Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/I got a plan/Art Online-Judy Malloy

Text File | 1994-09-13 | 17KB | 344 lines

                              ART ONLINE

                                 by

                             Judy Malloy

There are similarities between going regularly to gallery and art space
openings and hanging out in online art communities, I realized as I
browsed through arts conferences on the WELL where arts coverage ranges
from poetry to virtual reality. I hadn't spent much time on the WELL for
several years, and it was like walking into an opening somewhere South
of Market in San Francisco.

At first, I felt ill at ease in the crowd of unfamiliar, often younger
voices -- like returning to a house that one lived in for years and
seeing that it is no longer faded white but a crisp new yellow.  I was on
familiar territory with unfamiliar faces, feeling older and detached,
longing for the "good old days" when I knew almost every art voice online
and could expect to meet all my friends there. But soon, as at any art
gathering, I began to react and respond to art talk like "Electronic Art
and the Public" on the Art Com Electronic Network Conference.  I got
interested in descriptions of art like Kenneth Pimentel's description of
"wheelchair VR" on the Virtual Reality Conference.

Familiar logins scrolled down my monitor like <rabar> (poet Ramon Sender
Barayon) talking about an artist he know in Austin, Texas in the Virtual
Rodeo Conference. Then, as at art events, known voices began to stand out
in the crowd - people whose words I hadn't read for a long time.  Very
soon, I was again a part of an online art community.


ARTISTS ONLINE

Artists who work or talk art online come from varied backgrounds. Gail
Williams who has been the Conferencing Manager on the WELL since 1991
credits her theatre experience with some of the insight needed to manage
the myriad WELL conferences.  In her online bio, she writes: "My best
known (original) character has been Virginia Cholesterol of  'Ladies
Against Women.' She's *very* quick to judge people, so playing and
writing her has taught me to be slower to draw borders!  And that helps
on the WELL."

Eric Theise, who is currently the President of San Francisco Art
Institute's Cinematheque's Board, combines an interest in experimental
filmmaking with a Phd in operations research.  Theise who teaches
ergonomics, human-system interface, and wide area networking at the Naval
Postgraduate School is working with the San Francisco experimental film
and video community to broaden its base by posting meeting and progress
reports in online systems.

Artist's attitudes and approaches to this text based cyberspace are
varied.  "Love is as (if not more) mysterious to me as
telecommunications," James Johnson who teaches art at the University of
Colorado at Boulder wrote me by electronic mail.

"The network will allow for the active use of telecommunications for
language and art research, providing a vehicle for intercultural
expression," Brazilian artist Artur Matuck said in the email
introduction to his "REFLUX" project.  "REFLUX" was a collection of
online art work and art discussion, carried on the Internet, that
included artists from all over the world and was included in the 1991 Sao
Paulo Biennial.

Artists use online systems range for publicity, for bringing people
together, and for making actual art. I've been involved in a virtual
community that's come out of it's cocoon, and connected in the physical
world, says Robert Campanell about the ne-raves community, a group of
musicians, vr world designers, students, engineers, and zine publishers.
"The rave scene and techno music is the glue that holds this community
together.  The net is the infrastructure we use to keep the scene alive
and help it's continued evolution."

Fred Truck, one of the hosts of The Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN)
an arts conference that began on the WELL in 1986, emphasizes
communication.  "For me," he says, "as it is for me in any community, it
is the close friends and sustained dialogue that have become the most
important aspect of this virtual community "

In addition to the WELL, there are artists online on college, art school
and university systems as well as in corporations and on CompuServe.
Hyperfiction authors Carolyn Guyer, Michael Joyce, and Martha Petry have
accounts on America Online. Musician Pauline Oliveros uses MCI Mail.
Hyperfiction publisher Mark Bernstein and artist/curator George Fifield
have accounts on The World. USENET arts related conferences include
rec.arts.fine and alt.artcom.

In Los Angeles, The Electronic Cafe (conceived by Kit Galloway and
Sherrie Rabinowitz) combines performance, communication, and community
outreach by making telecommunications equipment available in a cafe style
artists space. Artist Paul Rutkovsky uses telecommunications in his
University of Florida classroom.  Recently, his students used email to
ask artists all over the world about problems in their communities.
At San Francisco State, artist Stephen Wilson taught an entire course on
art and telecommunications.  At the School of Art at Northern Illinois
University, Mary Beams is soliciting digital quilt squares by email.  The
resulting "quilt" will be exhibited as part of Women's History Month.

At Carnegie Melon University's Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carl Loeffler
directs a Telecommunications and Virtual Reality Program. The Project
investigates the basis for multiple users located in distant
geographical locations, to be conjoined in the same virtual, immersion
environment. It employs telecommunication hardware, as well as the
hardware associated with virtual reality: head mounted display and
multi-directional navigation devices, and utilizes WorldToolKit, a
virtual world development program, available from Sense8 Corporation.


COLLABORATIVE ART ONLINE

Online environments are text based cyberspaces shared by many other minds
In these systems, art like can thrive outside the confining walls of
galleries, museums and book covers.  Art is a part of a group mind, and
the artist can shape art not only for that group mind but with that
group mind. "In contrast to the telephone or television, explains Anna
Couey, the Network Coordinator of Arts Wire, "computer networks are a
many-to-many communications medium -- the virtual communities that
inhabit them exist through active participation amongst their members."
Couey, who recently coordinated Cultures in Cyberspace, a virtual panel
running on five conferencing systems in conjunction with TISEA (the Third
International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Sydney, Australia, feels
that "this technology would seem to incur a new social  order -- one
based on reciprocity and interaction."

Like jazz, art created collaboratively online sometimes exists most
potently in the moment of its creation.  As they were in the performance
art of the last decades, shared experience and connection are integral
materials in this art, but online collaborative works go a step further
than most performance art did by actively involving the audience in the
creation process.

Collaborative online projects can involve many artists and/or audience
participants. Artist Brian Andreas has gathered stories for his "Hall of
 Whispers" by email and on the WELL. (in addition to fax and conversation
with neighbors)  "Hall of Whispers" is a collaboratively produced
narrative that simulates mythological Babylonian ziggurat rooms where
whispers were permanent residents.  Andreas started with themes that his
neighbors could connect to -- generation gap stories, parenting stories,
moments of love.   "Story is an invitation rather than a statement of
position, " he told me in his Berkeley studio where he has handwritten
many of the stories from "Hall of Whispers" on the white walls.

Electronic mail or conferencing systems can also be used by a only a few
artists to make a collaborative artwork.  Hyperfiction authors Martha
Petty and Carolyn Guyer wrote their hyperfiction "Izme Pass" by passing
text sections back and forth on the Internet. "Hard trying to find a more
spontaneous way to do this," Guyer told me by electronic mail.
"Collaboration should ideally have all means of communication open and
available, especially the simultaneous: physical proximity and
conversation.  But when geographical distance intervenes, we're left with
what technology can offer.  Telephone talk, each in front of her
computer, or live  "synchro" talk online.  Otherwise, we're left with an
awkward system of turn-taking, and a willingness to tolerate some
free-form stuff which is likely to happen in between the times one of us
has a turn at the file." "Izme Pass" was published, in disk form, as part
of the Spring 1991 issue of "Writing on the Edge". "Working over distance
and having to 'keep track' places some restraint on the creative
process," Guyer says, "but in order to have the other kinds of artistic
freedom we seek, it surely is worth it."


PUBLISHING LITERATURE AND ART ONLINE

Evolving hardware can rapidly outdate machine-specific electronic
literature or "artware", and readers are limited to the specific machine
the work was written for.  In contrast, literature published online, in
electronic form, can be accessed and read by anyone with a computer and
modem, and it does not require continual updating.  "This kind of
electronic publishing encourages experimentation and evolution of the
content and format of the publishing products," wrote Roger Malina, the
Executive Editor of "Leonardo" in a special issue of "Leonardo" (edited
by Roy Ascott and Carl Loeffler) on "Connectivity: Art and Interactive
Telecommunications."

ACEN pioneered dial in electronic books. The Art Com menu on the WELL
includes "The Heart of the Machine" by Ian Ferrier (in cooperation with
Les Editions Dromoslogiques), a work that allows readers to participate
in the creation of the characters.  In Canada, ARTNET and the Matrix
Artists' Network have made art and literature available online.

The electronic art journal "Leonardo Electronic News" (available on the
Internet) and the online art information database F.A.S.T. (FineArt
Science and Technology) available on the WELL are projects of Leonardo,
The International Society for Art, Sciences and Technology.   A recent
issue of "Leonardo Electronic News" contains descriptions of art that
range from a "Sound Playground" built by Bill and Mary Buchen in the
South Bronx New York City to "Ghost Nets", an environmental work by Aviva
Rahmani situated on a island off the coast of Maine to a recent issue of
the French literary journal "Action Poetique" that includes a Macintosh
disk.  It also includes information about a Russian film company that was
sent by email from Georgia, Russia.

"Arts Wire" ,a computer-based network and electronic meeting place for
artists and the arts community, is a program of the New York Foundation
for the Arts. Its Project Director, Anne Focke, is in Seattle, and its
Network Coordinator, Anna Couey, is in San Francisco.  "Arts Wire"
carries a news summary on social, political, philosophical, and economic
conditions in the arts and a searchable resource of grant deadlines and
other opportunities for artists.  It also includes resources, discussion
groups and directories such as "Arts Wire Directory", a searchable
directory of the people and organizations on Arts Wire.  Much of the
information on "Arts Wire" comes from associated "Interest Groups" that
range from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, Inc. to
the Visual AIDS and the AIDS Working Group. "Arts Wire" is part of the
Meta Network, a 386-based unix microcomputer that uses Caucus as its
conferencing system.

"NetJam", run by Craig Latta in Berkeley, is a computer network that
allows people all over the world to collaborate on musical compositions.
Participants send Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and other
data files to each other via electronic mail, edit them, and resend
them.  To join "NetJam", Latta says "all that are required are in
interest in music, access to MIDI-compatible or other supported
equipment, e-mail, compression facilities and access to the Internet."
An introductory "NetJam" guide, primarily technical info for people
interested in participating, is available via ftp as
[e-mail]:misc/netjam/doc/guide, or via email to
[e-mail] with the subject "request for
info".

Global in nature, online arts communities and services are changing
the art scene from local ("New YorK Art", "California Art") to
international.  "System X", forinstance, is an online media art facility
which originates in Australia and has been running continuously since
January 1990. "'System X' is designed as a narrative structure providing
context but not content: the content is produced by a group of artists
who work together to produce an alternative storyline to the narrative of
interaction in their daily lives. "It is the only project of its kind in
Australia," says Systems Designer, Scot Art.

THE FUTURE

In online environments, publishers, creators, and audiences can
communicate interactively. Work is rapidly and inexpensively published.
However, there are drawbacks. Because of system limitations, online works
usually have to be programmed in simple structures. Some users find
modems, communications software and online operating systems difficult
and expensive to use.  At present, writers do not receive royalties.

In the future, standardization and intelligent software will simplify
the telecommunications process. Publishing systems modeled on database
vendors (BRS, DIALOG, etc.) may be set up. Users may pay small amounts
to access online literature. Writers may receive royalties. It is
possible that systems like Prodigy, where online entertainment induces
users to use shopping services, may eventually support literature and
art.  Ideally, electronic publishing will be based on operating systems,
such as UNIX, that port between personal computers and online systems.
The catch, says Anna Couey, is that computer networks are not accessible
to everyone. Cyberspace is being colonized primarily by countries with
access to a high level of technology."  As Craig Harris, the Executive
Director of Leonardo says, "we have had to think a lot about bridging
some of the gaps between connected an not-connected communities, between
more and less formal communication styles, between editorially-focused
and more dialog-oriented structures. We take the issue of communication
among people from different cultures with different levels of access to
electronic communication (from complete to none) extremely seriously. "



RESOURCES

AMERICA ONLINE
8619 Westwood Center Drive
Vienna, VA  22182-2285
[phone]

ART COM
POB-3123 Rincon
San Francisco, CA  94119-3123
Email: <[e-mail]>

ARTS WIRE
Anna Couey, Arts Wire Network Coordinator
1077 Treat
San Francisco, CA  94110
Email: <[e-mail]>; <[e-mail]>

COMPUSERVE
New Order Department 816
P.O. Box 20212
Columbus, Ohio 43220-9922
[phone]

DIGITAL QUILT
Mary Beams, School of Art
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
Email: <[e-mail]>

ELECTRONIC CAFE
1641 18TH St.
Santa Monica, CA  90404

F.A.S.T., LEONARDO, LEONARDO ELECTRONIC NEWS
Annie Lweis, Electronic Projects Director
Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and
Technology
672 South Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, CA  94110
[phone]
Email: <[e-mail]>

FINEART FORUM
Paul Brown, Editor
Mississippi State University / National Science Foundation
Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation
PO Box 6176, Mississippi State, MS 39762-6176, USA.
Email: <[e-mail]>

HALL OF WHISPERS: A VIRTUAL OPERA
Brian Andreas
2972 Otis St.
Berkeley, CA  94703
Email: <[e-mail]>

MCI MAIL
1133 19th St. NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC  20036
[phone]

THE WELL
27 Gate Five Road
Sausalito, CA  94965
[phone] (voice)
[phone] (modem)

THE WORLD
Software Tool and Die
1330 Beacon STreet
Brookline, MA  02146
[phone]
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