New York, USA Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 4:00 pm EST
Los Angeles, USA Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 1:00 pm PST
UTC, Time Zone Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 9:00 pm
Net Art has been with us since the early days of the Internet, certainly in a more structured way since the mid-nineties. Set in a time of a global socio-cultural advent of Internet Technologies, this artform’s use of the Internet medium sets it apart from other contemporary art movements delivering specific aesthetic, cultural and social experiences, seemingly outside of the rationale of the major artworld. Net Art can certainly be viewed as a phenomenological platform revealing how society and technology co-constitute each other. Two decades after the pioneering work in Net Art gives us perhaps enough of a distance to revisit it, and analyze it through various prisms, including McLuhan’s Four Laws of Media (The Tetrad) as a means of focusing awareness on very hidden or unobserved qualities in our culture and technology through Retrieval, Reversal, Obsolescence, and Amplification. After all, the nature of media determines the nature of society, and once new technology comes into the social milieu it cannot cease to permeate it until every institution is saturated.
Participants of Screenworlds: Net Art and Online Communities are asked to contribute to the discussion about the beginnings of Net Art, as well as its influence on art and culture, and how it has evolved in the past two decades, via the perceptual, the historical, and the analogic prisms.
Have Net Artists been able to create a unique and adequate art experience of the Net? Is there an antagonism between Net Art and Art Institutions? How have the developments in digital technology affected YOUR use of the Internet for artmaking? Was the White Box ever a good place for the presentation of Net Art? How did communities around Net Art grow, beyond the set parameters of the artworks? What will the future of Net Art bring?
The first SPARKS online zoom discussion, Screenworlds: Net Art and Online Communities, features ten presenters who have responded to the topic, the beginnings of Net Art, as well as its influence on art and culture, and how it has evolved in the past two decades via the perceptual, the historical, and the analogic prisms. Following the presentations of the three-minute lightning talks, the zoom audience is encouraged to engage in moderated discussion.
- Have net artists been able to create a unique and adequate art experience of the net?
- Is there an antagonism between net.art and Art Institutions?
- How have the developments in digital technology affected the artistic use of the Internet for artmaking?
- Was the White Box ever a good place for the presentation of net.art?
- How did communities around net.art grow, beyond the set parameters of the artworks?
- What will the future of Net Art bring?
The discussion following the presentations will reflect on these questions and the presentations. Melentie Pandilovski and Kathy Rae Huffman, are the Digital Arts Community co-moderators.
To Protect and Server
An open source net.art project that subverts and challenges Google’s ReCaptcha software by having the public choose images of “police brutality” in order to advance to an online police training simulator game.
Tally Saves the Internet
A browser extension that transforms data advertisers collect into a multiplayer game. Its core goal is to make us more aware of our screen worlds.
Net.art, a Chapter in the Groundhog-day Saga of Historic Avant-guards
Our duty as net.artists was to help propagate the virus of freedom and our refusal of the art world and of social context was translated into serious propositions of better communications, interfaces, and ways of creating and collaborating. Our job was NOT to fulfill the promises of interactivity, multimediality, beauty, sublimeness, realism, or anything like that — those were given by the makers and vendors of hardware, software, infrastructures, and protocols.
A Brief History of Early net.art Initiatives and Encounters Hosted by Desk.nl in Amsterdam in the Mid-90s
Between 1994 and 1996, desk.nl served as a host but also as a meeting place for artists, activists, curators, critics, engineers, hackers, and others to help them explore possibilities of ‘new media’ and to support them in realizing online artworks and online communities for discussion and dissemination.
XOXLABS.COM
The engagement with new media and net.art over the last decade, especially as the social and phenomenal core of technoscientific society, is central to Zepka’s practice.
VRestaurant: Food for Thought – the Contribution of the Virtual to the Transformation of the Real
VRestaurant: Food for Thought is an immersive, synesthetic, gastronomic, and collaborative artistic installation that brings to the table some major challenges we face today in relation to the production and consumption of food, on a global scale. Will we be able to feed 10 billion people on the planet in a healthy and sustainable way by 2050? Global food production threatens climate stability and the resilience of ecosystems, causing accelerated environmental degradation on the planet. Unhealthy diets – both those that cause malnutrition and those that lead to obesity – are another source of concern about the future. Electronic art can help promote awareness, engagement, and social change with regard to healthy diets and sustainable food production.
Momimsafe
Since its inception in 2020, Momisafe asks “How have our interpersonal relationships with friends, family, and loved ones been affected?” The tactility of intimacy has been tattered and the strength of the internet has been put to a test…the pandemic has inspired artists and creative practitioners to innovate alternate forms to achieve intimacy, connection, and togetherness.
Rainforest Awakens, Interactive Telematic Performances
A revisiting of her 2001 VRML work in a ZOOM performance. “Today, as the medium becomes more widely available as cultural and entertainment tools/experiences, I believe it is more critical than ever to contextualize the technologies and rethink the cultural production process”
History of the Berlin net.art Scene in the 1990s
In the 1990s Berlin was one of the hubs of the European net.art scene with a strong presence of online communities. I was part of the Internationale Stadt Berlin which was an artist’s and cultural community project dealing with representing community and arts projects in the early internet.
90’s Mailing List Culture – Nettime, Faces, Syndicate, and Spectre
How these lists were formed, how they operated, and how they became important in developing critical net culture and a context for net.art to emerge.
How I met the Internet (Web, Telnet, Gopher)
As part of the early net.art avant-garde with etoy (1994-1998), I understood that the internet was a new organism and that this was where I would spend the rest of my life doing art, living, and communicating. I realized that within a few seconds and my head imploded.
Dr Melentie Pandilovski is an Artistic Director who has curated over 200 projects. His roles include: Creative Producer at JOLT Arts in Melbourne, Australia; Director of Riddoch Art Gallery; Director of Video Pool Media Arts Centre; Director/Curator of SEAFair.
He was Editor of Art in the Biotech Era; Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Communication and Aesthetic Theories Revisited. He published Perspectives on Living and Thinking Vectors of the Anthropocene, Found Sci; Arts & Science – the Intersection (re)engineered in: Wiley Blackwell; The Phenomenology of (Non)Habitual Spaces for the Bioarts in Catalyst Book Series (2017).
Kathy Rae Huffman is a writer, producer, researcher, lecturer, prolific public speaker and a pioneering curator of video art, media art, online art, interactive art, installation and performance art. She was Chief Curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art in Long Beach, California from 1979 to 1984, where she established LBMA Video as a regional center supporting early video art. From 1984 to 1991, Huffman was Adjunct Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts and curator/producer of The Contemporary Art Television Fund. From 1991 to 1998, Huffman worked as free-lance writer, curator, lecturer, producer and consultant, based in Austria. During this time, she co-founded FACES listserv. After two years from 1998 to 2000 as an Associate Professor of Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she was the director of Hull Time Based Arts, UK from 2000 to 2002 and the Visual Arts Director at Cornerhouse in Manchester from 2002 – 2008. Since 2008, she has curated major exhibitions for EMAF, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Transmediale and The Getty.