Subject : RHIZOME DIGEST: 4.21.02
By : RHIZOME
Date : 2002/04/21
Link : http://rhizome.org/archive/digest/msg00067.rhiz
RHIZOME DIGEST: April 21, 2002

Content:

+editor's note+
1. Mark Tribe: Rhizome.org Seeks Editorial Coordinator

+work+
2. Tamara Lai: T.L.J. project
3. vcards: VCards

+announcement+
4. Jim Ruxton: 5th Annual Subtle Technologies Conference

+interview+
5. Mike Caloud: Sarai

+feature+
6. Lev Manovich: Generation Flash (2/3)

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

1.

Date: 4.18.02
From: Mark Tribe (mark@::::::.org)
Subject: Rhizome.org Seeks Editorial Coordinator

Rhizome.org, a nonprofit organization focused on new media art, is
seeking an Editorial Coordinator to manage the flow of content created
by our community using a new member-driven content management system now
under development. This is a part-time position (15-20 hours per week).

The ideal candidate is a long-time Rhizome member who is web-savvy, good
at communicating with people via email, very smart and very
knowledgeable about new media art. We are looking for someone who is
prepared to make a long-term commitment to the organization.

Rhizome.org is among the oldest and most well respected organizations in
the field of new media art. For more information about the organization
and our programs, please check out our web site: http://rhizome.org.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:
+ Edit Rhizome Digest, a weekly email publication of approx 4000 words.
+ Oversee the creation of text objects by Rhizome superusers
+ Commission book reviews, critical essays, etc.
+ Define archiving and indexing techniques for TextBase
+ Represent Rhizome at conferences, festivals and other events
+ Manage relationships with writers and other publishing venues
+ Manage Regional Editors
+ Manage Editorial Interns

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
+ 2 years editorial experience, preferably online
+ demonstrated involvement in new media
+ experience managing writers, interns and contract workers

Exceptional candidates will also have the following skills:
+ experience with metadata and content-indexing standards
+ experience with member-based communities
+ HTML
+ Photoshop

START DATE: June 3, 2002.

LOCATION: On-site in New York City or telecommute

COMPENSATION: $15,000-$20,000/year, commensurate to experience

TO APPLY: Please email a detailed cover letter and resume to Mark Tribe:
mark@rhizome.org

http://rhizome.org
http://rhizome.org/jobs/20.php3

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2.

Date: 4.17.02
From: Tamara Lai (tamara.lai@::::::::.org)
Subject: T.L.J. project

T.L.J. project

Tamara.La•.Jimpunk - collaborative project  B / FR 04 2002

(best in 1024 X 768 resolution & Internet Explorer >=4 )

http://www.jimpunk.com/www/T.L.J./

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+ad+

**MUTE MAGAZINE NEW ISSUE** Coco Fusco/Ricardo Dominguez on activism and
art; JJ King on the US military's response to asymmetry and Gregor
Claude on the digital commons. Matthew Hyland on David Blunkett, Flint
Michigan and Brandon Labelle on musique concrete and 'Very Cyberfeminist
International'. http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/issue23/index.htm

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

3.

Date: 4.11.2002
From: vcards (vcards@:::::::::::::.com)
Subject: VCards
Keywords: surveillance, security, privacy

VCards is an email based art application. Using the metaphor of the
greeting card VCards invites the users to share a voyeuristic experience
by viewing and sending emails with random personal images to people in
their address book.

Send A VCard to someone you love:

http://www.flavoredthunder.com/vcards

VCards, Lets get with hot communications

http://www.flavoredthunder.com/vcards

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

+ad+

Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ) 11 includes a double audio CD, "Not
Necessarily 'English Music,'" curated by musician, composer, writer and
sound curator David Toop. The CDs feature pieces from pioneering U.K.
composers and performers from the late 60s through the mid-70s. Visit
the LMJ website at http://mitpress2.mit.edu/Leonardo/lmj/

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

4.

Date: 4.21.02
From: Jim Ruxton (cinetron@::::::::::.ca)
Subject: 5th Annual Subtle Technologies Conference

SUBTLE TECHNOLOGIES 2002

Blurring the Boundaries Between Art and science

*MAY 9-12 2002 Innis Townhall, 2 Sussex Ave. Toronto Canada*

*We are pleased to announce the program*

*for Subtle Technologies 2002, now available at*

http://www.subtletechnologies.com

+ + +

In its 5th year, Subtle Technologies is a multidisciplinary festival
where artists and scientists come together to discuss, demonstrate and
exhibit their work.

Topics include dance, neurology, genetics, music, quantum physics,
cultural theory, biological model based animation, and more....

This year, we are pleased to present:

*Lectures featuring keynote speaker Erik Davis*,

Todd Barton, Richard Brown, Joe Davis, Alan Dunning, Ivar Hagendoorn,
Heath Hanlin, Don Hill, Amy Ione, Stephen Morris, Josef Peninger, Susie
Ramsay, Mark Rudolph, Diana Slattery, Aephraim Steinberg, Brett Terry,
Lisa Walker, Andrea Wollensak.

http://www.subtletechnologies.com

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

5.

Date: 4.18.2002
From: Mike Caloud (mcaloud@::::::.edu)
Subject: Sarai
Keywords: research, public space, media activism, connectivity

[Sarai is an alternative, non-profit organization in Delhi, India. They
describe themselves as "a space for research, practice and conversation
about the contemporary media and urban constellations." Sarai publishes
an annual "Reader" covering many issues relevant to new media art. In a
recent email exchange, Mike Caloud had the chance to interview Sarai's
"Raqs Media Collective" on their unique institution
(http://www.sarai.net).]

+ + +

Mike Caloud: Let's begin with a little background history. How and when
did Sarai begin? What were the interests and motivations?

Sarai: To understand how Sarai began, it may be necessary for us to take
a brief step back to the summer of 1998, when five of us, (Ravi
Vasudevan & Ravi Sundaram from CSDS, and Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula &
Shuddhabrata Sengupta from the Raqs Media Collective) began to conceive
of Sarai.

The summer of '98 was a time for many new beginnings in the city of
Delhi. The nineties had been a decade marked by doubt and rethinking on
many fronts, all of which seemed to have come to a head for some of us
during that summer. There was a sense of disquiet with increasing urban
violence and strife, dissatisfaction with restrictive modes of thinking
and practice within mainstream academia, the universities & the media,
and a general unease at the stagnation that underlay the absence of a
critical public culture.

At the same time, Delhi witnessed a quiet rebirth of an independent arts
and media scene. This became evident in exhibitions and screenings that
began taking place modestly in alternative venues, outside galleries and
institutional spaces, and in archival initiatives that began to be
active. Spaces for dissent and debate were kept alive by clusters of
teachers and students in the universities. New ideas, modes of
communication and forms of protest were being tried out and tested on
the streets. The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in the summer of
1998 had brought many people out on to the streets of Delhi in
spontaneous protest. There was a vibrant energy evident in street level
improvisations with new technologies. Public phone booths were
transforming themselves into street corner cybercafŽs, independent
filmmakers were beginning to organize themselves in forums, and a new
open source and free software community made its mark in the city's BBSs
(Electronic Bulletin Boards). The city itself, as a space and as an
idea, was becoming a focus for enquiry and reflection, and a provocation
for a series of creative experiments.

It was from within this ferment of ideas, rough & ready plans, and
fragments of proposals that a series of conversations on film history,
new media theory, media practice and urban culture was able to mature
into the conceptual foundation of Sarai. Sarai (the space and the
programme) takes its name from the caravan-serais for which medieval
Delhi was well known. These were places where travelers could find
shelter, sustenance, and companionship; they were taverns, public
houses, meeting places; destinations and points of departure; places to
rest in the middle of a journey. Even today, the map of Delhi carries on
it twelve place names that include the word Sarai. The Sarai Initiative
interprets this sense of the word "sarai" to mean a very public space,
where different intellectual, creative, and activist energies can
intersect in an open and dynamic manner to give rise to an imaginative
reconstitution of urban public culture, new/old media practice,
research, and critical cultural intervention. The challenge before the
founding group was to cohere a philosophy marrying this range of
concerns to the vision of creating a lively public space where research,
media practice, and activism could flow into each other. It took two
years (1998-2000) to translate this conception into a plan for a real
space and to design a workable interdisciplinary programme of
activities.

The third Next Five Minutes conference in Amsterdam was a turning point
in some ways. The discussions between those of us who were planning (or
rather dreaming) Sarai, those in the Waag, and those who were to become
part of Sarai's international partners began taking a more concrete
shape at that event. The next several months were spent in detailing
what we wanted to do at Sarai and on the hammering out a concrete
proposal that focused Sarai's interests and objectives.

Today, the Sarai Initiative embraces interests that include cinema
history, urban cultures and politics, new media theory, computers, the
Internet and software cultures, documentary filmmaking, digital arts and
critical cultural practice. Sarai opened its doors to the public of
Delhi in February 2001 and the first year has been very hectic for all
of us, especially as all our projects and public interventions have
begun to take concrete shape. As we draw towards the completion of our
first year we realize that our strength lies in the collaborative vision
that has been the founding principle of Sarai, and that the space can
grow only by continuing to include and engage with new people and ideas
from across the world.

Mike Caloud: The beginnings of an institution like Sarai involve
gathering resources, raising funds, and setting up a space to work. What
was that initial experience like?

Sarai: We had to spend a fair amount of time and energy to garner the
resources and the funding that made Sarai possible. In fact it took
roughly two years (with some of us concentrating full time on the task
of writing and following up on proposals) for Sarai to become a reality
in terms of funding. The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
our parent institution, contributed the space, which has been a major
asset. Additional funding was raised, through the Waag, from the Dutch
government for a collaboration and exchange programme. And, over time,
we have raised further resources for our other projects.

Having got the funding, we had to spend a lot of time on actually
converting the space that we had (an empty basement) into what it is
today. This meant designing the space, supervising construction, buying
furniture and appliances, and working a lot with our own hands to create
a well-equipped, convivial, and comfortable space. As we had no
precedents to follow, we obviously made a few mistakes and errors of
judgment, and had to learn to deal with realities like power surges,
leaking basement floors, complicated insurance contracts, and purchase
invoices. We think that these mundane aspects of setting up spaces such
as Sarai often get overlooked in the hype about culture and creativity,
but without them, and without people working really hard to ensure that
everything in a building is working and in its place in conditions that
are far less than ideal, none of the culture and creativity and new
media can flourish. We have enjoyed dealing with all this as much as we
have enjoyed designing our website or creating new media work, or doing
research.

Mike Caloud: Do you have sufficient computer hardware and software for
your projects? Also, how much does Free Software play a part?

Sarai: We are reasonably well equipped. We have a Media Lab that has
five multimedia computer workstations, including 3 Mac G4s, and two
Linux PCs. One of these is equipped with Final Cut Pro, and so doubles
as a video-editing suite. The Media Lab is the production hub of Sarai,
all our creative work in various media, Internet projects, print and
design projects are located here. The Media Lab has a scanner, a
printer, a digital video camera, a digital still camera and audio mini-
disc recorders. Five people work at the media lab. The Interface Zone -
the public access area that is also used for residencies, workshops, and
exhibitions is equipped with five PCs. The Interface Zone is looked
after by an animator who designs and curates events, and facilitates
public interaction. Apart from this, the research projects have five
computers, which are used by research assistants and fellows at Sarai.
The free software project has two PCs.

Sarai's experimental outreach programme--the Cybermohalla Project--a
digital culture lab in a slum settlement in Central Delhi is also
equipped with three Linux PCs, a scanner, analog audio recorders and a
digital still camera.

Sarai has a core team of eighteen people from different backgrounds and
disciplines (filmmakers, academics, software programmers, lawyers,
social workers, activists, designers, writers, researchers, and media
practitioners) who work on a regular basis on different collaborative
and individual projects. Apart from this, eighteen seed grants and
fellowships have been given out this year for different research and
media projects on themes that resonate with Sarai's interests with city
spaces, urban cultures, and media forms. These include architects,
theorists, sound artists, student groups, and a graphic novelist. Sarai
has also embarked on a modest residency programme for visiting artists,
practitioners, and scholars to work and interact with Sarai fellows.

In terms of connectivity, we have recently acquired a 64K lease line
connection. This means that we have now enough bandwidth to begin
thinking concretely about streaming audio, and hopefully eventually
video from Sarai.

To answer your question about the usage of free software at Sarai: The
entire network at Sarai runs on Linux. The PCs are all Linux machines,
and run free software applications, and one of the Macs at the media lab
has been configured to run Linux. Everyone at Sarai is encouraged to
work as much as possible with free software, and most of us use Free
Software (we experiment/use many distributions).

This is certainly a conscious choice on our part. We are interested in
Free Software not only because it makes economic sense in an Indian
context not to spend a lot of money on expensive proprietary software,
but also because we believe there are crucial issues of cultural freedom
and creativity that are at stake here. A mono-cultural domination of
Microsoft, or any form of proprietary software, is as lethal for the
sustenance of the dynamism and diversity of software culture(s) as the
domination of Monsanto seeds is to farming. We want to contribute to
autonomous, collaborative energies in the field of software culture,
which are conducive to conditions of diversity. Many of these
collaborative energies challenge, or at least are skeptical about the
commodification of digital culture across the globe. That is a
characteristic we would like to see fore-grounded in a lot of the work
that we do.

We are lucky to have on board a team of young, talented, and
enthusiastic free software activists, who also run and administer the
network at Sarai. They have been able to put in place an array of
machines and applications across platforms, which we think is unique in
terms of the variety and number of sometimes conflicting demands that it
effectively addresses.

Mike Caloud: waag.sarai.net is evidence of the partnership between the
Waag and Sarai. How have the Waag and Sarai benefited from
collaboration?

Sarai: The relationship with the Waag has been one of collaboration at a
very practical, concrete level, as well as one of the sharing of
intellectual and creative energies. There has been a lot of two-way
traffic, with exchanges of residencies, and visits. This has certainly
lent dynamism to the creative processes at Sarai. The programmers and
media lab people at Sarai have benefited enormously from their visits,
for instance, to HAL and to tech_2, both of which took place with
support from the Waag-Sarai Exchange programme. We have also had
workshops in design, networking and system administration, as well as
video and audio streaming. The partnership has also facilitated visits
and talks at Sarai by media theorists from Europe, and starting from
this summer, it will be theorists and practitioners from Delhi who will
be spending time in Amsterdam, doing talks and conducting workshops that
will be organized by the Waag.

The publication of the Sarai Readers 01 and 02 is another instance of
the Sarai Waag collaboration. The readers have been jointly published,
and Geert Lovink from the Waag has been a part of the editorial team for
both Readers.

The level of exchange and collaboration is poised to enter a
qualitatively new phase as both Sarai and Waag as content producers can
envisage the possibility of entering into new collaborative
possibilities, this time with third parties located elsewhere. This is
particularly because the experience gained by both Sarai and Waag in
developing digital cultural interventions in cities like Delhi may have
relevance in many other cities of the South.

Mike Caloud: Do you have other collaborations planned in the Asian/South
Asian regions, and internationally?

Sarai: Sarai has active ties with other international institutions,
organizations and bodies, and these are growing as we get many requests
for collaborations, exchanges, and visits from overseas. We have
especially good relationships with the new media scene in Australia
(through ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology), the UK,
and Germany. We do feel that we should have a more active relationship
with practitioners in North America, especially in the free software
movement. We are developing partnerships with similar bodies in Eastern
Europe and Japan, (through ISEA) and are actively pursuing a more
dynamic network in the South Asian Region, especially with practitioners
and artists in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. The political realities
of South Asia, particularly the strained relationships between the
Indian and Pakistani governments makes the need for collaborative
energies in the region more urgent and all the more difficult, but this
is certainly an area that we hope we will be able to forge more
meaningful relationships in the future.

Another area of building interesting alliances with artists,
practitioners, and public intellectuals is with similar cultural and
academic initiatives in other Indian cities, particularly with Mumbai,
Bangalore, and Kolkata--where we are now beginning to be known.

Mike Caloud: The Opus Project seems especially compelling as a model of
collective creation. How far has the collaboration software progressed?
What are your hopes for Opus? Also, if participants can easily modify
nodes within Opus, how do you determine authorship for nodes? Will
authorship even matter?

Sarai: Opus is an acronym; it stands for Open Platform for Unlimited
Signification! In a simple sense, it will be an online space for people,
machines, and codes to play and work together--to share, create, and
transform images, sounds, moving pictures, and texts.

Once you have published your work, other members of the Opus community
will be able to give their comments and reflections on your work through
the attached discussion boards. You can also inspire others and allow
them to take your work as a starting point for a new (art)work. Opus
follows the same rules as those that operate in all free software
communities. The source(code), in this case the video, image, sound or
text, is free to use, to edit, and to redistribute.

Needless to say these freedoms also apply to the code, i.e. the software
itself that lies behind Opus.

We are quite excited by the possibilities that we envisage in the Opus
Project. I think it exemplifies for us the opportunity to evolve a new
ethic of creativity, of making work that is collaborative, playful and
involves a series of interactions between practitioners, technicians,
coders, and artists. This involves a necessary re-imagination of the
character of cultural praxis. Opus is less about individual artists or
practitioners, but of laboratories and virtual ateliers where
practitioners develop creative processes, and those cultural artifacts
are available to all those who seek it. This is related to an idea that
we have been working on for some time now, which is to lay the ground
for a "digital commons" which is predicated not on the dissolution of
authorship, but on its dispersal and elaboration over time.

We are not saying that authors do not matter, but what we are saying is
that a "line" of works may be the result of many authors who enter the
process of creation at different points of time, or who are located in
different spaces. This is analogous to the way a population grows.
Authors (or the traces of them in different works) act in the same way
as parents act in a given generation of human beings. Their children
(the works) may attract other materials and further processes of
reproduction will involve the exchange of the genetic code of different
works. The process of survival and growth of the population of works
over time is dependent on their ability to attract partners (other
authors, other materials) and reproduce. Since each work, at each stage
of its presence--as a "rescension" in Opus will embody the signature, or
code of its parentage, it will be possible to construct genealogies of
works, making it possible to identify quite precisely the distributed
authorship of a work and its rescensions over time.

A word about the term "rescension"--a "rescension" is a narrative which
can give rise to another narrative (which is neither a clone nor a copy
of the "original") without being a replacement of the first. We see this
as being vital to the development of a collaborative space for creation.
Each rescension stands in relational autonomy to every other rescension,
the presence of one modifies the reading of another without calling for
its replacement.

Curiously, this is the process by which epic narratives have multiplied.
A good example is the way in which the narrative of the "Mahabharata" in
South Asia has formed and reformed--as rescensions--allowing for an
extensible multiplicity of meanings and authorial agencies. These new
"rescensions" and/or threads will not replace the older ones. They will
together form a series of interlinked interpretations.

So authors will matter, but they will matter in a dynamic, rather than
in a static sense of their contribution to a work or works. We are
actually quite pleased with the obvious parallels between the process of
continued creation in an online environment and the ordinary business of
making babies, or ensuring that life continues in the real world.

At the moment we are working (at a relatively furious pace) the front
end of the Opus Interface and on the code on which Opus will move. The
media lab is quite busy with Opus; we are a fairly motley crew, with
programmers from Delhi, Zurich, and Amsterdam poring over long sheets of
code, while designers and media practitioners debate the look, the feel,
and interactivity of the interface.

[Please continue reading part 2 of this interview online at
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?3465.]

http://www.sarai.net
http://waag.sarai.net

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6.

Date: 4.17.02
From: Lev Manovich (manovich@:::::::.edu)
Subject: Generation Flash (2/3)

The Unbearable Lightness of FLASH [1]

F-Biology

Flash artists are big on biological references. Abstract plants,
minimalist creatures, or simply clouds of pixels dance in patterns which
to a human eye signal "life" (Geoff Stearns: deconcept.com, Vitaly
Leokumovich: unclickable.com, Danny Hobart: dannyhobart.com;
uncontrol.com) Often we see self-regenerating systems. But this is not
life as it naturally developed on Earth; rather, it looks like something
we are likely to witness in some biotech laboratory where biology is put
in the service of industrial production. We see hyper accelerated
regeneration and evolution. We see complex systems emerging before our
eyes: millions of years of evolution are compressed into a few seconds.

There is another feature that distinguishes life a la Flash from real
life: the non-existence of death. Biological organisms and systems are
born, they develop, and eventually they die. In short, they have
teleology. But in Flash projects life works differently: since these
projects are loops, there is no death. Life just keeps running forever -
more precisely, until your computer maintains Net connection.

Amplification: Flash aesthetics and Computer Games

Abstract ecosystems in Flash projects have another characteristic that
makes playing so pleasurable (Joel Fox). They brilliantly use the power
of the computer to amplify user's actions. This power puts a computer in
line with other magical devices; not accidentally, the most obvious
place to see it is in games, although it is also at work in all of our
interactions with a computer. For instance, when you tell Mario to step
to the left by moving a joystick, this initiates a small delightful
narrative: Mario comes across a hill; he starts climbing the hill; the
hill turns to be too steep; Mario slides back onto the ground; Mario
gets up, all shaking. None of these actions required anything from us;
all we had to do is just to move the joystick once. The computer program
amplifies our single action, expanding it into a narrative sequence.

Historically, computer games were always a step ahead from the general
human computer interface. In the 1960s and 1970s users communicated with
a computer using non-graphical interfaces: entering the program onto a
stack of punch cards, typing on a command line, and so on. In contrast
since their beginnings in the late 1950s, computer games adopted
interactive graphical interface - something that only came to personal
computers in the 1980s.

Similarly, today's games already use what many computer scientists think
will be the next paradigm in HCI: active amplification of user's
actions. In the future, we are told, agent programs would watch our
interactions with a computer, notice the patterns, and then automate
many tasks we do regularly, from backing up the data at regular
intervals to filtering and answering our email. The computer would also
monitor our behavior and attention level, adjusting its behavior
accordingly: speeding up, slowing down, and so on. In some ways this new
paradigm is already at work in some applications: for instance, a
Internet browser offers us the list of sites relevant to the topic we
are searching on; Microsoft Office Assistant trying to guess when we
need help. However, there is a crucial problem with moving to such
active amplification across the whole of HCI. The more power we delegate
to a computer, the more we lose control over what it is doing. How do we
know that the agent program identified a correct pattern in our daily
use of email? How do we know that a commerce agent we send on the Web to
negotiate with other agents the lowest price for a product was not
corrupted by them? In short, how do we know that a computer amplified
our actions correctly?

Computer games are games, and the worst that may happen is that we lose.
Therefore active amplification is present in practically every game:
Mario embarking on mini-narratives of its own with a single move of a
joystick; troops conducting complex military maneuvers while you
directly control only their leader in Rainbow Six; Lora Craft executing
whole acrobatic sequences with a press of a keyboard key. (Note that in
"normal" games this amplification does not exist: when you move a single
figure on a chessboard, this is all that happens; your move does not
initiate a sequence of steps.)

Flash projects heavily use active amplification. It gives many projects
the magical feeling. Often we are confronted with an empty screen, but a
single click brings to life a whole universe: abstract particle systems,
plant-like outlines, or a population of minimalist creatures. The user
as a God controlling the universe is something we also often encounter
in computer games; but Flash projects also give us the pleasure of
creating the universe from scratch.

The active amplification is not the only feature Flash projects share
with games. More generally, computer games are for Flash generation what
movies were for Wharhol. Cinema and TV colonized the unconscious of the
previous generations of media artists who continue to use the gallery as
their therapy coach, spilling bits and pieces of their childhood media
archives in public - for instance, Douglas Gordon. Flash artists are
less obsessed with commercial time-based media. Instead, their
iconography, temporal rhythms, and interaction aesthetics come from
games (Mike Clavert: mikeclavert.com). Sometimes the user participation
is needed for the Flash game to work; sometimes the game just plays
itself (UTOPIA by futurefarmers.com; dextro.org).

Flash versus Net Art

Tirana Biennale 01 Internet exhibition: this title is deeply ironic. The
exhibition did not include any projects from Albany, or any other post-
communist East European country for that matter. This was quite
different from many early net art exhibitions of the middle of the 1990s
whose stars came from the East: Vuc Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, Olga Lialina.
1990s net art was the first international art movement since the 1960s
that included east Europe in a big way. Prague, Ljubljana, Riga, and
Moscow counted as much as Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York. Equally
including artists from the West and the East, net art perfectly
corresponded to the economic and social utopia of a new post Cold War
world of the 1990s.

Now this utopia is over. The power structure of the global Empire has
become clear, and the demographics of Tirana Biennale 01 Internet
section reflected this perfectly. Many artists included in Tirana
Biennale 01 Internet exhibition work in key IT regions of the world: San
Francisco (Silicon Valley), New York (Silicon Alley) and Northern
Europe.

What happened? In the mid 1990s, net art relied on simple HTML that run
well on both fast and slow connections - and this is enabled active
participation of the artists from the East. But the subsequent
colonization of the Web by multimedia formats - Flash, Shockwave,
QuickTime, and so on - restored the traditional West/East power
structure. Now Web art requires fast Internet connections for both the
artist and the audiences. With its slow connections, East is out of the
game. The Utopia is over; welcome to the Empire.

(Tirana Biennale 01 did include one artist from China who contributed a
beatiful animation of martial arts fighters. But we never found who he
was. All we knew about him was his email address: zhu_zhq@sohu.com.
Maybe he did not even live in China.)

Lightness

When I first visited the most famous Flash site - praystation.net - I
was struck by the lightness of its graphics. More quite when whisper,
more elegant than Dior or Channel, more minimal than 1960s minimalist
sculptures of Judd, more subdued than the winter landscape in heavy fog,
the site pushed the contrast scale to the limits of legibility. The
similar lightness and restrain can be found in many projects included in
Biennale 01 show. Again, the contrast with screaming graphics of
commercial media and the media art of the previous generations is
obvious.

The lightness of Flash can be thought of as a visual equivalent of
electronic ambient music. Every line and every pixel counts. Flash
appeals to our visual intelligence - and cognitive intelligence. After
the century of RGB color which begun with Matisse and ended with
aggressive spreads of Wired, we are asked to start over, to begin from
scratch. Flash generation invites us to undergo a visual cleansing -
this is why we see a monochrome palette, white and light gray. It uses
neo-minimalism as a pill to cure us from post-modernism. In Flash, the
rationality of modernism is combined with the rationality of programming
and the affect of computer games to create the new aesthetics of
lightness, curiosity and intelligence. Make sure your browser have the
right plug-in: welcome to generation Flash.

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NOTES

[1] Tirana Biennale 01 Internet section
(www.electronicorphanage.com/biennale) was organized by Miltos Manetas /
Electronic Orphanage. The exhibition consisted from a few dozen projects
by Web designers and artists, many of whom work in Flash or Schockwave.
Manetas comissioned me, Peter Lunenfeld, and Norman Klein to write the
analysis of the show. This text is my contribution; many ideas in it
developed out of the conversations the three of us had about the works
in the show. The joint text entitled "KLM Theory" will be released soon.
The names in brackets below refer to the artists in the show; go to the
show site to see their projects.

I should also make it clear that many of the sites which inspired me to
think of "Flash aesthetics" are not necessaraly made with Flash; they
use Shockwave, Javascript, Java, and other Web multimedia formats and
scripting languages. Thus the qualities I describe below as specefic to
"Flash aesthetics" are not unique to projects made in Flash.

http://deconcept.com
http://unclickable.com
http://dannyhobart.com
http://uncontrol.com
http://mikeclavert.com
http://futurefarmers.com
http://dextro.org
http://praystation.net
http://www.electronicorphanage.com/biennale

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