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October 08, 2004

flow

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It's the Moment of Connection

Researching the early history of telematic art, I came across an interview with Robert Adrian by Jeremy Taylor, the Digital Archivist working on contract at Open Space.

Adrian is a Canadian artist based in Vienna who began work in telecommunications in the late '70s. In 1982 he designed his first major telecommunications art project, "The World in 24 Hours," a global multimedia linkup involving 24 cities and using fax, email, and slow scan-video where it was available. Adrian defines telematic arts as "art (or artworks) that exist(s) at least partly in more than one place at the same time and/or within the space of a communications network."

What particularly struck my attention were the three things Adrian thought important to remember about producing interesting telematic or network art:

1) The fact that nothing is permanent in network art. The moment of connection, where the work really happens, is dependent on the machines being turned on. When the machines are off the work is gone--and even worse, the machines and software upon which the work depends will probably no longer exist within 5 years of the creation of the work.

2) The work exists at the point of connection--with the receiver. It is always very hard to remember that not only can you not control the way your work is received but it is actually undesirable to want to exert control. This demands a completely different attitude than we know from industrial art practice. Perhaps it can best be described as "flow" rather than "process"--the creation of the space where things or objects may exist or happen rather than the making of things or objects themselves.

3) Like Mail-Art, the only really interesting thing about Network Art is that everybody is an author or potential author. There is no obligation to reply but the question is open and the means are available. The art industry is trying very hard to establish "artistic criteria" in order to exclude the riff-raff but so far without much success...luckily.

I put this out as a reply from one of the pioneers of telematic art to Liza Sabater's post on Rhizome Raw, reproduced on this blog 10/5/04: Art: Object or Process?.

Posted by newradio at October 8, 2004 08:45 AM

Comments

About point 1. we may suggest that an artwork still exists even if it's not functional anymore, in this case, it just exists under another state. This state is a property of the artwork. The artwork can be a visible and functional interface in one state but also just a readable source code in another state. The question is here , where is the arwork ? Is it in the relation between a end-user and a front-end interface, or is it in the set of codes which allow this relation. Does the artwork still exist when its environment evolve, and let's say, without users/actors/spectators ? If we consider the second state, probably yes. So an artwork of this kind can adopt different forms, shapes. One day it's an online networked performance, but the other day, it's a set of human readable source codes.

Posted by: x-arn at October 9, 2004 11:52 AM