Re: [-empyre-] geography...

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@unsw.edu.au>]

sylvie and empyreans..
there was something in that "dialogue" thread about the graphic capability
of the web, and getting away forn the notion of what is real net.art and
what isn't , and just looking at a lot of what is currently showing .. alot
of contemporary work is really graphically based eg "netflag" and that genre
of "code" works,   or flash works, and even say works like young hae chang's
award winning flash work -  tho it is text, and just text with versions in
both korean and english, it is also very graphiclly based.. ie its nice for
me to watch the rhythms of the screen changes and the form of the characters
in the korean version of it even if i don't get the jokes "reading" it.

although i must confess to generally being really english centerd..i rarely
get emails and urls except from maybe central europe about works in other
languages.. and i am sure there are some fabulous japanese language sites,
and spanish and portugese ..especially from south american countries. im
sure there is some wild stuff happening in russia  and india and china as
well.. i don't look at any french canadian  web sites either ..(sylvie could
you give us the urls of some from quebec?)
 and if the global network ideal is dead, then  is net.art reflecting this
or contributing to it ..??  in the last few yeras i have been trying  to
make a multi user VRML space where people could communicate with just sound
and gesture rather than text, to try and eliminate langauge barriers -but
have a text interface in there as well.. and i still notice that users in
the space still do the "where are you (geographically)" "what time is it"
questions..rather than making sounds and gestures.. the text - to my
dismay - is more often valued over the playful options...

im wondering what this all means in terms of end-users interacting with
works.. maybe its hard coded human behaviour to like and reinforce
difference and distance?  and is this a reflected by global tendancy to wage
war on people who speak different languages, and at the other end of the
spectrum , by the art market that supports the discrete, exotic, the unique,
the different, but not the multiple, distributed, accessable, inclusive
experience.

melinda


sylvie wrote:
> In the first years of web art, when the group of people involved was
> smaller (less artists, works, critics, museums, etc) there was a
> stronger sense of community, and of being able to  go beyond
> geographical boundaries. You mention the connections between East-West
> European artists (Syndicate, Deep Europe, east-west new media festivals,
> etc). This phenomenon supported the belief in a global network less
> determined by geography. (but it was just one specific phenomenon) It
> seems that the art projects themselves reinforced these dialogues and
> this ideal. Many early works, in the tradition of communication arts,
> were based on the possibilities to connect people together. Recent art
> projects, many of them at least, are less based on the web as a tool for
> communication than as a means of dissemination of narrative film-like
> works (Generation Flash).  They don't necessarily encourage two-way (or
> multiple) connections but rather, like the film, a type of
> creator/viewer relationship that leads to  "isolation", which is not
> something bad in itself, just different, and somewhat opposed to the
> global network ideal.
>
> Sylvie
>
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