Marco Deseriis on Wed, 11 Feb 2004 00:54:34 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> An Italian book on net.art |
dear nettimers, here is a short abstract of a book that regard closely our community. The book came out last June for Shake Editions (Milan) and it represents one of the few contributions on the topic coming from a country where public and private investments in this field approximate to zero, but where artists, activists, hackers and magazines gave an important contribution over the last few years to the growing of this scene. all the best, snafu Thanks to Francesca da Rimini for editing this text. ::::: Net.art. The Art of Connecting Marco Deseriis and Giuseppe Marano Shake Edizioni, 2003 pp. 234, 15 € Featuring: Vuk Cosic, Heath Bunting, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Rachel Baker, Andreas Broeckmann, Andy Deck, Ascii Art Ensemble, Jaromil, Chaos Computer Club, Vinyl Video, Jodi, Cornelia Sollfrank, etoy, 0100101110101101.ORG, Antiorp/Netochka Nezvanova, Adrian Ward, Florian Cramer, epidemiC, Retroyou, I/O/D, Tom Betts, Maciej Wisniewski, Mark Napier, Radical Software Group, Mark Daggett, LAN, Mongrel Project, Critical Art Ensemble, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Vns Matrix, Francesca da Rimini, Identity Runners, Surveillance Camera Players, Fakeshop, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Electrohippies, Federation of Random Action, Irational, ®TMark, Ubermorgen, Kein Mensch Ist Illegal, The Yes Men, Amy Alexander, Walter Van der Cruijsen, Rasa Smite, Geert Lovink, Graham Harwood, Matthew Fuller, Tillman Baumgartel, Josephine Bosma, Pit Schultz ::::: Table of contents, press releases, presentations http://www.thething.it/netart/ Download the Pdf of the whole book (in Italian) http://www.thething.it/netart/netart1.pdf English Abstract http://www.thething.it/netart/abstract.rtf Memetic Map (designed for the Blogwork of the Venice Biennale): http://thething.it/netart/net_map.htm ::::: Table of Contents Premise 1. The art of making network - Prelude. Vuk Cosic's dreams - Net.art vs art on the net - Aesthetic of the machinic and of communication - The forerunners - Net.art dawn 2. Poetics of the code - The link politics - ASCII Art - We love your computer 3. The possible extensions - The digital hijack - Nobody dare to call it plagiarism - Not.art? 4. Software as a culture - When the virus becomes epidemic - Making and unmaking navigation interfaces - Netscape Art - I show you mine, you'll show me yours - The culturally positioned software 5. The performative matrix - Inverting technology - The Venus matrix - The market of the fakes 6. Sabotage and simulative strategies - The electronic civil disobedience - The Electronic Disturbance Theater - Cloning Web sites - The viral corporation - Above everybody - The man with the golden phallus - The Toywar 7. The politics of connection - Recombinations in the tactical media universe - Building shared contexts - The sustainable networks - Hybrid laboratories Conclusions ::::: Premise This book is the result of a clumsy theft, a smuggling of ideas, theories and practices of dubious provenance. The spoils have been accurately forged, but they still present the recognition signs left by their last “owners”. You will not find them on a stall, nor auctioned on e-Bay. The thieves (the authors) have mounted the objects on a tapestry, to form an almost coherent drawing that make them not saleable one by one. The choice of fixing in the printed matter an ephemeral and hypertextual process like “the art of connecting” was a challenge in itself. It would have been certainly easier to propose an on line index or to set up another collection of essays. By stubbornly insisting on the linear path we have been forced not only to exalt but also to order the hypertextual links amongst various projects. Looking for an “original” cipher of the text, the reader will probably have to consider the way in which the projects have been related to each other. Naturally, we would enjoy a pierced book, or just clicking and jumping from one page to another. But the linearity cage is also a resource, because it has forced us to decide what comes first and what after, and why a project has to be included in a chapter instead of the other. Another issue was that we were facing a mature practice (for someone already dead), knowing that in Italy very few people even realized it was born. Obeying to the tyranny of a chronological order would have favoured clarity but it would have distracted us from our goal. Which was not to narrate the net.art “progression”, but to capture its most ambivalent aspects and openness to other influences. The initial hypothesis formulated in 1999 was that the Internet was relaunching the aesthetics and politics weaving, so common to all the Twentieth century avant-gardes. The hypothesis was supported by the blooming of highly hybrid practices that freshly recombined a formal experimentation on network codes with a renewed use of communication-guerrilla tactics and with all a series of trespassing into domains apparently distant light-years one from another. In few words, culture jamming landed on the Internet, with the consciousness that anonymity, the “real time” dimension and the system of communicating vessels of the mailing lists were crucial points of strength. By acting in a viral and unexpected manner, the new culture jammers were trespassing different territories, recombining different know-hows to turn upside down the traditional form of communication and politics as if the extreme specialization of informatic and tecno-scientific languages could be partially recomposed through a shared procedure and method. Moreover, the acceleration of participatory processes on a global scale would have demonstrated that far from being isolated, some of these groups were landmarks for the production of imaginary of the new global movement. Obviously, net.art is not only this. If the authors declare explicitly their sympathy, and their belonging to the networks of the semiotics warriors, the art of connecting walks along winding and not always converging paths. Formal exploration of code, errors and interfaces has its own agenda, that only occasionally mix up with hacker, activists and other troublemakers that swarm on the Net. Nevertheless, it’s not necessary that a link between one practice and another is explicit to be actual. Our selecting effort has been to focus on the “memetic potential” of any project and to exalt those ones who looked more suitable to be reused into different contexts. For us, net.art is mainly a connector, a neuron, a lexicon amongst the billions of idle objects residing on the Internet. It is the possibility of turning the banal experience of navigation in a narration in which characters and authors redesign continuosly the paths along which they walk. This is the reason why the “Italian scene” stays in the background. Besides the dubious existence (and necessity) of an actual national scene, the features of Italian groups and practices resembling net.art are generally not suitable for a great contamination. To the tecno-linguistic gap, add the peculiarity of Italian movements, since ever disposed to a broadening of inclusion mechanisms against the velocity of execution and interference. This book is a tool at their disposal, to be modelled by thousands of users and to disclose new possibilities of transformation of the present. Chapter 1 The art of making network Prelude. Vuk Cosic’s dream The chapter begins with a vision of the Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic (an invention of the authors), who dreams to walk on a hill shaped by monumental buildings designed as archaic, yet ever-changing and flexible 3D characters. After climbing one of the buildings, Cosic can eventually see his own face from the tip of the nose It is a morning of December 1995, and with the sensation of being himself an alphanumeric construct, Cosic downloads the e-mail containing the birth myth of the term “Net.Art”; a corrupted ASCII message containing only six legible characters separated by a dot. Cosic forwards the message to a Croatian friend, Igor Markovic, asking him to decode its content. The original text was apparently a rather vague manifesto blaming on traditional art institutions and reclaiming a generic freedom of expression for the artists on the Internet. The quoted fragment read: “All this becomes possible only with the emergence of the Net.Art as a notion becomes obsolete...”. The text was a ready-made, produced entirely by a machine. And it could have not been otherwise, for a practice entirely based on the manipulation of pre-existent assembled codes. Net.art vs art on the net After mentioning the formation of an independent “media circus” made of mailing lists, festivals, media labs and conferences (e.g. Net Art Per Se, Trieste, 1996), the general outlines of the semantic field of net.art are drawn. In January 1997, the mailing list Nettime hosts a long thread polarizing around two terms: net.art versus art on the net. The first one is preferred by the vast majority of the interventions not only because of its elegance and synthesis, but mainly because placing the word “net” before “art”, it stresses out the collaborative, process-based and interactive aspects of the practice. Instead “art on the net” would define the Net only as an accessory tools, a simple means of distribution of works who are pre-existent and produced “elsewhere”. As Joachim Blank wrote: “Art on the net is mostly nothing more than the documentation of art which is not created on the net, but rather outside it and, in terms of content, does not establish any relationship to the net. Netart functions only on the net and picks out the net or the "netmyth" as a theme. It often deals with structural concepts: A group or an individual designs a system that can be expanded by other people”. Therefore the “mission” of net.art is to constantly explore limits and possibilities of many-to-many communication in a tecno-social environment. Along this trajectory, the Net becomes material and tool for production. For the first time in art history, the means of production and distribution concide. If this self-reflective quality exposes net.art to the accusation of formalism and separation (“therefore placing it in modern art tradition”, Baumgartel), its capacity to mix various competences and attitudes brings it into the undetermined field of “an art that no longer needs to be called art” (Shulgin). In other terms, it is the “medium” in which net.art operates to free it from the limits of modern art and by opening it to the the intervention of designers, hackers, activists, journalists, scientists and many others. Because of these features, net.art doesn’t make use only of the World Wide Web, but relies on a wide range of protocols, communication channels and software: e-mail, browsers, search engines, mailing list, chat, Moo, p2p, satellite and wireless networks. These software are sets of formal instructions (the code) inter-related to other software, whose underlying alphabet is composed of zeros and ones. The duty of much of the software and GUI is to anthropomorphize machine language and binary system. Net.art deploys itself in this undetermined passage between semantic and non semantic writing, in the koiné where stratified systems of signs collapse one upon the other, producing often ambiguities, errors and paradoxes. These inputs will be deepened in next chapters. By now, it is enough to say that net.art rarely deals with the creation of clearly representable objects. In this case, it would be better to talk of Web Art, which deals with hypertext or animations characterized by a low level of interaction. Even if they are conceived to be browsed on the Net, most of these web sites could be distributed also via other physical supports, such as the DVD, CD-ROM or Floppy Disk. Nevertheless, it is not our intention to create schematic categories. Not all of the artworks that reside on the Web can exist independently from it. Indeed, some “web art” sites can be considered interventions of network art; for being always “under construction”; for being effectively open to external contributions or other forms; or simply because they reflect conceptually on their own medium. Because of this, net.art does not have to be related to any specific application. Rather, to define its ray of action, we prefer to put it in relation to three specific concepts and practices: identity play; the manipulation of information fluxes; the aesthetic of the machinic. Starting from the latter we will step back to the origins of net.art to pass to analyze, in the following chapters, the other forms of intervention.... ...continue http://www.thething.it/netart/abstract.rtf # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net