This piece is a response to <a href="/cgi/to.cgi?t=1293">Ron Wakkary's review of "Avatar,"</a> a touring group show curated by Ulrika Sten of Riksutstallningar (Swedish Travelling Exhibitions), within which Soda exhibited a collaborative installation.

While we are interested in the ideas expressed in Wakkary's review
concerning a network model of art and how this impacts on curatorial and
art practices, we felt that many of his criticisms were not relevant
applied to "Avatar."

"Avatar" was not a media art show; it was intended to be a museum
touring exhibition by artists with a range of practices who mostly used
media technologies in this instance to explore the idea of "Avatar."

As far as we understood the curatorial position, the show was not aiming
to "represent the emerging practice of media art" as Wakkary states. Nor
were the practices of the exhibiting artists "divorced from their
contextual ground," as suggested in the review: most of the artists
(including Soda) are engaged with the gallery system, Mariko Mori being
the most well known within the international gallery context.

It was not part of the curatorial position of this show to use media art
discourse to challenge a status quo model for exhibiting art. Organised,
curated and promoted by the national Swedish body which arranges shows
primarily for tours through regional museums within Sweden, the tour was
not setting out to challenge the museum or gallery space by showing
media art.

What it did allow was each artist to respond to the notion of avatar
which (as we see it) would necessarily involve thinking about the
resulting work being contexualised by its site and by art history. Thus
the charge of "Avatar" being a conservativist strategy is unfounded, at
least in terms of the criticism offered by Ron Wakkary.

As far as the idea of avatar goes, we're not sure that you have to make
a networked piece to explore it. Like Wakkary, we thought of avatar as
an interface and the idea we wanted to explore was that of agency, the
ability to impact on context, rather than representation.

We agree with Wakkary that: "More essential to the concept of avatar is
that it provides a multiple and distributed presence or agency that can
only exist in a non-centralized network." But we don't agree that this
means an art work exploring the idea of avatar can only exist in or
involve a non-centralized network.

Soda's work for "Avatar" involved a kind of network. It comprises eight
wall panels, each able to fold out from the wall and return to the
vertical, each moving individually within evolving patterns
choreographed by an algorithm running on a small micro-controller within
a single control panel. Each panel is not an individual agent with its
own programmed behaviour (so in a computing sense it is not a network of
clients).

But this is the level of detail that is not relevant to the work–this
level of detail is about technology. What is it that you see within the
space?

The way the installation is displayed makes evident the fact there is a
central control box, and each panel is clearly linked to it with tubes
for the compressed air driving the pneumatic rams which fold the panels.

You can probably work out from this that the signal to fold is coming
from the centralizing control panel, and yet each panel's individual
behaviour nonetheless seems…individual. The piece thus plays with the
distribution of agency, with the individual within a network, with
issues of centralization and control.