■ Mark Amerika's comment

How strange that a very self-explanatory one-word movie device, built for
the web, will now win the top award for the 2005 Project net.art event
held annually at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts. But is it really
that odd, or is just the right pick for its time? If a particularly loaded
word can launch a thousand-plus images in a flickering frame-by-frame
remix of what the web is dreaming in asynchronous realtime (and how is
that for personification?), then who is to say that we are not entering
yet another phase of net art, perhaps a more folksy and fibrillating
phase, a phase that is at once simple to interact with, essentialist in
its bare bones VJ aesthetic, while also projecting the mandatory
cleverness and catchiness that all decent and upstanding net art phases go
through.

Fads come and go: hypertext, Gifbuilder animations, Shockwave-this /
Flash-that, data visualizations, JavaScript performance art, alternative
web browsers, sneaky hactivist interventions, mp3 concept albums with
hyperlinernotes, ebooks, philosophically disposed online art games, as
well as forays into web-based cinema that trick the user into thinking
they are in total remote control.

Nowadays what feels really worth my time can be found on blogs, like
Screenfull.net, or some of the experimental image sets permeating sites
like Flickr. One of this year's nominated entries, confluence.org, though
not the top award winner, caught everyone's attention as a kind of
cyberpsychogeographical matrix of location based art. Still another work,
one that did not make it into the final round, located at
http://www.availableonthursday.com, creates an opportunity for the user to
have the artist "perform the actions and events scheduled for him" by us,
at his web site. Very folksy and in a familial kind of way, if not a
little masochistic, but who is to say that all of us "web users" are not a
little sadistic in our addicted, push-button, make-me-happy, networked
lives. Early net artists, and dot.com types too, were obsessed with the
idea of web presence, and knew that the only way to keep the attention
coming was to create sticky art and business sites (as in "stick around
and see what happens"). Now web presence is a given and what matters most
is not whether or not you are online creating sticky sites, but how what
you do with your web presence turns me on enough to keep me coming back
for more. It's less about duration and more about constantly hooking up.
If I push a button, just one button, and it links me directly to you, or
what passes as you in this continually expansive, rhizomatic space of
flows, what will you do for me, how far will you go, and will it be good
enough that I will become a regular customer, a loyal fan? Here I am now,
entertain me.

There were many supercool works of net art nominated this year and now I
am a fan of sites I had not heard of but got introduced to via the jury
process, including the wonderful work of Nicolas Clauss, Pleix, and Marina
Zerbarini. And the finalists for this year were all worthy of the
attention they will receive as a result of our virtual jury process.
Template Cinema is an excellent introduction to the by now prolific net
art work of Thompson and Craig. Google Will Eat Itself proves once again
that conceptual net art is alive and well. And The Fragile Circus is the
kind of work that I hope to see more of in the future, perhaps in expanded
cinematic versions that are easily delivered over the net and invite us to
co-create the "narrative experience" (loose term) as any good conspirator
would want us to.

But this year the top award goes to One Word Movie, a simple yet precise
work that taps into the collective unconscious of the imagistic web. Pick
a word, any word. When I first came across the site, and eventually
nominated it for the award (with no idea it would eventually win), I
intuitively plugged in the word "Warhol" and was impressed with what I
saw, what I experienced. And OK, vanity being what it is, I also then
plugged in "Amerika" and was shocked at the disturbing flick that played
on my screen. Other words came into the picture and even overlapped with
previous flicks, just like my VJ sets. Now I go back and plug in a word
every now and then just to meditate on the history of Mosaic and all the
other GUI browsers that came tumbling after. Because, truth be told, I am
a User. A graphical User (who takes things at interface value). Even today
I plugged in a word that's been on my mind since I recently began
post-production on my first feature-length film. The word was "Salma."