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1 interview, 4 texts by Anne-Marie Schleiner
newly accessible from opensorcery.net
http://www.opensorcery.net/texts.html

Text sample:

Fluidities and Oppositions among Curators, Filter Feeders, and Future Artists
(written for Intelligent Agent edited by Patrick Lichty and
Christiane Paul, originally developed from one page manifesto Das
Fliesende und die Gegensetze for the Jochen Gertz Anthology of Art)

Artists of the future may not know that they are artists. If the
Internet continues to expand, (and withstands the commercial impulse
to convert it into some kind of interactive TV), collaborative and
modular digital art practices will also grow. Most net users,
gamers, musicians and programmers will produce cultural artifacts,
software, digital accessories, game warez, and music warez that they
share with each other both freely and for pay. Users will be both
cultural producers (artists) and consumers, readers and writers, and
information filters and collectors: i.e. net curators. In describing
"future" artists and curators I am also referring to present day
artists and curators. Just as cyberpunk science fiction describes
near future scenarios whose seeds are sown by present day conditions
of increasing globalization, my future art scenarios are pixel
painted from the work of contemporary artists and netizens.

Future Artist Scenario X:

This artist keeps his/her identity guarded from the public,
concealing gender markers, age and physical location. He/she/it,
(shall name her/him/it X), spends 99.9% of its every waking hour
sitting in front of a high-grade lap top bought with student loans, a
credit card, some kind of grant, or perhaps savings from a pre-dot
com bust job. X eats breakfast while reading X's email every morning
while still in bathrobe. X's email is filtered into many folders for
multiple art, music, and news lists. Thus reading email, in addition
to responding to the odd personal, professional, or fan mail, entails
also reading news articles, following links to MP3 downloads, and
clicking on links to art sites, anime sites and random bizarre web
curiosities.

About 2-3p.m in the afternoon X may decide to take a shower, (most
likely not), and do a little grocery shopping for some organic food
products. (X always dresses in black.) Upon return after a brief nap,
X will plunge back into X's current project involving creating in "L"
authoring environment or language, (L could be Perl, Java,
Nato/MaxMsp or Director/Flash or future programming languages or
authoring environments). Around 8p.m. X takes a break and visits
some of X's favorite indy porno sites. Then X goes back to creating
artwork. At 4 a.m. in the morning precisely X participates in a live
streaming broadcast of X's work to a performance venue on the other
side of the world.

Future Artist Scenario Y:

This artist sometimes works solo but more often than not collaborates
in an artist collective with four other artists, some of whom live
nearby and others quite far. Artist "Y" does not have a formal
artist training-he studied computer science in college. By day
28-year-old Y works as a database programmer at a local firm where Y
dresses just like one of the other guys except for his shoes.
(Unfortunately most of Y's programmer colleagues are men due to
complex gender and economic factors in the country/city where Y
lives, although his project manager is a woman.) After work Y grabs
a burrito or falafel and heads towards the a shared rented lab space
where Y and a few other members of Y's art group goof around, surf
the web, play network shooter games and hatch up crazy projects. At 1
a.m. Y and possy head out to a bar and catch some friends'
experimental music performance. (Maybe artist X's live broadcast is
playing there too!).

Future Artist Scenario Z:

Artist Z is a 19-year-old college student. She hasn't figured out
what her major is yet-she likes both mathematics and drama, (she
never studied art yet). Since she was a kid Z has always had her own
computers and built web sites for friends, played games and surfed
the web searching for her favorite anime and pokemon pets. When she
was 12 she programmed her own demo V.J.(Video Jockey) effects program
that made jagged swirly 3-D patterns in response to musical input.
Now she is into GWUB, growing without Unix babies, an open source
form of alife creatures/digital dolls that hop on and off linux
computers and into smart linux protocol t-shirts, backpacks and
liquid tattoo patches. Her first GWUB doll used alife algorithms
made freely available by other GWUB makers and the second included a
special "compulsive echolalia" configuration she actually paid money
for to a guy named Fats Cho. The third was a mixture of her own
dolphin algorithm and some algorithms coded by others-her most
complex GWUB to date who is attracted to any movement resembling
ocean waves. People have downloaded Z's GWUB's hundreds of times and
her site is linked from the front page of the most popular GWUB
directory. She is working on ways to compress her GWUB file sizes so
even low-end boggy cable modem users can use them at peak hours.

<—————————–Oppositions———————————>

Past ArtistFuture Artist

StudioBedroom or lab
Solo GeniusMember of high status list serv or
collaboration
Shock generatingBeta testing
InventionPlayful mutation, hacking
MasturbationFeedback loops
High profile wickednessUntraceable mischief
New York art market aspirationsNomadic Hobboism
Flirting with museums and galleriesFlirting with reporters and festivals
Male ego overblown on itselfFemale ego overblown on fan mail
IndividualFlexible clusters
Art eliteDiscreet online communities

Fluidities:

Non linear thinking
Process driven evolution
Collage, montage, hybrids
Playing with rule systems
Fetishization of aesthetics
Compulsive creativity
Compulsive deconstruction

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