Anne-Marie Schleiner intentionally wrote an unconventional article, Fluidity's and Oppositions Among Curators. . . it caught me a bit off guard. First, like Digital Art in most cases, the format itself was different, the placement of text and side conversations were free style and unlike most academic articles. Initially, her message was somewhat of a challenge to decode, an example are her descriptions of X, Y, and Z artists, because I didn’t realize she was being a bit humorous with her definitions. Sifting through her paper I found that her main ideas were about how we need to redefine net artists, net curators, and net audiences. She feels that every, “ website owner is a curator and cultural critic, artist, creating chains of meaning through associations, comparisons, and juxtapositions, parts or whole can in turn serve as fodder for another website gallery.” The Internet is contextual and users or website owners are involved with an ongoing process of creating and recontextualizing or changing of the digital material. Schleiner states, “I am what I link to.” The link or linking changes the contexts. I thought her oppositions of past artists and future artists, and past curators and future filter feeders were comical but also true.
Websites:
Turbulence is an active website that has been promoting, commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving "networked art forms" since 1996 to the present. It also offers a research blog called Networked Performance which concentrates on net-art and it's future. In addition, it includes networked, an interactive site where people share ideas and dialogue in a "networked environment" with book authors.
Net_Condition is an archived exhibition at the Center of Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The exhibition was referred to as a multi-local networked event because it took place simultaneously in Karlsruhe, Germany, Graz, Austria, Tokyo, Japan and Barcelona, Spain. Webcams were used in the “net lounge.” Net_condition is "about the artist's look at the way society and technology interact with each other, are each other's "condition.
I selected and viewed two of the following net-artists, John Hudak and Jodi Zellen.
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Hudak/index.html
On turbulence, I found Artifact, by John Hudak ('97). He used actual "artifactual sounds and images collected from the web." To open, you click on an alternating red, yellow and green rectangle with artifact scribbled in black. It opens to entirely black background with a small rectangle in the center. Within the rectangle, 12 small squares flashed and alternate from black and white to the beat of a pulsating Internet sound. When you click on each tiny square it pulls up a different picture and the sound changes. Some of the pictures were in color, for example one brown eye that looks right and left. The sounds seemed too match the movement of the pictures. I thought the sounds and images he chose were clever and interesting.
In Net_Condition, I clicked on Ghost City, by Jody Zellen ('97).
This piece also has a black background and a large square in the center. Within the square are 20 smaller squares, grid like, each flashing with changing urban images (street signs, wires, cars, sidewalks). Viewers must navigate either by clicking on random squares (links), or by following the linear narrative on each page. Each space is made up of images and texts “clipped” from different media sources. It’s a cityscape in a moving collage. The “Random chaos of the city” is beautifully captured in her complicated network of images.
Both of these net-art pieces were from 1997. Hudak’s work Artifact was fun, playful and more simplistic than Zellen’s Ghost City. Ghost city was quite a complex and in depth project. She was making a social statement about chaotic city life. It was a “representation of the city by the mass media...fragments, a memory, a ghost of reality.” Both sites allowed the viewer to interact with the graphics.
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