Description
Screen Worlds: Net Art and Online Communities
Moderated by: Melentie Pandilovski and Kathy Rae Huffman
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.
Presenters and Speakers:
• To Protect and Server – Jonah Brucker-Cohen
• Tally Saves the Internet – Joelle Dietrick
• Net.art, a Chapter in the Groundhog-day Saga of Historic Avant-guards – Vuk Ćosić
• A Brief History of Early net.art Initiatives and Encounters Hosted by Desk.nl in Amsterdam in the Mid-90s – Walter van der Cruijsen
• XOXLABS.COM – Erik Hoff Zepka
• VRestaurant: Food for Thought – the Contribution of the Virtual to the Transformation of the Real – Rejane Spitz
• Momimsafe – Amay Kataria
• Rainforest Awakens, Interactive Telematic Performances – Tania Fraga
• History of the Berlin net.art Scene in the 1990s – Valie Djordjevic
• 90’s Mailing List Culture – Nettime, Faces, Syndicate, and Spectre – Diana McCarty
• How I met the Internet (Web, Telnet, Gopher) – Hans Bernhard
https://dac.siggraph.org/sparks/2021-01-screen-worlds-net-art-and-online-communities/