On entering the tiny "Art Now" space, packed away behind the modernist sculptures at the back of the Tate Britain, it looks as though one of those sculptures has been accidentally included in the current show: "Art and Money On line".
A smooth white cylinder, rising out of the floor like a modernist obelisk turns out to contain a touch screen monitor, linked to a video projector displaying "CNN Interactive just got more interactive", a web artwork by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (T&C).
The viewer is invited to use the (real) CNN site which is seamlessly framed by T&C's additional menu of tacky midi soundtracks, ("Upbeat", "Festive", "Melancholy", "Disaster".) which are provided to match the changing moods of the endless stream of news. The intervention in the austere, corporate CNN interface spills over into a physical intervention, sending strains of nauseating synthesized muzak out of the Art Now enclave and into the proper, serious Tate Gallery.
In the leaflet that accompanies the exhibition the curator Julian Stallabrass repeatedly refers to T&C's piece as a work that "only exists on line" and "has no material presence". How strange that he didn't notice the Brancusi-like obelisk/kiosk, the flashy touch screen monitor and the insane muzak intervention in a show that he is meant to have curated. Other works in the show are safely sanitized, (either comfortably fetishized as art objects or presenting an inscrutable veneer of slick technology and self reference). Obviously Stallabrass is interested in the fashionable idea of art parodying corporate culture and infotainment. However, he may have missed the fact that T&C were also throwing a parodic frame around the Tate's efforts (through this show) to assimilate net art into stagnant aesthetic/historical narratives.
After seeing T&C's installation, you can't help but notice the "Sponsored by Reuters" sign on the way through the modernist sculpture room, and just before you reach the exit, as the muzak fades, a bay of slick, corporate style kiosks, displaying the Tate website.
CNN Interactive just got more interactive (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slide/cnn/) by Thomson and Craighead.
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Talking at the CODE conference in Cambridge UK this April, Geert Lovink blamed the "Shut up and party" attitude of the dotcommers and their disregard for "business fundamentals" for their downfall. Now the remaining poverty stricken start-ups sell cheap to established business or die quietly.
While there has never been any money in net art, the prefix "net" used to have some tangible benefits. Every glossy art and culture magazine needed net art stories, e-businesses needed 'visionaries', grants fell like manna from government budgets and now it's over. Just as the e-businesses have been fighting for the opportunity to be bought out by established interests, net art practitioners are forced to huddle closer to institutional warmth, or just give up and work.
This trend has dealt a double blow to na•ve hopes that net art in itself offered an easy escape route from traditional art market imperatives and a powerful potential for subversive cultural action. Not only is net art becoming sanitized by inclusion in galleries, national collections and even university course curricula, but also net arts interventions in dotcom land can seem petty now that their corporate targets are in such reduced circumstances.
Since early 1999 this situation has led many people to announce the "death of net art", some people to conclude that net art should no longer be distinguished from art, and a few people to get excited about what this change makes possible.
Net art will no longer be fashionable and will no longer attract fashionable sponsors and hangers-on. Net art can at last be seen as a tool, useful both formally and contextually, rather than remaining a specific media centric genre.
Net art criticism will become more interesting as it becomes necessary to move beyond "is it art" to more useful questions and we start to see more mixed shows that incorporate net art. As net art mixes company with and hybridizes other practices it will become less daunting to draw on the rich resources of traditional art criticism and apply those methods and histories to looking at net art.
Most importantly, net art can still be "not just art" as Matthew Fuller has called it. The processes of net art, weaving through disparate contexts and protocols, homogenizing and juxtaposing information spaces, maintain the ambiguity of net art's identity allowing it to infiltrate and enrich many contexts while taking advantage of its critical and conceptual grounding in art.
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In art-prestige stakes, Art school degree shows are the lowest of the low. Quality is irrelevant, few curators see the work and it never gets reviewed. The economies of the degree show are simply unable to support curatorial and critical interest. The kudos and money invested in the show are distributed too thinly between too many art students to offer any worthwhile percentage to the secondary and tertiary art-world industries of curators and critics. In most cases tutors and networks of contemporaries provide support, feedback and a context for art student work.
It was surprising to find several excellent pieces of electronic art at Central St. Martin's degree show. Charles Lim's Quake mission in the Tate Modern and hyper-real-3d light installation and Shiho Fukuhara's broken, lowtech magic mirror stood out from the crowd. These were as professional as any electronic art installations that come to mind. This, however, is not saying much. The impression could well be due to the fact that the experience of electronic art and particularly net art often parallels that of the student show. The queasy feeling of being swamped in disparate artistic environments without the comfort of being asked to slot the artist or artwork into a convenient historical narrative; artwork is exciting, unfinished, sometimes failed and often baffling to a visitor with no connection to the development process of the artist, unable to reach halfway towards the work to grasp it. As successful net art hubs have shown (rhizome, nettime, syndicate) the support of engaged, critically active fora is vital to the understanding and development of networked and electronic art.
When an ambitious student leaves college and embarks on a mainstream art career, the fickle and divisive market of fame speculation replaces their formative support network. Critique and curatorial interest come at a price, both financially and conceptually. The payoff is that the art is cleaned and polished before being sold.
The question for net art is whether it's graduation into the mainstream (an awkward, pompous and uncomfortable ceremony so far) will interfere with the supportive and engaged critical and curatorial relationships it has enjoyed in its (relative) obscurity.
Shiho Fukuhara's and Charles Lim's work can be seen on the 5th and 7th floor at Central St. Martin's Degree Show until 5th July 2001. 114-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC1.
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_______ __________
| | | |
| Media |----------> SIGNAL <---------- | Politics |
|_______| |__________|
> <
/ \
/ \
/ \
( "net.art" )
\ /
\ /
\ /
_______ > < __________
| | | |
| media |----------> NOISE <---------- | politics |
|_______| |__________|
Key:
Media - The mechanisms that collect and weave multiple
narratives into historical narrative.
Politics - Ideologies and their articulation through
social institution(s).
media - The plural of medium; the languages and
technologies of communication.
politics - An on-going process that informs and
emerges from social interaction.
NOISE - The transient action of multiple narratives.
SIGNAL - The persistent monologue of historical narrative.
In this schema, the contrived term "net.art", (as opposed to Net Art)
is an aestheticised textual construction. This ironic anticipation of
its own historical narrative provokes net.art to mutate and
re-define itself, forming the feedback loop between the noise of
media politics and the signal of Media and Politics.
##########################
# Saul Albert & Nick Fry #
##########################
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Users of the Glyphiti applet (the latest offering from Andy Deck's artcontext.net) are invited to engage in the collaborative editing of a mural, composed of 256 icon sized images (glyphs) by working on one 32 x 32 pixel section at a time.
Running Glyphiti feels like using a dysfunctional amalgamation of interface features from a museum of image editing software. PhotoShop's navigator window, permanently zoomed in too close to make visual sense of the whole image, icon editing (circa 1985) with Mac Paint 1.5 (pixel by pixel, black or white), the cack-handed results of drawing with a mouse on a clumsy 'virtual whiteboard' app.
The expected meaning of 'collaborative' is also skewed by the disparate, anonymous crowd of users that are attracted to this piece, scrawling over each other's glyphs like bored schoolchildren carving expletives into classroom desks.
This seems to be the point. Deck acknowledges the pitfalls of de-centralised authorship in a software-determined environment. In his introduction he describes the 'co-determined' relationship produced by Glyphiti (he codes the rules, the users follow them). He also offers the source code for the applet as a further deferral of his authorial status, and invites users who are discontent with the interface to "Copy it. Steal it. Share it. Print it. Pretend it's yours. I don't care."
Few of the tiny minority of appropriately skilled users are likely to take up this challenge. Rather than de-centralising authorship and creativity, Glyphiti works because it attempts to confound them. Once the seamless, anti-aliased surfaces of so-called 'creative' image editing software are stripped away, and the myth of 'on-line collaboration' is exploded, what is left is a hugely over-determined situation in which the input of the user/author is limited to 32 x 32 choices, black or white, one or zero.
This might seem like yet another dry lesson in software politics to be duly learnt and taken seriously. A good (if near-infinitely boring) example of this is "Every Icon" by John F. Simon JR. (http://www.numeral.com/eicon.html): an applet artwork that attempts to draw systematically every possible combination of 32 x 32 pixels which at current maximum processing speeds will take something like 2 billion years to complete. However, it is exactly this kind of trite, conceptually hermetic inanity that Glyphiti counterpoints.
While I played with Glyphiti I noticed that someone was editing a glyph on the top right of my screen. I jumped to a neighbouring icon and added two little surprised eyes and "hi" in a speech bubble. Enigmatically, someone wrote "Jesus Paves" on the icon next to mine and disappeared. A few (mal)communications later I was hooked, and spent hours trading scrawls with whoever showed up. Some attempted grandeur, spanning 20 or 30 icons, others were subtle and humorous, some icons changed regularly while a few favourites were respectfully preserved.
Glyphiti is not just an experiment in human-computer interface, it is also a breeding ground for a quirky development of computer-mediated (or computer-confounded) communication; the beauty of it is watching people find ways to work around it's implicit limitations.
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