[-empyre-] more translations

["Diana McCarty" <diana@bootlab.org>]

Ricardo,

Thanks for the information about the setting of the show. Wow - 5k and a
year to prepare doesn't sound too bad to me. I guess your main point is
that the net.artists in the show had significantly different terms of
participation than the "real" artists, in terms of space, budget and time?
That makes me curious about why the curators and organizers included the
online works - and went to some effort and cost to do that? I am also
curious about how the online works relate to the interventions.

My earlier post was pretty sloppy - but what I meant with old school was
in terms of net.art (or whatever it gets called these days) and how it
relates to the larger landscape of the internet, or web, and art contexts.
This problem of something like net.art getting ghettoized in art contexts
in not new; also the reading of net specific works as artless. I'm
guessing that what Christina meant with dentimundo is that it looks more
like net and less like art. Showing something like that in an art context
to an audience that isn't net savvy always seems to raise the same issues.
I found it a clever way to approach la frontera and translate a very real
scenario into an art context, while referring to the language and
aesthetics of popular websites and not appearing so much as art that a
typical surfer googling for dentists in Tiajuana would reject this site.
That people do google for dentists in Tiajuana is the social fact you take
up.

The same goes for lowdrone. There are lowrider car club websites, lots of
Chicanos on line, and all kinds of other car freaks that do actually come
across the site. That this is art or not is probably not an issue for a
lot of them. That is, there is an audience for both sites outside of
people interested in the border as a space of translation in an art
context and that is what makes works on the net interesting to me. That is
a kind of communication that you rarely get in certified art contexts.
Maybe I should say that I work in art, and do a lot of art stuff, but it
is always an elite field, no matter where one works, and most folks just
don't count themselves as the type of person that checks out what is going
on at the local art space.

To jump over to a comment that I think Ryan posted about the Cybracero
work - it was something along the lines of "we can all be taken in by this
gimmick". This is something I'd take issue with, because I'm not at all
sure about the assumption behind that we. It sounded a bit like all work
on the net would be read from a white perspective - (please forgive me if
I'm reading this incorrectly) - in spite of the dominant demographics,
this excludes the possibility that that work could or would be accessed by
an audience that would have an entirely different reading of it. Chicano
art work on the web has been around since at least 94: I'm thinking of
Chicano Secret Service and the fake campaign websites they were doing, and
futurist work detailing Chicano anthropologists excavating gringo culture
(I forget who did that). So there is a history of savvy online works by
Chicanos - and an audience to go with it. For example:

http://cartoonista.com/
http://lowrider.com/

Not what I'd really call art, but they are artefacts of an existing
colored presence online. So it is necessary to be careful when using terms
like we. I'm also not proposing that everybody should make art that is
totally accessible to all publics or interesting to my mom, or her
neighbors, but that it should be acknowledged that there can't be a
universal reading of art.

And back to the question of who gets humanized to whom - actually, I'll
send these links to some friends back home, most of whom don't have
anything to do with art, and say this is the kind of stuff that happens in
my world. It is really rare when there are works that can do that. So
maybe I am getting humanized ;)

Of course, a lot more to add, but this seems like a good point to end.

paz,

diana