INDEED, SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE. The net was slow, just like it was last year; the entries were ranging in the same numbers (we had over two hundred urls to visit); the hours were long, and yet too short; we again had a tough discussion about who was to be our winner; we drank and smoked too much, as is our wont; and even the opening sentence of this year's jury's report is the same as last year's. But other things have changed, and for the better too: there was a new juror, an old one rejoined us and there were new discussions. Of course there's a new winner, too, but that was rather to be expected. Less predictably, there even was a novel aroma in the tiny net jury's room: Demetria's pipe tobacco smelled of caramel, which soothed the stench that the cigarette butts of the other jurors emitted.
Let's start the juror's statement by rehashing an old discussion. It's old for the jurors, anyway; but we'd love some of our contestants to take more notice of it, especially since this matter is at the heart of the net prize: what exactly is art on the net?
The debate is a difficult one, especially because the question 'what is art?' has (of course, how could it) never been resolved in real life. There is a perpetual debate about art: about its definitions, its boundaries, its function, its aims and its means; about accessibility, politics, status; about high culture versus popular culture; about inclusion versus exclusion; about funding and money; about art and anti-art. There's an abundance of camps in these discussions, and they tend to fight fiercely. The computer animation jury's choice (Toy Story in 1996, Dragonheart in 1997) has been criticised in the past two years for selecting the work of rich companies and Hollywood productions over entries which may not look as slick, but which are way more innovative or challenging - that is, they have been criticised for their take on this discussion on art and commerce and for favouring popular culture over counter culture or avant-garde.
While the net jury would be loathe to give the Golden Nika to Bill Gates if he were to submit Slate Magazine or the Internet Explorer (or, more realistically, to Cosmo Magazine, who did indeed enter their net edition into this year's competition), such discussions are not the fodder of the net jury. We are not debating art-as-it-is-in-real-life, nor are we taking sides in the above-mentioned debate. (Well, we are. Of course they are somewhere at the back of our mind. Read on.) However, the net jury is as of yet far too much engaged in attempting to define what net art might amount to.
Net art, as we explained last year, does not equal taking whatever is on your gallery's walls, convert it into something the computer can digest and then make that accessible via a homepage. Net art deals with the consequences of what it means to be on the net and the implications of the choice to make that particular technology one's medium. For instance, film as a medium has its own rules and restrictions: it works within certain technical possibilities (montage, editing, cut-up techniques, camera points) and can't deal with others (you can't play back, there is a linear chronology involved, the public can't interfere with the story-line nor select or influence the shots, point of view, montage etc.), it responds to specific aesthetic conventions (point of view as a means to identify with characters), it is part of a history of visual display (focusing means singling out a character; black & white footage connotes 'historical material') and narrative reception (we know the thriller director is trying to scare us, and we know his stock of tricks; thus, the director will try to work around those in order to truly startle us); in short: the medium shapes the art, both in form and content. The same goes for any medium: novels, oil-paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, etc. all have their own rules and (dis)advantages. Having made a film, one may very well convert it to a digital format and put it on the net. But that transformation - and we grant that it may sometimes be a very complicated or time-consuming one - does not of its own accord turn those films into net art.
It is obvious that a museum or a gallery, where art is on show, are not themselves art - unless, of course, the building has a very special architecture, but then it would be the building that would earn this definition, not the exhibition on show inside. It's also obvious that the documentation of a project is hardly ever a piece of art in itself. Nevertheless, the misunderstanding that reproducing or exhibiting analogue art on the net will magically produce net art is a very common one, and far too many contestants insist on submitting homepages that merely contain art: shockwave movies, vrml (that is: rendered 3D) models, paintings or photographs converted into gifs and jpegs. Such pages are most unlikely to be considered net art by the Ars Electronica net jury. So after browsing them briefly, we invariably dumped them. (In fact, at some point we became rather vicious about it: "Oh, another gallery," we would say, at that point using the term 'gallery' as a generic term for homepages that were basically containers of art.)
WHAT WE, THE JURORS, hope to achieve via our statement, is to highlight what distinguishes net art from other kinds of art. This statement shouldn't be read as a manual or a set of basic instructions ('The Ars Electronica Compendium On How To Make Net Art'), but since every medium has its own rules, we attempt to describe the aesthetics and structure that the net engenders in order to make artists more aware of those. And just as important, we try to identify new areas of development on the net, to direct you on how to use them, and to generate some attention towards these areas. We wish to point out these new, very often rather virginal regions of creativity to artists, saying: 'Look, try this, it's there for you to use,' and to thereby encourage artists to explore these regions. Ars Electronica does have acceleration power, and we hope that it will be used in good stead.
What we are looking for, and at, when identifying net art, is however difficult to describe, seeing that the net is evolving at a very fast pace and is forever changing. The novelty of the net and its prime importance is that it links. Connectivity is its structure and its means. The net "connects computers, people, sensors, vehicles, telephones, and just about anything together in a global network which is fast and cheap," as juror Joichi Ito put it, "and this interconnectedness is the context." "The pertinence of the [net] is that it is not yet another distribution, but a distributive system," juror Derrick deKerkhove wrote in the 1995 Ars Electronica Catalogue; "the fun and substance of the [net] is that it is meant to connect living minds at work in all manners of complex and purposeful configurations." Using this connectivity, showing an awareness of this connectivity and making sense of all the archived and real-time information that is going around in this context is what net art should be about. Anything stable - 'stable' as in: done, finished, not growing, unchanging - is not net art. What we are looking for is places on the net - be it in the form of homepages, programs or interfaces - that reflect, stimulate, enhance this connectivity and that both draw from it and thrive on it. That need the net in order to be able to exist. We are looking for things that can only happen on the net; not for a relocation or repositioning of analogue art.
We came up with a short list of criteria that we think are indispensable to define this elusive yet all-pervading 'connectivity'. Not all winners and mentions reflect all criteria, but most of them do to some degree. Here they are, listed from the more-or-less concrete to the rather abstract (and yes, of course the boundaries between these various items is sometimes superficial):
Use of technology. We're not looking for plug-in orgies or for technology for technology's sake. We're looking for people who make an innovative or creative use of a specific technology. (And please remember that necessitating people to download a shockwave movie or a vrml-file, only to see it crash at 70 percent, is not going to get you any friends except for the Telecom companies. Test your stuff on lots of computers.) Grammar. Just like a novelist uses narrative devices, a sculptor uses spatial arrangements and a director draws from cinematographic conventions, people on the net are working with and continue to develop a grammar. Basically, a grammar defines the lay-out of a homepage, its accessibility and its embeddedness. This grammar can be parsed into how one uses links, the transparency of the rules of navigation (ouch - the amount of submitted pages that use hidden links, that is: where you can't see that a link is present nor where it leads to! This new craze turns navigation into a very haphazard, random, click-and-run thing), the use of frames and backgrounds, et cetera. Structure. All media we knew before the net are linear, time-based. There is a sequential orientation: a step-by-step chronology where one step is the (indispensable) building block for the next, and where the author of art is by necessity, as Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg put it, imposing "a benevolent dictatorship". On the net, linearity is just one of the orientations one may opt for. You can keep previous versions of your work on-line, you can offer people a range of routes to go through your story, allow archives to accumulate and mix them with your current work. On the net, linearity is abandoned. Users should always be allowed to retrace their steps, to go though homepages in a variety of ways, none of them 'better' or more meaningful than the other. Public service. Does a page, program or interface provide the net with a public service, with some kind of community information? Net-awareness or self-reflectiveness. Does a homepage or interface enhance our knowledge (or sensation) that we are part of a giant, global network? Is it able to acknowledge what else is going on on the net and use that as a treasure, as a joke, a metaphor, as something ironical, as something to dwell upon or fantasise about? Co-operation. Co-operation works on many levels, the smallest one being the use of various formats such as sound, text and pictures. More importantly, does a page, a program, an interface on the net reflect that they are embedded in the richness and vastness of the net, or are they insulated projects? Is it something various people work on or with? Are there any outside links? Is material from other places on the net being incorporated, commented upon, drawn from? Does it stimulate co-operation and contributions? Can one interact, or is one supposed to just click a few buttons and consume? Community and identity. The net allows people to mix and mingle in new ways: people from various backgrounds who live in widely varying places can meet in MOOs, MUDs, Usenet newsgroups, IRC talks, Palace sites, net games and Virtual Worlds, and swap information, create communities, build worlds and develop a sense of belonging. Does a program, interface or homepage promote this sense of community? Does it allow you to exchange information? Has this community any influence on the analogue life of its participants? Does it allow people to take on various (virtual) identities? Does it allow people to overcome some of the disadvantages they may encounter in analogue life, such as sex, age, colour, disability, lack of social status? Is it an accessible community? Openness. Is the platform, protocol or programming language that is being used, open and transparent for others, or is it proprietary software? Can participants or users share it, or even modify it? We are looking for people who come up with memes: ideas that are structured to survive. 'Survival' on the net is often about being copied: loading a copy of a webpage in your browser's cache, giving out freeware or shareware (that is: copies of one's program of interface), offering people the possibility to copy, save, cut, paste and use information, pictures, programs, or other chunks of distilled ideas and creativity. Being copied on the net is indeed a measure of success: the more one's page is linked to, the more one's program or interface is used by others, the more people subscribe to one's memes by replicating it, the more viable and vivid the meme becomes, and the better adapted. Does the maker hold on to its original form and guard this memetic baby, or does he or she allow for mutation and variation to occur? Is he or she willing to let go and see how this particular idea evolves? (Interestingly, in last year's forum about the net prize, all winners expressed what we labelled a 'willingness to be copied'.)
WHILE BROWSING ALL ENTRIES and measuring each homepage and interface against the criteria listed above and discussing our own affiliations on the net, we couldn't help but noticing that Virtual Homesteads are becoming more prominent. What the existing Virtual Homesteads have in common, is that they allow people to meet and connect, and to build worlds or environments. Much to our surprise, hardly any Homesteads had been submitted - presumably, we conjectured, because their makers and inhabitants mistakingly do not consider these Homesteads to be net art. The net jury believes otherwise.
There were no MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) or MOOs (Object Orientated MUDs), which are text-based programs where one can build rooms, use pre-programmed portions of text and create robots that perform specific tasks; no net games, where people gather to play multi-user games such as Quake and Diablo, form clans and where one can design new levels; just a few digital cities that had surpassed the combined homepage- and Usenet stage and tried to pave a virtual roof over people's head or under their feet; just two Palace sites, where one can design surroundings and have visitors create a face for a graphically enhanced IRC chat; and no Virtual Worlds, where one creates an avatar and can build houses and public buildings and take a stroll.
Virtual homesteads are worlds. One can walk through them and encounter (see, read about) various people and objects there. There are things to do, things to see or read, adventures to be enjoyed. People who visit these worlds often become regulars, and help to build and expand their world. People meet there and fight and fall in love; they have virtual weddings and divorces and children; people invest time and energy in them; often, they decide to meet in real life. The sense of community that evolves in these worlds does indeed seep into real life, especially when one of the community members suddenly finds himself or herself in dire conditions. These worlds and homesteads take on a life of their own: unpredictable things happen that startle even their makers, they grow a history, stories revolve, urban legends abound, and the concerted effort of their inhabitants even reaches into the future. (Why else would one build, if not for the future?) And apart from this binding sense of community that is being produced, these virtual communities tend to give people some air to breath. One can play with characteristics that are usually perceived to be stable and part of one's 'core personality': sex, colour, age, class. You can take on any appearance you want and take on a role; for instance, in order to experiment with what it is like to be different than your usual self - more abrasive, perhaps, or more naive. And in virtual worlds it's less easy to make assumptions about the people you meet: you have only their text (and in some worlds: their selected appearance) to judge them by, not their actual haircut, their dress style or their looks. (Although most people still assume that whoever they meet is white, able and heterosexual, and the most popular question people ask one another is still the lame "What sex are you?" - but then, one can always lie. All you have to do is keep in character to be someone other than you are in analogue life.)
The differences between these types of worlds used to be vast. But that is changing rapidly. Layers upon layers are being added and new protocols and programs developed. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based medium, but once the Palace was invented, we had a graphic IRC of sorts as well. MUDs and MOOs are experimenting with graphic appendages. Active Worlds and Virtual Worlds allow for the same building capabilities as MUDs and MOOs do, but are based on graphics and use text only for conversations. There are now some vrml-worlds that accommodate for inhabitants and that one can contribute to, and vrml-worlds where one can play a game.
Each of these worlds has its own particularities and advantages. MUDs and MOOs don't need fat computers, since they are text-based: they can be run on almost any kind of computer. And the programs are free. Some argue that these text-based worlds, like novels, leave more room for the imagination and incite you to fantasise, to make your own visual representation of your co-inhabitants and your environment. The Palace and Virtual Worlds are proprietary software and need license keys, devoted servers and lots of computer memory. On the up side, these worlds provide their inhabitants with common pictures: you can build whatever is in your mind and present that to others, and let them use it. Also, some people and some cultures are better versed in pictures than in text. In net-games such as Diablo, you earn points and skills as you go along. Loosing your character means you have to start from scratch. However, the levels one creates in Quake, and the clans that have come into existence, persevere. How to judge these various interfaces and programs that all create worlds? Are text-based worlds and graphic-based worlds two versions of the same phenomenon, or should we consider them to be different media, just like books and television are different media?.
What is interesting is that these worlds are somehow solid: they persevere. The inhabitants are bent on creating permanence: they list and archive their history, they build and add (and whatever is built in these worlds cannot be undone), they invest time and energy, they develop friendships and affinity. In short: inhabitants put their stakes in these worlds. That is a kind of investment that involves people and makes these worlds valuable for them, so that they will protect them, cherish them, and continue to live in them.
We are looking forward to more open protocols and platforms to create worlds like these. As of now, MUDs/MOOs, IRC, WebChats and vrml are the only open platforms. We're looking forward to seeing more of those and we predict that in the near future, Virtual Homesteads will combine text, vrml, avatars, sound and graphic into multi-media surroundings. It would seem that the media or technologies that these Virtual Homesteads make use of, are converging, while their originals are still available too. When these different modes of presentation do converge, the impact of Virtual Homesteads will be huge. After all, the World Wide Web only came into existence when text and pictures were combined via an open protocol - and look at the impact that that created.
The winners
Honorary Mentions:
The jury was:
- Oliver Frommel
- Derrick deKerkhove
- Joichi Ito
- Demetria B. Royals
- Karin Spaink
- and was assisted by Thomas Riha.
Copyright Karin Spaink.
This text is offered for private use only. Any
other use requires the author's written permission.
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