■ John Hopkins' comment

where is netart?

When invited to join this year's netart curatorial crew, I was somewhat sceptical that such an exhibition -- with the attendant baggage of dusty artifact carried by the traditional Art World -- would be a satisfying way to spend life-limited time when there are always other things to be done. That and the continuous nomadic movement that underlies my participation like a slippery mat, allowing only sporadic concentration of my remote presence hunting for and looking at network-based art and actually thinking about it.

However, collective curation with people who I knew were sensitive to the contingencies of remote collaboration and very aware of the limited understanding that the Art World has regarding net art makes the project interesting. So what then? Do I trawl the now-vast
network for something brightly shining or sounding attractive? Eye candies? A hopeless task. The only thing to do was to sift the daily flow of content, during interstitial times when local presence was not demanded -- that flow of information personally customized by the networker to form a vital link with the remote macro-network -- while keeping the overall blast of data at a comprehensible level. Not always possible: getting ever more difficult with each spam-filled day. Especially given that the networker is not fond of reductionist activities which concentrate attention on particular nodes.

In order to proceed at all in a project using the words "net" and "art," it is useful to start by reaching back into the recent past of teaching for several proto-definitions which follow:

-- network -- a distributed and dynamic configuration of humans engaged in dialectic and sustained exchanges of energy.

-- digital art - artifacts/performances enabled by or realized with a digital device.

-- (computer)net art - art(ifacts?) on the net (what's the net?) Internet? Any technological network? Any human network?

-- web art - specific art(ifact?) located on the WWW (and possibly interacting with that particular network dataspace).

-- networking art - art activities that take advantage of, or use the concepts of, (human / technological) networks - use of those spaces for active expression (creation of spaces for others to create in) -- networks which are an extension of socialized being.

Meditating on these definitions suggests certain defined spaces where creative activities might take place or be placed. It also suggests rather different forms of creative activity, or that even the concept of classifying art by traditional material parameters might not aid
in the understanding of creative manifestations existing in networks.

The definitions perhaps eliminate much of what is considered as "art on the net" -- those artifacts which are nothing more than extensions of very traditional art forms: sound, static image, moving image, and text. But what then is left beyond these apparently all-encompassing formal typologies?

One possible space beyond artifact is the set of creative practices which, in their immediate operation, may be as ephemeral as presence and being in the world.

Ping Melody, the winner of this year's competition, is as ephemeral as life. Humans are constantly configuring and re-configuring the architecture of the technologically-networked space of the internet -- a space that is embedded in the greater dynamic social system of
human be-ing in the world. This constant flux of connection and dis-connection governs the actual pathways in which energy moves between individual humans when crossing this massive network. These pathways may be traced in their momentary configuration via a
technique named after the sound that a war-time sonar system makes when it senses reflected sound energy from an enemy vessel, a "ping." "To ping" in the telecommunications sense is to send a small digital signal out into the socially constructed human/technological network. The ping is aimed at a particular distant point in the network, and if that remote point is active, the signal is "reflected" to its origin. Fundamentally, the pathway that the signal follows is a direct expression of the momentary (and very much human) connectivity
of the network. Ideal networks are dynamic systems where momentary state-of-being information is distributed throughout the network so that any single point in the network contains information about the whole network. Thus, a traced pathway through the network space is an elegant expression of the momentary state of the entire social network. Incorporating this state information into a live sonic performance brings the richness of that dynamic state into juxtaposition with the creative potential of the single human node in
the network, the artist. This is a network collaboration in its most fundamental form.

One of the runners-up works, Gridcosm, explores this participatory space more explicitly, where there are several critical elements juxtaposed: the concept and the programmers of the collaborative space, the people participating and interacting in that defined space, and the resulting artifact that spins out of the space.

It is precisely this interaction, a deep participatory action -- between the individual node and the collective human network -- that makes both these works the epitome of net art by the definitions proposed above.

But where is the actual art? Is it the concept? Is it in the ephemeral traces, pathways through the network? Is it the artifactual evidence of Gridcosm? Is it the programming code of the
"pinging" software? Is it in the live sonic performance? Is it the idiosyncratic imagery of Gridcosm?

I leave those questions to be pondered be visitors to the netart exhibition -- with the observation that networks are the site of creative activity, networks are a means of creative production, and that net art is about the dynamics of human connection.

John Hopkins

Ukiah, California, 22.November.2004
http://neoscenes.net