[-empyre-] Is the Internet like a Medium of Art?

[Timothy Conway Murray]

On 4/4/14 1:45 PM, "Daniel Herwitz" <herwitz at umich.edu> wrote:

>in the twenty years since
>then the global south has begun to establish a profoundly different
>relation to the world at large, courtesy of the internet and digital
>technologies. ...
>But there are ways in which the internet is like a medium: it
>derealizes whatever is uploaded from all traces of physicality.

Thanks for much for initiating this month's discussion of Critical Making
in International Networks, Daniel.

I'm wondering if you would mind elaborating on the particular kinds of
South African 'making' to which you refer.  Might local or regional
markers of making continue to provide a context or even regional
style/flavor to particular new media interventions that would, precisely,
foreground their "profoundly different relations to the world at large"?
And might not such markers or frameworks or even URLs re-realize the
traces of physicality, which you are concerned evaporate with the internet?

Thanks for engaging -empyre- with such provocative opening thoughts.

Best,

Tim