<nettime> What is netart ;-)? by Joachim Blank (Tue, 22 Apr 1997) - has something changed in 5 years!

["Dimitris C.Milionis" <milioni@otenet.gr>]

      Date: Tue, 22 Apr 1997
      From: Joachim Blank 
      What is netart ;-)? 

      Joachim Blank 

      The text below is a contribution to an exhibition and congress
called " (History of) Mailart in Eastern Europe" at the Staatliches Museum
Schwerin (Germany) 1996 [excerpted]

      The "Internet myth" is the result of a massive self-referentiality
of our media landscape. Unlimited communication in a yet unknown
conglomerate made of machines, cables and people. The exclusive networld
of cyberpunks, scientists and artists has been superseded by the thirst
for information of the industrialized mass consumption. Nevertheless, the
cultural "stylistic howlers" of communication in data networks continue to
exist not only in the underground.

      Artistic projects, strategy projects, discussion forums and
autonomous network structures within the vast Internet, but remote from
the glossy, dust-free surfaces, show interesting beginnings for an
alternative use of this medium.

      Netart vs. Art on the Net

      The art market has discovered the net for the distribution of art.
It uses the net to promote art just like ordinary companies. Gallerists,
museums and other art brokers provide information about their artists,
exhibitions and events. For them, the net is nothing more than a big
telephone book in which they too want to (have to) be represented.

      However, netart differs from art on the net. Art on the net is
mostly nothing more than the documentation of art which is not created on
the net, but rather outside it and, in terms of content, does not
establish any relationship to the net. Netart functions only on the net
and picks out the net or the "netmyth" as a theme. It often deals with
structural concepts: A group or an individual designs a system that can be
expanded by other people. Along with that is the idea that the
collaboration of a number of people will become the condition for the
development of an overall system. netart projects without the
participation of external persons are perhaps interesting concepts, but
they do not manifest themselves as a collective creativity in the net
(Dieter Daniels, http://www.hgb-lepzig.de/theorie/mailart.htm). The idea
is fundamental, but dubious without media-specific translation and without
participation of other people. For all netart projects there is a
retraceable starting point, an author, so to speak. Nevertheless, what
develops from one idea of one single artist with the collaboration of many
others, is incalculable. Like the incentive of gambling, here too the
openness, the curiosity about an imaginary end, the exciting challenge of
taking part in such projects. And that with a medium like Internet, which
makes a direct form of intervention possible at the same time on different
levels of communication (text, sound, picture, motion picture, real time).

      [...]
     


+

dimitris c. milionis

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p.s. ...and the " net.art world " wants to know now has something changed
in 5 years!

++




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