■ Trace Reddell 's comment

> as conceptually transferring strategies for navigation across different layers of play and experience
> I'm trying not to think of the telematic realm
> as divorced from life or as being in service to life
> which is what bugs me about ...
> those net-based, artifactual works

Surveying the most engaging contributions to this year's netarts.org competition, the most compelling reveal the presence of the network as a cognitive process, a pattern that goes with us. Both network-based locative works like One Block Radius, and ideological mind-candy like this year's runner-up, unosunosyunosceros, ultimately reveal otherwise occulted patterns of control or influence exerted by the systems in which we reside. Ping Melody merges these two tendencies in the form of a musical performance using network locative pinging as a form of telematic meditation on the conditions and consequences of connectivity.

Transforming the network into a massive FX box, Pawel Janicki engages a process whereby the medium functions as its own message. This makes superfluous the artist's efforts to assert that what is really at stake in any given performance is a tacit confrontation with the military's communications system. I find myself struggling with the documentary site's inability to let the piece speak for itself -- that is, to leave theconflict unspoken, embedded in practice, something more-than-implied and still only flickering around the peripheries of our understanding of this particular network. But the documentation does imply valuable questions and suggests possible new directions for Janicki or others. For instance, it
would be worth knowing whether the melodies of pinging would be different if packets were distributed, say, over exclusively civilian or commercial networks. Do different telematic systems contain different harmonies, song lines, and choruses? Do these particular sonic networks link up with other extra-telematic networks? And if so, what does it take to navigate across them?

Ping Melody suggests that a key function of net.art is cartographic. One Block Radius is likewise about participating in the ongoing undoing of networked documentation of the patterns we inhabit. This project exemplifies the practice of digital psychogeography, and it is a compelling documentary of an urban zone. More than Ping Melody, the web presence of this project features a living document; it's not simply a record of completed performances or installations, and it's ongoing support and development
doesn't hinge on specific, scheduled events. Rather, an artistic relationship to the net -- as an avenue for releasing the objects of psychogeographical research in a steady cycle -- becomes a mode of daily
practice, just as the writers of the IS had intended. I believe that this project embodies something that John and I discussed: digital media and networked artistic practice provide ways to intensify one's participation in the imaginative production of everyday life. Seeing, hearing, walking, touching, all become charged in the situationist space of the psychogeographical drifter. Inside of this One Block Radius, a great amount of cultivated, digital awareness. This is a site that I will continue to come back to.

Tyler Potts's 52 Songs represents something of a virtual, and intensely personal, corollary to the locative works also featured in the exhibit. Network connectivity, micro-indy label aesthetics, and personal journaling all meld as a non-narrative, ongoing soundblog, a form of practice that has,
as John described it, "a human element that the artifacts don't have." More than any other project in the competition, orbiting through this site on a regular basis has already become part of my own living practice.Our runner-up, unosunosyunosceros, characterizes the "net.art-as-mandala" vibe. If we're looking to recognize net.art objects or artifacts, this is one of the better ones. This is the project that led me to think of"ideological mind-candy." This is meditative media that functions as an imaginary correlative to the association-expanding consciousness of the psychogeographical entity plugged into a networked locative piece. That is, unosunosyunosceros serves the function of prayer in that it trains
consciousness for heightened function in daily experience.

> this is different from a rhizome, I think
> because a rhizome implies a genetic similarity across the connectivity points
> it's all the same lifeforce

> a network allows for connectivity and exchange across systems that are dramatically different
> and I think that this is partly why digital media had its day in the sun--
> and to some extent still does--
> because it mythologizes and materializes the intensity of that connectivity