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cc-eyebeam - [cc-eyebeam] Re: Hola Amigos

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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: blogdiva AT culturekitchen.com
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-eyebeam] Re: Hola Amigos
  • Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:23:46 -0500 (EST)


Hi Jon,

I've been thinking about the rhizome and net
art these days because I've been thinking a
lot about Rhizome.org. It's that time of year
when they need to raise money and it's that
time of year when people start moaning,
complaining and questioning why should anyone
"pay up" (as opposed to contribute) to this
organization that is just a list. This issue
never seems to come up with The Thing and
I've never been aware of it surfacing on
NetTime. What's different about these
organizations is that, Nettime and The Thing
have always worked as cloisters, even clicks.

Rhizome on the other hand was THE portal for
the net art and eventually new media and
digital art communities as well. They did not
seem to set any restrictions on who or what
you needed to be in order to join in. On the
contrary, they seemed to expand the
definition of net art and to basically drag
out the debates about what it really is. So
the promise of Rhizome was that it was the
more socially "open" organization of the
three. Even if the core of these
organizations' social interaction happened
only through email, Rhizome was always viewed
as the more open of the three. Of course, it
is not.

Now people will jump at me and say, "Of
course not, you've got to pay $5 to join".
Nope. That's not the reason why it is not
open. I'm not talking here as a creative nor
as an academic. I'm talking here as a
promoter of net art. I'm a realist,
organizations need money and I don't have a
problem with the fee. On the contrary, I had
suggested charging a fee for Rhizome once on
an Upgrade meeting (and a larger amount
actually) and my idea was vehemently
rejected.

I've been thinking about Rhizome because it
seems almost incredible to me that the
technologies that turn personal publishing
into social tools could have passed by an
organization such as Rhizome. What if all
Rhizome's content was a feed of the
syndicated posts of net/new media arts
critics and curators? What if the Artbase
were contextualized via comments and
trackbacks? What if the debates, flammings
and sometimes thoughtful discussions that
happen on Rhizome_Raw were syndicated? What
if we could view which works on the Artbase
where the most visited, what categories of
comments where the most discussed --even, oh
even if you were to charge then for the
privilege of being on the list of recently
updated NetArt sites so that it would get
there up there and center? What if then all
of a sudden a NetNewsWire added ART as a
category of the headline feeds that you could
read online? What if then you start parsing
out sites as JAVA or OPEN GL or PERL/CGI or
FLASH, opening up this little world of art
coding geeks to commercial coding geeks --who
happen to be as creative as their starving
artists counterparts? What if then artists
started commenting directly about other
artists art even if they looked like <!-- @@a
title="muteblog" href="http://
glowlab.blogs.com/muteblog/"-->muteblog<!-- @@/a-->?
What if you could email your post about a
fellow artists site or a question and have
that appear not just on Rhizome_Raw but on
your site and on the site of your commented
artist? What if Raw were syndicated?

Rhizome has not fulfilled its potential of
being rhizomatic and, in effect, of becoming
one of the largest nodes of distributed
creativity on the net because
technologically, it is closed. That's what I
mean about creating sites like it was 1996.
And believe me the irony of my saying this is
not lost knowing how <!-- @@a title="potatoland"
href="http://www.potatoland.org"-->potatoland<!-- @@/
a--> is structured. In defense of the site, I
have to say that a site as a work of art is
one thing and many of the early net art sites
were the artworks themselves. Times have
changed though and the technology is
available for people to turn their sites from
static portfolios to real online studios
where they could not just update visitors on
their projects, post any "discoveries" they
make a long the way of a project, announce
shows, events or accolades but most
importantly, open the field for feedback
whether through comments left onsite, longer
articles linked through incoming trackbacks/
site pings or more importantly, syndication.
What kind of social context and social
network would come about in the netart
community if artists started exploiting the
potential nodality of these technologies?
What kind of associations OUTSIDE net art
would emerge?

Napier has already reminded me many times, he
is an artist not a web designer. That's
fair. Still, even though many would think
he's got his spot in the art ether, we both
agree that if net art has not in any way
become ubiquitous on the web itself, how it
will ever be in the analog world? Netart is
just really non-existent to many. So as a
promoter, producer, writer, and basically
parser of net art, I believe that the only
way this can happen is by creating sites that
are parsable.

Change does not come easy. I've been
negotiating the "modernization" of the site
for a few months now and, given our
schedules, it's going to take between 3 to 6
months to complete. It's a big effing deal to
create standard compliant sites that are
opened to potential social networks with
technology that is already being abused by
spammers. There is another kind of change
though and that is in the artist's
relationship towards their site.

Napier has also pointed out many times he
makes art, not content. Still, he knows
better than me that anything on a site is
content and more importantly, that what you
put there is fair play. Any art is really
fair play but on the web, the digital is
truly plastic and anything can be done with
it. Many artists feel that closing the sites,
either by hiding the code to their works or,
my favorite, turning the whole site into one
massive Flash plug-in is a great means of
safeguarding their intellectual property.
This to me is the most absurd. Creatives, not
just artists have always been thieves. What
happens though when you do not have a
community of artists on the net but more of
an archipelago of artists? Unintentional
copies? Carlo, if you read this, please
relate what happened with you and some other
artist's contribution to Rhizome's Artbase.

Carlo's situation (and a similar occurrence
at The Thing) just made me think of how link
repositories are just there, sitting on some
server. There is no context to them and
needless to say, no documentation directly
linked to them. One of the most powerful
aspects of blogs is that attribution is
easier to trace than through emails or even
bulletin boards, especially if there is a
mess of trackbacks commenting your entry.
Google knows all, especially if it is a link
with a context (hence "blog spam", the
new scourge of the net).

On a links directory there is no context and,
really, no life after the link is added. It's
just there and it could go dead or be turned
into a sex site and no one would ever notice.
They are more of a taxonomical phenomenon,
breathing no life into the websphere.

Carlo's situation also made it painfully
apparent that, as far as copyright law is
concerned, unless it is easy to determine
attribution and dating of content, as an
artist you have no recourse for action. And
even if you did have everything in hand, what
good is it if you have no money --because
copyright or copyleft, if you have no money
to defend yourself, you have no leverage.
Period. So at least in the land of the free
and broke, traceable attribution is the next
best thing. Linus Torvals is not successful
because he made Linux. He is successful
because <b>everybody knows</b> he made Linux.
It's the "If a tree falls..." effect. Some
people call it street creed, geek creed, the
web of trust. In Carlo's situation, if that
artbase entry were 'alive', maybe this kind
of coincidence would have been averted. It's
a big maybe. I mean, I found <A Href="http://sytes.org";
target="_blank">http://sytes.org</A>
the other day and remarked how it harked back
to some of the earlier browser art. I pinged
the guy and just the other day got a
response, thanking me for the heads up but
wondering how in the world he had never heard
of potatoland or, for that matter, net art.

Still, google potatoland and the site has
street creed. For a new or up and coming
artist the situation is very different --and
maybe more difficult. The best way that I can
see for an artist to become visible on the
web these days is by creating the space for
context and attribution on their sites. By
creating websites that are the social fabric
of the web, instead of forgotten links in a
directory. By creating sites that not only
take advantage of the publishing and social
software that is out there but that are not
beholden to proprietary technologies for
their functioning and even more radically,
not beholden to the browser. That's the
challenge.

Best,
Liza




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