hello Lucy Kimbell,

Thanks for the response to my review. I appreciate the chance to discuss
further what I consider to be (and clearly you do to) the important
issues raised by the review and your response. Admittedly, the review
has a polemical bent to it and is explicit in laying out an opposing
strategy for media art. This is in response to the seemingly benign and
submerged strategy of "Avatar". An approach that quietly disarms the
potential of media art and network approaches, in particular, and
repositions it safely within the physical and conceptual confines of the
museum/gallery. If it was not explicit enough in the review, I believe
that any network-based media art inherently critiques the current
practice of almost all institutions, be they museums or galleries. This
is not exclusive to network-based media art but rather is akin to a long
avant-gardist history, that includes Duchamp, Productivism, Conceptual
Art, Institutional Critique etc. In addition, I hope it was clear in the
review that I was arguing that it is impossible to approach the avatar
idea without a concept of the network. I hoped to illustrate this idea
of the network as a concept superceding its technological specifics by
discussing the origin of avatars in Hinduism.

Unfortunately, by your response to the review you accept the conventions
of established art practice as exemplified in the exhibition and brush
aside the rich problematic of applying technology to art. Ironically, I
agree wholeheartedly with your description of the Avatar show:

"'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'."

However, that is exactly what I take issue with in Avatar. It is a late
nineteenth century Beaux-Arts notion that you can separate the medium
from its cultural and social context. It equally struck me as odd that
the implication in the exhibition, and you state it explicitly, is that
the 'use' of media technology and the idea of Avatar are distinct and
separate. As if you could equally "explore the idea of 'Avatar'" using
ceramics, for example. And especially, the lack of understanding that
the idea of Avatar is embedded in current use of media technology
whether conceptually, as in the idea of a distributed agency or
literally, as on the Internet.

"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."

Again, I couldn't agree more with your above statement but as I said
earlier, I believe that media art and network-based approaches in
particular, inherently critique status quo institutional practice. In
that sense, it takes a high degree of misplaced mastery to strip it of
its critical edge. And you are absolutely right about Riksutst