[-empyre-] 'real' networked art

[Timothy Murray]

>Thanks, Anna, for stressing the internationalism of 'early' net art, 
>particularly its Eastern European and Balkan flavor.  Your post made 
>me think fondly of a project I did in Slovenia with Teo Spiller in 
>99-2000 for INFOS 2000, for which we ran an international net.art 
>competition.   I believe that I've posted before on this, but the 
>conceit was that artists had to agree to permit their work to be 
>copied and disseminated off-line on CD-Roms that were distributed 
>for free both to Slovenian technology fair, INFOS 2000, and to 
>international alternative media centers (with the aim of reaching 
>audiences lacking home high speed connections).   This ended up 
>being a very interesting experiment that generated  widespread 
>international participation.  There's still our account of this on 
>http://art.teleportacia.org/kunstkammer/webart.html.


>  "Internationalism" was also the driving force of CTHEORY 
>MULTIMEDIA.  I don't think anyone working in these venues were 
>particularly worried about establishing an art ghetto.  Rather there 
>was extreme enthusiasm about working outside of the conventional 
>gallery-museum network with the hope of reaching an alternative 
>audience.  Of course things have become more conventionalized over 
>time, but generally the artists working on these exhibitional 
>efforts tended to be committed to the kind of collaboration that 
>typifies -empyre-.

>  Interestingly, this is the same spirit that has grown the Rose 
>Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, with the majority of the general 
>'collection' having come voluntarily from international artists 
>committed to the communal notion of a new media archive.   I like to 
>think that the spirit lives on.


Best,

Tim

>Ok - got it!
>Kazys wrote:
>
><Both High-low/internal vs. Cool/Uncool/transdisciplinarity are 
>reflections of the same transition to network culture.>
>
>however, I would still ant to maintain that relative to the period 
>in which they ere working, '90s net artists were not necessarily 
>elite. I don't think small or niche = elite. The question of access 
>and mass has taken on a renewed medial push in the age of 'hits' and 
>their registering. This links up to Anne's points about the ways in 
>which search engines produce forms of identity. Likewise algorithms.
>
>One thing we might be forgetting about that early net art was its 
>internationalism - alot of it came out of eastern europe and the 
>balkans especialy and was very much connected with early net radio 
>and its relations to Dutch net culture. A number of people, 
>Stallabrass included, have remarked on the net art movement as one 
>of the truly international art movements of the late 20th century. 
>For me, this alone takes that work out of some 'art ghetto' and 
>makes it concerned with a lot more than avant-gardism...
>
>best
>Anna
>_______________________________________________
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre


-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853