■ The "Project netarts.org 2009"

From 1995 to 2003, The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts hosted the "Art on the Net" project promoting the Internet as a space for artistic expression. For nine years, this project had been calling on artists around the world to investigate the relationship between Art, the Internet and the Society.

A fter the years of the "Art on the Net," we launched a new exhibition called the "Project netarts.org". The Exhibition section of the project will feature recent developments in Internet Art and is open to all forms of creative expression that use the Internet as their primary medium.

And the theme of the exhibition this year is, "Play with me. "

Can you come out and play with me?

The question comes after the doorbell rings, a neighborhood friend arriving after school and with luck, after home work is finished. A nostalgia about prior times. Before the internet. What happens now? Friend me! But what has become of play? What is play in the time of Wii? Has it simply transformed yet again through the inexorable shift of material technology? Does it retain that immaterial call to the imagination in the immersive visual time of WoW (World of Warcraft)? Do birds twitter and tweet as a form of play or simply to mark their territory?

This year's theme is meant to surface that part of the network which recalls digging in the sandbox -- and doing so for the pure pleasure in the act of being. Play is sometimes solitary, but as a social activity, in collaboration with others, formal and informal games become an absorbing means to bind lives together. Can you play with me?