[-empyre-] intertwining.threads

[Jon Cates <jon-cates@usa.net>]

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net.art
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text,
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criticism +
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geography
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threads
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Barrie Collins wrote (Subject: [-empyre-] Re: Is it digital art? Date: Tue, 30
Jul 2002 14:53:59):
"The computer is just another tool"
This kind of positioning of the technological tends to neutralize the system
or a component as an isolated "tool" which lacks political, socio-economic and
various other cultural meanings, implications and reasons for existence. 

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Do these threads extend beyond the discursive boundaries of empyre? Are there
many off-list dialogues that continue where unanswered questions remain?

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On one level, emerging technologies undeniably set the tone. This admission
does not imply strict technological determinism, as it is a feature of the
technological rather than the defining characteristic.

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The text based model which has been established in/on these networks (for
historical reasons articulated elsewhere) is not the only model and
increasingly shares space with other developing models brought on by various
technological implications and implementations. XML, for instance, brings a
different taxonomical structuring to online content and allows for treatments
which break from the static page metaphor of HTML. FlashMX takes this same
increasingly object oriented approach and applies these principles to dynamic
graphical projects as has been noted previously in the "[-empyre-] real net
art" thread.  

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Of course, The text-based approach still dominates as is evidenced in that we
are collected here in this place around these discussions.

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I agree with Diana Jeon in her post (Subject:  [-empyre-] re: is it digital
art? Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 22:25:44) on the status of digital art, in that
the digital is a matter of degree, a continuum and therefore not inextricably
tied to specific technologies. Yet, when we use the term "net.art" we are
referring to a particular historical, personal and even thematic strand of
contemporary theorypractices. The term arises from a specific situation (the
alleged error ridden translation of a document now lost) and carries with it
the presence of telecom as a zone of artistic theorypractice.

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On telecom as a site of contemporary artistic theorypractice check Eduardo
Kac's "Aspects of the Aesthetics of Telecommunications". 

http://www.ekac.org/Telecom.Paper.Siggrap.html

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Melinda Rackham wrote on the Tue, 30 Jul 2002 15:46:08):

"which makes net.art a sort of chaotic anti heirarchical collage of sensation,
totally unrelated to any language or geographical structure, without the
necessitry to define values of form content , without value judgements of good
and bad etc.... it flattens the playing filed.. which i don't think is the way
it works in the hard space of realism. we arent being globally idealistic any
more in net.art (and everything else) then language matters, position matters,
geography matters.."

I wonder whom you mean when you state "we" have ceased to be "globally
idealistic"? Are you referring to artists that contribute to these systems? I
have trouble reconciling your statements in the above paragraph. Are you
genuinely stating that net.art is an identifiable genre that somehow
simultaneously breaks with genre classification and resists value judgments?
Is this what you mean by a flattened playing field?

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Perhaps the playing field has imploded rather than flattened, a vacuum
replaced by infiltration. Perhaps playing field is an inacurate metaphor.
Probability field instead?

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As Adrian Miles suggested (Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Is it digital art? Date:
Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:53:24) art itself, as a discipline, is a technology which
adds to the complication of understanding the initial Art + Technology
movement's need to clarify itself in the same way the various other
contemporary technological arts are demarcated. This situation partially stems
from cultural understandings of craft, labor, creativity, etc.  

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Which reminds me of Lachan Brown's comments (Subject: [-empyre-] digitisation
and audiences Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 18:22:29) on the falsity of
"cyberculture" and his dismissal of the possibility of definable differences
between "cyberculture" and other cultures (esp. those that are formulated in
distinctly physical terms). People historically imagine utopias with physical
coordinates (i.e. the "space" in cyberspace) even when these physical
coordinates are in many ways antithetical to the utopian ideals expressed
(i.e. the major military and corporate funded internet backbone). But it is
important to remember that soft-subversions occur and micro-politics are
possible. Technological histories have multiple direct illustrations and
examples of human desires reshaping the uses of various systems. John Whitney
built his "computer animation" equipment from discarded military surplus and
the first "computer films" resulted. 

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For another discourse on utopias and mythic technologies check Susanna
Paasonen's "Utopias with a difference". 

http://www.translocal.net/susanna/utopia.html

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Jon Cates