of the possibilities for participations (as interactions with the net project). A net project's context can be constituted and cultivated by the net activities of the participants (blogs, websites, etc.): "Such a process does not exclude conservation but incorporates future thinking in its practice while guarding or making documentation as traces of a past..." (4/2015).

  • Moss, Cecilia Laurel: Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu.
    Thesis, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University, New York 2015. Modified print version: Expanded Internet Art. Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu. London/Oxford/New York/New Delhi/Sydney 2019. In her thesis Moss expands the subject of artistic works with and in an "informational milieu" created by the internet as she already published it in her essay of the same title from 2013 (see above). While Tiziana Terranova in Network Culture (2004) explains the contribution of cybernetics to the "informational milieu" (p.9,20 et seq. ) and defines the term information in reference to Gilbert Simondon in a framework larger than the one offered by the cybernetic reduction to physical processes, Moss understands Simondon's critique of mathematically oriented cybernetics (p.57f.) as a paradigm shift to a milieu concept that presents processes between technology and man as reciprocal: Man and technology develop inseparable units in milieus. Although Moss integrates contributions also written in the fifties by Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer into her concept of the inseparability of man and technology in cultures, Simondon's intellectual environment does not provide her with decisive insights for "Expanded Internet Art".
    With Jean-François Lyotard's concept for the exhibition «Les Immatériaux» in 1985 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (p.94-111) and with his texts and lectures of 1985-86 Moss attempts both to determine the development of the connections between man and technology as well as to clarify the function of art in the technical environment created by man.
    The visitors could not follow a guideline through «Les Immatériaux» but had to choose their own paths between the stations. Moss compares the perplexity of the visitors in their search for the goal of the exhibition with situations in the "informational milieu". She notes a "continual unfolding" as a characteristic of an "expanded internet art" that "has co-developed with the internet." (p.45).
    To Lyotard's "anamnesic resistance" (p.127f.) Moss tries to find alternatives with the aid of the "media tourists writing in the 2000's" (p.52) Terranova, Mark B.N. Hansen und Bernard Stiegler in order to be able to define the contemporary "informational milieu" as being shaped by the "posthuman" (p.128,149,151-155). Inspired by Hansen' explanations Moss wants to recognize a milieu being constituted by the ways how subjects react to their environment (p.155 with ann.35).
    Thus she wants to recognize relations between subjects and their environment beyond Lyotard's definition of "resistance" against the "inhuman" (p.79-89, 116f.,149f.). Unfortunately in her effort to determine a posthuman constellation betweeen creators and milieu beyond Lyotard's approach Moss succeeds neither on a theoretical level nor in the analysis of works of art by Kari Altman, Harm van Dorpel, The Jogging (Brad Troemel & Lauren Christensen), Oliver Laric, Katja Novitskova, Hannah Sawtell, Katie Steciw and Timor Si-Qin.
    In contrast to Moss' assessment of the artistic subject in posthuman conditions Michael Sanchez observes (in "2011: On Art and Transmission", 2013, see above) artists moving without resistance in the contemporary flood of images and concludes that these works can no longer claim authorship in the traditional sense: The reaction time adapted to the accelerated flood of data prevents an artistic processing that would suggest an editing subject (1/2020).

  • Quaranta, Domenico: Situating Post Internet.
    In: Catricalà, Valentino (ed.): Media Art. Toward a New Definition of Art in the Age of Technology. Rome 2015, p.121-134. In 2013 Post-Internet Art became a much discussed term in the art world (art trade, museums etc.), from which net art became independent. In 2014, Brian Droitcour explained the term in Perils of Post-Internet Art as part of a marketing strategy to direct interest through an "internet layer" (p. 122) to mediocre works as exhibition objects. Quaranta, on the other hand, argues that Post-Internet Art should be understood as an extension of strategies to address images and texts circulating on the web: Post-Internet Art is to be criticized against the background of "group surfing practices" that emerged in the first decade of the 21st century (p.123).
    From December 2009 to September 2010 Gene Mc Hugh thematized the Web in a blog as a distribution and navigation medium – "a distribution platform, a machine for altering and re-channeling work" (Mc Hugh, Gene: Post Internet. Brescia 2011, p.6) – with which contemporary art should deal. In addition to Gene McHugh, Artie Vierkant (see above), Louis Doulas and Katja Novitskaja also addressed the artistic relevance of the circulation of data that permeates everyday life and is determined by the Web: "...they all pointed to the internet as a cultural reference and an environment, rather than a medium." (p.125) The Web is seen as a source of points of reference for art works in different media rather than as an examination of webness (media-specific criteria of the Web).
    James Bridle's observations of a "New Aesthetic" influenced by digital technology in everyday life, design and art, "surfing clubs" (p.126ff.) and artists like Kevin Brewersdorf, Mark Leckey, Guthrie Lonergan, Metahaven, Seth Price and F.A.T. Lab with Evan Roth, Aram Bartholl, Addie Wagenknecht, Lolan Levin and others (p.126-131) provide clues to Quaranta for an investigation of web-related everyday and media phenomena. This investigation exists alongside the marketing of works by a group of artists under the label "Post-Internet Art". Quaranta confronts the commodities being labeled as Post-Internet Art with works of artists who locate their works within the media landscape and contexts shaped by the Web: The works are processes in which analogue and digital media are combined in a way that is both close to today's media use and distinguishable from it. Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin already addressed this self-localization in a "cultural loop" in 1999 in Introduction to net.art (1994-1999) (p.130). In "Painting to exist only when it's copied or photographed" (1964), Yoko Ono also anticipated an attack on "artworks-as-commodities" (p.132) with the process of destroying originals and replacing them with copies. Quaranta sees a continuation of this "process of (subversive) affirmation" (p.131) in Joshua Citarella's Compression Artifacts (2013) and Oliver Laric's Lincoln 3D Scans (2013). Both integrate telecommunication, digital media and objects into strategies that take up processes of the art world (p.132ff.). To what extent these examples revitalize the Context Art of the nineties with extended medial possibilities is not the subject of Quaranta. The relation of concept and context becomes relevant here again in a way whose art-world-centered way was transgressed by net art. The two levels of firstly media reflection extending beyond art and secondly the re-embedding in the context of art have already been linked in context art with refractions of this context, usually without transgressing it. By following these strategies, Quaranta's examples of Citarella and Laric are Context Art under the conditions of the Web (2/2020).

  • 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 Narula) 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).

  • Ivanova, Victoria: Art's Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié.
    In: Parse Journal, Issue 2, Autumn 2015. According to Ivanova the term "value" can be differentiated into three fields of meaning: "ethical, functional and economic" (p.92). "Ethical" are "the referent's non-instrumental qualities" (p.92) pointing beyond morality, while "functional" also includes "use-value" outside the economic values. Ivanova presents the interplay of these value concepts in refractions from Conceptual Art to Post-Internet Art. In her reconstruction of these refractions the following postulates play a decisive role because they determine what art should be: 1.) While following discourses on social values art should not lose sight of reality but rather influence these discourses. 2.) Art should not reflect economic values uncritically. For Ivanova the former is a problem of the art of the sixties and seventies, the latter a problem of Post-Internet Art.
    While the latter (2.) integrates values into its concept in such a way that strategies of "branding" lead to economic success of the artists, the former (1.) pays too little attention to possibilities for interventions meanwhile they concentrate themselves on discussions of values. In order to sound out the possibilities of bringing both sides together Ivanova presents the possibilities of a "right" and "left accelerationism" (p.103) attempting to make the communication media more accessible despite their "capitalization" (p.103) in developing peculiar modes of presentation with integrated articulations of "values": "Changes to systemic conditions need not be immediately tangible or game-changing, but the impetus needs to be discernible if art's value is to have integrity that isn't just a matter of formal integration of its component parts." (p.104).
    According to Ivanova strategies that directly criticize "capitalization" are not an option because in this way their dictum of integrity, which can be achieved by integrating values into ones own practices, is replaced with a success-oriented use of resources. The old discussion, as to whether activism (respectively intervention) or politically effective autonomous art is preferable, is renewed by Ivanova with her plea for the latter. Instead of gaining perspectives through a discussion of strategies in and for a media landscape changed by social media, Ivanova argues with terms such as "ontology" and "value", which she does not define, and with questionable reconstructions of a "conceptual/post-structuralist turn" (p.94) (1/2020).

  • Lotti, Laura: Contemporary Art, Capitalization and the Blockchain: On the Autonomy and Automation of Art's Value.
    In: Finance and Society, Vol.2/No.2, 2016, p.96-110. Lotti outlines the close interrelationship between contemporary art and capital: New ways of distributing art correspond to digital modes of the financial system's organization. In consequences of these new ways the artistic strategies of social intervention are pushed to the periphery of the art world (p.100). The platforms ArtRank and Artsy (and the Art Genome Project) serve Lotti as evidence of the interpenetration of digital organisational forms of capital and the art world. The automation of the evaluation of artists and works is one of the consequences: "...the 'value' of contemporary art becomes subsumed into pricing mechanisms and loses any ontological primacy."
    In this situation Blockchain and Bitcoin appear to offer ways out of financial dependencies since money is not materially available here and its value results only from "dynamics of the network" (p.102). On the one hand the banking system tries to integrate Blockchain, on the other hand there are expectations to find new applications for "online commons".
    Lotti uses the examples Monegraph and Plantoid to investigate how Blockchain is integrated into current art projects. The former offers artists the possibility to provide digital works with an "authorship layer" through which the paths of the work can be tracked and fees can be billed (p.102f.) without having to rely on galleries. In fact old dependencies are replaced by new ones – now by "an algorithmic third party" (p.103).
    In Plantoid of the French collective OKhaos a robot is paid by voluntary contributions via "smart contracts" in Ethereum. In this way further robots are financed and then developed and executed. Lotti sees the executing persons as "'Mechanical Turks'" (p.104).
    The projects "Plantoid" and "Monegraph", according to Lotti, reflect "the dynamics of contemporary markets" and contribute to the "'commodification of everything'" (p.105) (1/2020).

  • Peraica, Ana: Culture of the Selfie: Self-Representation in Contemporary Visual Culture.
    Theory of Demand Nr. 24. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2017. Peraica outlines the possibilities of Selfies through prehistories: the history of the self-portrait as well as depictions of mirrors as they are used in the media of painting and photography.
    The possibilities of painting to make people visible in the pictorial space by means of mirrors provide Peraica with occassions to thematize the integration of observers into the pictorial space.
    Peraica contrasts the debate of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century about the medium photography as a trace of the past and thus as Memento Mori (p.72) with photographs of the contemporary staging of the dead – often with open eyes – with family members (post-mortem photography): The consideration for the dead being common today had first to be established.
    On the one hand, Selfies take up again the integration of the observer into a pictorial space that delimits his location, as it was developed in the history of painting, through self-representations in the mirror (p.66,92, image 9,18), and the dead are sometimes shown disrepectfully, as if Post-mortem Photography had to be revived (p.77, image 11f.). On the other hand, the distribution conditions for photography, as they are constituted by social media, change the status of the image producer and the possibilities of image reception. The photographer loses his/her status as a creator and the private context of family albums, as it was important for the Post-mortem Photography, is replaced by the Web 2.0 public sphere.
    As a result of these changes the three "spaces" of the image creating human, the portrayed person and the recipient are newly intertwined. The "Selfie Olympics" are a competition that in 2014 (and for the second time in 2018) called for the photographing of self-portraits with mirrors in the bathroom. These Selfies can be called up with hashtag in Twitter (#selfieolympics). The contributions of this competition, in which the participants photographed themselves in unusual poses between mirrors and other parts of the bathroom, are used by Peraica as examples to show how the objectifying mirror image is subjectified in the Selfie, in order to be objectified again by the reactions of the Twitter participants: This "subject-object loop" (p.99. Cf. p.50f.) has parallels in contemporary art photography taking up parts of the art history of painting: The mirrors in paintings by Jan Van Eyck (p.35, image 6), Parmigianino (p.40, graph 3), Diego Velazquez (p.39, graph 2) and René Magritte (p.98, graph 9) are revived by Miguel Angel Ganeca and Joan Fotcuberta (p.94 with Image 19, p.100 with image 20) in photographically constructed spaces while in Selfies photographers present themselves in the space depicted and thus at the moment of image formation, and then they distribute the results via social media losing the originator's/author's control: "...selfies are unstable...ephemeral and non-important." (p.88f.)
    According to Peraica painting is the medium for "the portrait of self" in which the artist is concerned with "internal reflection", while photography is the medium of the "self-portrait" in which the "time-gap between recording and posing, as well as between shutting and developing the film" (p.100) is used by authors for the graspable realization of an intention. In Selfies, by contrast, "a willing destruction of privacy" takes place, "that subverts the endless public display of the self" (p.105, quoting Henry A. Giroux).
    Peraica refers in her history from the self-portrait to the Selfie to Michel Foucault's lectures on "The Culture of the Self" at the University of Berkeley in 1983. Foucault's title inspired Peraica's title (p.56). In order to be able to cross her reconstruction of the dispositifs constituting the cultures of the self with the history of the media, painting, photography and selfie Peraica presents the myths Narciss and Perseus in interpretations by psychologists and the role of phototherapy in psychological practice (p.62f.,81). Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Julia Kristeva, Christopher Lasch and Marshall McLuhan (p.45f.,52) provide Peraica with building blocks for the reconstruction of the psychological discourse.
    With these and other academic references Peraica succeeds in reconstructing an convincing cultural history of self-representation in the media mentioned. What is conspicous about Peraica's history, however, is the absence of tourist photography by means of an analog camera, as it was investigated by Pierre Bourdieu in «Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de la photographie» (Paris 1965) and which is continued in the contemporary Selfie. The change of the self-representation in front of a travel motif is part of a "Culture of the Self[ie]" (1/2020).

  • Lotti, Laura: Financialization as a Medium: Speculative Notes on Post-Blockchain Art.
    In: Gloerich, Inte/Vries, Patricia de/Lovink, Geert (ed.): MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2018, p.87-100. In the "financialization" turning art works into commodities tensions arise in the determination of prices since cultural and aesthetic values oppose procedures of quantification based on standards. In a digitized culture art appears socially and economically valued in a way that, according to Lotti, provokes comparisons with derivatives of the financial markets.
    Two years after her critical article on "Contemporary art, capitalization and the blockchain" (2016, see above) it seems plausible to Lotti that an art with Blockchain makes use of a digital system that permits independence from the institutions of the financial system and proposes new modes of application for this system: Through appropriation and reprogramming of the "current logic of financial derivatives" (p.96) "new horizons for the creation of autonomous milieus" (p.97) can be won.
    The affirmation of existing cultural, technical and economic conditions in Post-Internet Art can be overcome by a Post-Blockchain Art that turns "the art of money making" (p.98) by programming "cryptographic tokens" (see Lotti, Laura: Cryptoeconomics And/As Practice (2018), see below) in "the art of making offers" (p.98).
    The projects BitchCoin (2015) and terra0 (2016) serve Lotti as examples for new applications of Blockchain which can be developed "toward the creation...of many possible, interoperating art worlds" (p.99).
    At "BitchCoin" parts of Sarah Meyohas' photographic prints are distributed in a system constantly generating new values. According to Lotti, how this "'liquid commodity'" with Blockchain can lead beyond the conditions of commodity trade, is the question and the answer is the search of new ways to overcome the limits of the current blockchains. Lotti recognises limits "in terms of scalability (due to low consensus speed and high entrance costs, so that only big investors can enter the space)" (p.98f.): The possibilities for the programming of "smart contracts", as offered by Ethereum, must therefore be extended (1/2020).

  • Manovich, Lev: 100 Billion Data Rows per Second. Media Analytics in the Early 21st Century.
    In: International Journal of Communication, Nr.12/2018, p.473-488. Manovich describes once again the changes of the internet caused by growing data storage and the abilities of platform programmers to respond to user behavior. He argues for "computational media studies" in order to be able to examine the effects of recommendations in social media and sites for web commerce, among other things: Do they lead to increased attention to a few offers or to the expansion of interests and purchases?
    In 1944 Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in "The Dialectic of Enlightenment" about the development of the media landscape of the forties towards dediversification. Manovich confirms this with results of the research on the movie production of the Hollywood studios. Such studies of "large volumes of media content" are not yet the norm of media studies for the present (p.483).
    Investigations of image platforms such as Instagram and Flickr show only minor differences in the filters responding to user preferences in different regions. Manovich mentions a study according to which the ambitions of Flickr users in photographic image design and the clickrates generated by Flickr do not show any connections. The results of ambitions of photographers only succeed in attracting the attention of the users to their photos if they communicate a lot in social media at the same time.
    Therefore the proposal seems plausible to install a recommendation system directing the attention to the least visited images and their characteristics (p.484; Schifanella, Redi & Aiello): Should this algorithmic procedure be used to find recipients for a kind of photographic image design in platforms in which examples of its application remained unnoticed?
    In contrast to the forties the "cultural industry" today is no longer creating images but "is focusing on organizing, presenting, and recommending content created by others" (p.484). Besides film stars "social-media mini-celebrities" (p.485) establish themselves under the conditions thus created. With "computational methods" the "variability of this content" (p.485) should become recognizable (1/2020).

  • Marres, Noortje: Why We Can't Have Our Facts Back.
    In: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, Nr.4/2018, p.423-443. For users visiting social media with fake news there are very few sites for facilitating investigations of the veracity of the information. According to Marres the polarization on the one hand in groups interested in "knowledge" and on the other hand in groups preferring "anti-knowledge" (p.432; "politics of demarcation", p.431) will not be dissolved but reinforced by "fact checking services" (p.431). The producers of such tools accept the evidence of verifiable facts which presupposes a static information landscape with established standards for evidence (S.428).
    How can a "knowledge democracy" be practiced in "dynamic information environments" (p.434)?
    The dynamics in "information environments" are supported by algorithms created to attract attention. The "truth-less public sphere" (p.435) thus created provokes "the dissolution of the modern fact" (Sergio Sismondo, p.434).
    For Marres dynamic information landscapes require "to test public media for 'experimental facts'" (p.438). The one-sided development to an ever wider audience for fake news as well as the counter-developments intensifying the separation between "knowledge" and "anti-knowledge" ("demarcationism", p.437,440) need to be counteracted by a "formulation and re-formulation of new empirical truths" realised by "different actors" and "new alliances" (p.440): "...epistemic authority will also have to be earned the hard way, through an exchange between epistemically diverse viewpoints" (p.441). In this way the change from the "politics of demarcation to a politics of selection" should succeed. This kind of politics "progressively establishes a referent for claims through an iterative process of locating and evaluating statement-networks in formation" (p.441, ann.28). Before the "knowledge democracy" won't be restored through a regained "epistemic authority...to want your facts back will amount to empty nostalgia." (p.441) (1/2020).

  • Tifentale, Alise/Manovich, Lev: Competitive Photography and the Presentation of the Self.
    In: Eckel, Julia/Ruchatz, Jens/Wirth, Sabine (ed.): Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Analytical, and Theoretical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography. Basingstoke 2018, p.167-187. In her first part (to p.15) Tifentale pleads for a knowledge of phtotographic equipment as a part of the "general literacy", the general education of the "global majority" (Nicholas Mirzoeff). Tifentale turns against studies exploring photographic practice with smartphones, as if there were no continuities between analog and digital photography, by quoting Werner Gräff and Franz Roh: In 1929 both referred to the connections between purchaseable portable cameras becoming cheaper, the expected knowledge and possible applications (p.4).
    For Tifentale the decisive separation of photographic practice does not take place between amateur and professional photographer but between "non-competitive photography" (p.9) and "competitive photography" (p.5 with ann.12) with stylistic characteristics of a photographer being identifiable in comparisons to other photographers. The first one's motives – such as family reunions – are relevant for the closer circle of friends, while a non-avant-garde "competitive photography" increases "likeability" by following criteria of a canon, as it has developed in instructions for the photographic practice and hopes to fulfill these criteria with stylistic coherency and recognizability (p.11ff.). Here there are continuities from instructions for photographing being published in 1954 – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis and Heinrich Freytag (p.12f.) are quoted – to the photographic practice for the distribution via social media. According to Lev Manovich Instagram contains an "80/20 split between non-competitive and competitive photography" (p.18).
    Manovich concentrates on Selfies which between December 2013 and September 2015 comprised about one tenth of the photo contributions on Instagram (p.19f.). According to Manovich painted self-portraits present the depicted person in isolation whereas the Selfies are dominated by relations between the depicted person and her/his environment: An important part of the image message results from where ("situation selfies", S.19) and with whom ("group selfies", p.20) the depicted person was photographed.
    In "anti-selfies" (p.19) self-portrayal becomes a minor matter: Instead of the face only body parts – often hands – can be seen (p.22 with fig.4): "...they [the photos] and the author's life are supposed to be the same in terms of values, interests and aesthetics." (p.23)
    In "visual narratives" on Instagram photo sequences can form a "viewpoint character" (p.23) whose characteristic peculiarities authors can use to make their sequence distinguishable from others. For Tifentale these criteria are primarily the formal ones of "competitive photography" ("an aesthetic statement", p.10). However celebrities do not have to be good photographers in their image contributions and are nevertheless "competitive" in the sense of "likeability" (S.10).
    If contributions follow "emotional" rather than aesthetic criteria and do not take "likeability" into account, then they are "non-competitive", according to Manovich: "These authors ...use Instagram for documentation and communication with people they know." (p.17 with fig.3). The question remains whether the differentiation criterion form versus emotion is viable for the differentiation of Selfies (1/2020).

  • Lotti, Laura: Cryptoeconomics And/As Artistic Practice: Sketches for New Design Imaginaries.
    In: Schloss-Post, Issue No. 0, October 2018. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer system enabling decentralized "autonomous systems" because transactions are stored immutably on different computers. Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on Blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin Ethereum enables "smart contracts" containing programs through which instructions of any kind can be executed. "Tokenization" refers to "smart contract tokens" allowing access to, among other things, "gold, computing power, artworks or more generally, an alluring proposition for a decentralized ecosystem."
    For Lotti tokenization "with a unique ID" can be used to create a digital parallel to a unique piece and its status as a work of art. In contrast to the art trade and the financial system this takes place decentrally and without institutional ties.
    Systems like Maecenas use "the rent model characteristic of financial capitalism and current internet platforms" for "the tokenization of physical art objects." Lotti refers to the parallels between financial systems and the art world: On the one hand the Blockchain systems applied to the art world appear like a consequence of the current phase of the "financialization of art", on the other hand tokenization via "cryptography" enables alternatives to this "financialization", as it is not only pushed in the art world ("financialization in general"). Lotti compares these alternatives with derivatives in the financial system. What can become a problem there due to a lack of regulation can also open up alternatives to "financialization": "...through the engagement with new interactive protocols, based on tokens as conduits to the experience of a decentralized ecosystem."
    Lotti mentions terra0 (2016) and 0xOmega (2018) as examples for the current state of Blockchain Art allowing prospects on its possibilities. Characteristic for these examples is the interaction through "economic incentives" to create a "common will to project" (Hui, Yuk/Halpin, Harry: Collective Individuation 2013).
    Compared to her contribution on "Contemporary art, capitalization and the blockchain" (2016, see above), Lotti shifts the focus of her analysis in "Cryptoeconomics And/As Artistic Practice" from a generally critical view of the combination of blockchain and art that does not escape the "commodification of everything" to "affordances" that artists should take into account in the "design of cryptosystems" (1/2020).

  • Kelkar, Shreeharsh: Post-Truth and the Search for Objectivity: Political Polarization and the Remaking of Knowledge Production.
    In: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. Nr.5/2019, p.86-106. To investigate the media constellations that led to the phenomenon "post-truth" in the USA, Kelkar combines two research approaches – "institutional political science" and "science, technology and sociology" (STS) – by combining the investigations of the history of the "political polarization" of the former with the "analyses of 'objectivity' in science and public life" of the latter (p.86,90). The former pursues the construction of a conservative counter-public sphere to academic, fact-oriented discourses, while the latter contradict a reduction of "knowledge democracy" to evidence-based proofs and examine the institutional preconditions of this "knowledge democracy".
    For the STS researcher Noortje Marres (in "Why We Can't Have Our Facts Back", see above) attempts to reverse "political polarization" through "fact checking" lead to an increase in "demarcation" (p.99) between the publics interested in fact-oriented knowledge and the publics of a conservative counter-public sphere. According to Steve Hoffman ("The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment of Post-Truth Demagoguery"), the conditions of "post-truth" are more diverse than Marres recognizes: the historical causes of "demarcation" lie before social media. But the latter have promoted the "alternative fact-making universe" (p.99).
    While according to Marres the "demarcation" runs between fact-oriented discourse and "mystification and propaganda", Hoffman recognizes two ideologies that are independent of each other. According to Kelkar, however, Marres' "true/false demarcation" is to be agreed to the extent that efforts of the "social media giants" to expose lies through "journalistic fact-checkers" (p.99) and to label them as such point the way to a restoration of "knowledge democracy" under conditions of "post-truth". While Marres sees in "fact-checking" only an intensification of "demarcation", and the way to a solution only leads via discussion, according to Kelkar the exclusion of the producers of fake news should be institutionally anchored: "A new knowledge-producing 'center' of researchers, journalists, and platforms" should be able to confront institutions that spread "white nationalism, conspiracy theories, and hate speech" (p.101). Crucial for such a center and the formation of "new civic epistemologies" (p.102) are the exclusion criteria, which institutions should be included in the circle of accepted researchers and which should be explicitly excluded. Kelkar points to the exclusion of the Infowars portal from the social media Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (p.101f.) as an example of how such exclusions can deprive the platforms that disseminate fake news of publicity.
    The conservative power dispositive is thus to be answered by a power dispositive that is strong enough to reinstall a "knowledge democracy", which derives its legitimacy from the difference between "fact-checkers" and fake news, but cannot claim this difference without institutional processes that are able to enforce exclusions. This is a demand to reinstall lines of demarcation, which should have been dismantled since the revolts of the 1960s. Do we only have the choice between a policy that restricts freedom of expression and a policy that abolishes this freedom? For Marres obviously remains the choice of an open discussion of divergent views as the only way to support political publicity (1/2020).

  • Calovizza, Giovanni/Finucane, Blake/Franceschet, Massimo/Smith, T’ai u.a.: Crypto Art. A Decentralized View.
    In: Researchgate, June 2019. This "decentralized position paper" explains the blockchain method and its applications in art from different perspectives. After an introduction to blockchain technology as the division of information into blocks that are interconnected ("cryptographic hash function") and disseminated via peer-to-peer, further aspects follow from art historical and artistic perspectives as well as from the perspective of platform operators. In their search for precursors of "Crypto Art," T'ai Smith and Blake Finucane believe they can find connecting factors in Marcel Duchamp and Conceptual Art (keyword "dematerialization"), but then have to sum up: "...crypto art inverses the critique of art's economic value that was initiated by Duchamp and espoused by practitioners of conceptual art." The gallerists Jonathan Perkins and James Morgan report from the early days of NFT platforms. These reports may become documents for histories of the NFT art trade (9/2022).

  • Garcia, David: Beyond the Evidence.
    In: New Tactical Research, 9/2019. A BBC radio show (Andrew McGibbon: Evidently Art, 2019) and texts by Tatiana Bazzichelli (2016) and Paolo Cirio (2017) highlighted the importance of evidence in a socio-critical art. Forensic Architecture's investigation into the circumstances of the murder of Halit Yozgat (The Murder of Halit Yozgat, 2017) is explained by David Garcia as an example of an "investigative installation": During the ninth NSU (National Socialist Underground, Germany) murder in 2006, a secret informant of the Hessian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Andreas Temme) was in the Kassel Internet café, who claims that he did not notice the murder. Forensic Architecture's exact reconstruction of the crime and the location of the informant before, during and shortly after the time of the crime prove the opposite. Members of the Hessian CDU doubted this result and thus protected the informant.
    According to Garcia, beside Forensic Architecture projects by artists such as Erica Scourti, Michael O'Connell, Jonas Staal, Lawrence Abu Hansen, Wachter & Judt, Trevor Paglen, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and others also reveal an "Evidentiary Realism" (Cirio) as a contemporary trend.
    For forms documenting socially critical tendencies artists and activists should also substantiate 'evidence through facts' epistemologically, because then their strategies of revealing can be distinguished from strategies of 'misinformation'.
    How can the truth content of 'rival narratives' be tested? Garcia mentions the point of view of the sociologist Noortje Marres (in "Why We Can't Have Our Facts Back", 2018, see above), for whom "epistemic authority" can only be won over in the discourse on "epistemically diverse viewpoints". But the "knowledge democracy" in which such debates are possible is being infiltrated by populists. In contrast, committed citizens can form "knowledge assemblies". For Garcia, extending the influence of "knowledge assemblies" on political opinion-forming is a decisive means against populism (1/2020).

  • Quaranta, Domenico: Code as Law. Contemporary Art and NFTs.
    In: Orizio, Zaglio e Associati (eds.): I, Lawyer. Innovation Lawyer Project. O.O. 2021, p.31-37. Domenico Quaranta introduces blockchain and NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens). He dampens expectations of high profits and shows that only a few artists generate higher revenues (20% generate $100 - $200). He also points to the return of "middlemen and gatekeepers" (p.36) in NFT trading. Instead of refusing to engage in NFT trading, the author advises: "Choosing the right mode to engage is key." (9/2022)

  • Quaranta, Domenico: L’estetica dei Non-Fungible Token/The Aesthetics of Non-Fungible Tokens.
    In: Civiltà delle macchine, 4/Dicembre 2021, p.66-71,89ff. The Italian art critic contradicts the view that there is an aesthetic of Crypto Art. He uses Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) as an example, whose illustration style via digital animation has not fundamentally changed with the sale via NFT. Quaranta sees possibilities for “una fenonomenologia specifica dell'arte basata su blockchain” (“a specific phenomenology of an art constituted by processes using blockchain.”) (p.70) in Okhaos' Plantoid (2016, s. tips) (9/2022).

  • Kasprzak, Michelle: Ethical Engagement with NFTs – Impossibility of Viable Aspiration?
    In: Cheang, Shu Lea/Stalder, Felix/Chaudronnet, Ewen: From Commons to NFTs. Makery Media for Labs, 2022. Michelle Kasprzak first presents reactions to the ecological problems of Ethereum's Proof of Work method (before Ethereum’s switch to Proof of Stake), then she reports on projects using Ethereum-based NFT trade also as a cash machine, but now it serves as a means for good causes. The Golden NFT project of the Peng! Collective uses the auctioning of digital works (via OpenSea) created by artists for this purpose to raise money as a means to obtain European passports for immigrants. This kind of passport procurement was previously only possible for rich non-Europeans, who can live with the consequences of ecological change and were or are partly contributors to climate change. Those people will receive European passports (in ironic utilization of the unfair, investor-favoring process of awarding "Golden Visa") who have lost basic working conditions in their home countries. The Art League of Congolese Plantation Workers CATPC (in the Democratic Republic of Congo) is cooperating in Balot NFT (since 6/14/2022) with Dutch artist Renzo Martens to auction 306 partial simulations of a wooden sculpture in order to be able to buy one hectare of plantation land with each of the 306 tokens. In 1931 the sculpture was created in Congo and it represents the Belgian colonial official Maximilien Balot. The wooden sculpture was built on the occasion of a Pende uprising against Unilever's plantation system and the Belgian colonial power. Additional information: The wooden sculpture is now on loan to the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond. It was sold by the Pende to the current owner in 1970 to send village children to school (Woodward, Richard B.: Visions from the Congo. Kap. A Rising of the Wind. Art from a Time of Rebellion in the Congo In: Blackbird Archive. Vol.11/No.1, Spring 2012). The VMFA is in dispute with Martens over the rights to the photographs used in the simulation (Boffey, Daniel: Row about Congolese Statue loan escalates into Legal Battle over NFTs. In: The Guardian, 2/19/2022). Requests to the museum to loan the wooden sculpture to the White Cube created by CATPC in the Unilever Plantations area went unanswered (9/2022).

  • Tanni, Valentina: The Great Algorithm.
    PostScriptUM #43. Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana 2022. Valentina Tanni presents ways of using social media that subvert their algorithms. Because these are proprietary, users can only hypothesize why certain opinions are shared frequently and others rarely, and consider how to use or circumvent the algorithmically organized selection. Combinations of topics popular on social media, such as cosmetics, with political topics can serve to undermine an "algorithmic censoring system" (p.10). Word formations give rise to "Algospeak" ("to unalive" instead of “to kill”) to disable the algorithmic selection for certain contents (Taylor Lorenz; p.12 with note 11). Against this background, Tanni explains Ben Grosser's methods in the projects Go Rando (2017) and Not For You (2020), which irritate social media selection systems through randomly generated clicks ("automated confusion system," p.14) and complicate the emergence of filter bubbles based on collected data about user preferences. According to Tanni, control strategies of social media companies are tricked by user tactics: tactics versus strategies (9/2022).

  • Slocum, Paul: NFT Problems.
    In: Paul Slocum's Qotile, 6/17/2022. According to Paul Slocum, platforms for trading NFT should solve the following problems:
    • Verification procedures against counterfeiting (1),
    • hacked artists' accounts (2).
    Proof of authenticity (1) and authentication (2) are not possible without dependencies on external structures. Resales on other platforms raise the same problem. The decentralized character of the blockchain is lost if solutions with external security systems will be used. Slocum points to technical problems of the blockchain technology to secure the certificate even over longer periods of time and therefore suggests a parallel certification on paper. NFTs do not escape the risks of cryptocurrencies: Warnings from software developers and economists are ignored in discussions about NFT trading. Unfortunately, NFT trading favors certain file formats while other types of Digital Art are not traded. NFT cannot replace the notion of digital art, but it can narrow the view of the latter (9/2022).

Books on electronic media, hypertext and hyperfiction in IASLonline Rezensionen (book reviews, in German):

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), mobile apps (MA) and activism (AK):

Databases about and with (works of) Intermedia Art:

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). Since May 2015 the links are not only listed in alphabetical order, but in chronological order, too.


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