[-empyre-] introducing Greg Ulmer and Marco Deseriis

[Anna Munster]

Marco, you wrote:

< On the
contrary networked art always contain a pragmatic element that enables a
community of practice to unfold. In an online environment, this
pragmatism has a technical component ("here is how this tool works," a
key tenet of hacking) an ethical element ("here is how to do things with
people," a key tenet of activism) and an aesthetic element ("here is how
the material world is divided up and processed by the sensorium in the
age of mechanical and digital reproduction," a tenet of avant-garde art).>

How do you want to account for net.art practice such as jodi.org which deliberately obsfucates the user's relation to the interface ie to participate is to shut oneself out of the interface, the work etc? That;s an extreme example, but a lot of net.art played upon the illegibility of code (some of Vuk Cosic's, some of Mark Napier's, 010101 etc.org)...

I'm not suggesting that you necessarily have to account for these artists but perhaps some different weighting of the 3 elements you have stipulated above takes hold in the light of this overcoded tendency in 1990s net art?

anna