+[techne]W3LAB+
New New Media Art
by rachel greene and alex galloway
http://gsa.rutgers.edu/maldoror/techne/w3lab-entry.html

"I would be the first to take command of a united front against new
media art." -Alex Galloway

Each time that technology, subjected to certain cultural imperatives,
ceases to be that which we expect of it, then art, always victorious,
defends itself by inventing new tools. At the margins of the art world
is new media art and at the margins of new media art is internet art.
Here, art massively disengages itself from mainstream practices in order
to find its own space. Net art is a nomadic space, a kind of rupture.
All else will not be art.

RHIZOME maps this territory by publishing and indexing a wide range of
net art discourse–from the self-promotional emails that may eventually
prove to ground net art history, to critical writing, chatter and email
art. These sometimes banal, sometimes personal, sometimes critical
rivulets of data have revealed, lately, a certain topography. We see a
shift, a shift from projects that are about "interface" or "virtuality"
to ones that are about privileging content over the formal systems that
usually control it. Take here a little glimpse through the RHIZOME prism
into the current state of new new media art.

Forget net.art. It's over. All our heroes of yesteryear have moved on,
to biotech, radio, and… the depths of hell. In fact, Hell.com
(http://www.hell.com) is brimming over with the leftovers of the
euro.net.art scene. But unfortunately you'd never know. You can't get
into Hell. You have to be invited. As the signpost says, "there are no
guest privileges, no visitors, no previews." Hell is a consortium of
internet art sites–part art gallery, part club house. It's what they
call "a private parallel web." The list of member sites is kept secret,
but it's the usual suspects. We've looked.

As Hell spokesperson Ken Aronson notes, "HELL.COM was conceived as a
conceptual art piece in early 1995 as an anti-web that sold and promoted
nothing and was not accessible to the public. For almost three years,
HELL.COM, a site with no content, never listed in any directory or
search engine nor linked anywhere averages in excess of a million hits
per month from people typing the name in their browsers. … The HELL
project is devoted to establishing a new frontier in the digital world,
that has no tethers to anything existing."

Interesting. So, Hell is conceptual art, a new type of living web
sculpture that connects artists together… a bit like RHIZOME, right?

"RHIZOME performs specific functions, provides relevant information and
is a resource for and about actual people, organizations, & things in
the world. HELL is unique unto itself we have no definable function.
Other than perhaps to provoke discovery."

But it's art, right?

"We try to avoid at all costs the scarlet letter 'ART.' Art is a
definition, a box, an excuse for people to put what they don't
understand into some context," writes Aronson. "The vast majority of our
traffic is comprised of people who have never stepped a foot into a
legit gallery. HELL.COM is a global magnet for people searching for the
unknown. They have no expectations. We provide only more questions…
not answers."

Great. I've been to hell and back, and it's an art gallery.

Climbing the charts faster than the gloomy, "browser.art" aesthetic of
hell.com is an interest in the corporate, both through corporate
endorsements (mostly fake) and corporation-style organizations.
Everyone's doing it: Easylife.org, RTMARK, etoy. This is where the power
of the corporate mogul happily merges with the aesthetic vision of the
avant-garde fringe. Corporate stamps are popping up everywhere,
partially because net art has historically been seen through a corporate
lense. We look at Heath Bunting's or jodi.org's work and are reminded
that it is the Netscape or Microsoft browser that has invaginated our
hard drives. Corporate stamps have long been part of the literal
picture, center stage left, but now artistic "branding" is proving to
resemble corporate identity more than ever.

Art saboteurs RTMARK (http://rtmark.com) are a corporation for practical
reasons. It displaces liability for culturally subversive and sometimes
illegal work. Incorporation also morphs the stereotype of saboteurs as
terrorists into saboteurs as … er … mainstream straights. Unlike the
disenfranchised Ted Kacynski or grunged-out Earth Firsters, RTMARK's
representatives attend conferences in smart suits, and can talk about
things like offshore investing. It is not just in uniform that RTMARK
resembles a corporation–it works very much like an American financial
services institution, offering a range of investment products to
consumers. Where a commercial bank has a range of capital receptacles,
from high-tech funds to IRAs, RTMARK offers a series of funds that
represent different fields of subversive cultural production. Invest in
culture, they say, not capital.

Like RTMARK, the Bureau of Inverse Technology is an art production
entity that bleeds into a non-human agency. The BIT proudly identifies
itself as a full-service agency for product, marketing and commentary,
revealing a critical cynicism about the political fabric of
techno-products and the persistent lack of "transcendent poetics" in
these products.

"The cultural force of products frame how we work, how we incorporate
nonhuman agency in the mundane daily interactions that form human habit,
which then gets called human nature," they write. "The Bureau produces a
brand legacy and brand story with ambitions not unlike Nike and Disney.
Brand loyalty for the sophisticated consumer is produced through
heterogeneous networks of material and ephemeral culture in which
products are embedded. Technoart engages this, unwittingly or not."

Similarly, in her early net art project "Bodies INCorporated"
(http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc) Victoria Vesna is interested in
both corporate business practices and the corporeal body, playing on the
meaning of the word "incorporate." In this virtual world users earn
shares based on how involved they are in the various activities and
options offered to them. Consequently, more shares allow for greater
participation in the community of body-owners.

Biotech. It scares us to death. We can't stop doing it. Natalie
Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting are there already with their "Biotech
Hobbyist Magazine" (http://www.irational.org/biotech/). Judging from
past work, Bunting is keen on making "fake" sites with real links. While
Jeremijenko, of Bureau of Inverse Technology fame (see above), brings
her own interest in technology. The Biotech Hobbyist Magazine claims to
be "THE place on the Web for biotech tinkerers, builders, experimenters,
students, and others who love the intellectual challenge and stimulation
of hobby biotech!" Is it a sham? No. Rather, in the tradition of the
Terrorist's Handbook or the Young Poisoners Handbook, it brings
potentially frightening recipes to eager, new readers. "It's a real
magazine, will make money from advertising and eventually be sold for a
good profit," claims Bunting with characteristic exuberance. Why biotech
now? "it's the next big technological push that will affect concepts of
property and representation."

Playing on fears of techno-science, The Biotech Hobbyist displaces
biotechnology to a realm of irony and subversion. It connects, for
example, instructions for growing skin with charming historical
anecdotes. It connects friendly looking links to companies with icky
names like "BioRad" and "Clonetics." The Biotech Hobbyist suggests that
the shock value of a resistive act (hacking a search engine for example)
has been muted–the frontier has shifted away from moneyed software
companies to those who are exploring what it means to be a person at the
genetic level. The editors of the Biotech Hobbyist hardly seem
aggressive, that's not their style. Instead they identify and encourage
a demographic of homebody-curious types: "We recognise that some of the
greatest cultural and technological advances have emerged from peoples
bedrooms and are therfore committed to tranferring the hitech life
sciences to the bedroom biotechnician (sic)."

Elsewhere it's hit or miss on the biotech topic. Despite its focus on
biotechnology, Critical Art Ensemble's (http://mml.fsu.edu/cae/) most
recent effort, "Flesh Machine," is disappointing. It seems quickly
wrought, and has too many disses on the internet as a medium. Yet like
The Biotech Hobbyist also suggests, CAE sees well that the physical body
is the next front for the kulturkampf.

EastEdge's project "Tyrell.Hungary"
(http://www.shiseido.co.jp/s9808tre/realindex.html) captures nicely both
the corporate aesthetic and an interest in biotechnology. We found the
following description somewhere… "In this project, a virtual corporate
website 'Tyrell.Hungary' is set up, which provides various services to
meet the needs of contemporary people. … By establishing a virtual
corporation on the net, it allows users to tap into issues between
providers of information and themselves in the information-environment
of the Internet and focus on boundaries between local/global and
real/fictional. For example, the issue of ethics concerning the
treatment of life (which we now face through the development of
bio-technology) obscures the border between self and others, and between
humans and that transcendental being above the level of humans. It also
questions how humans can be defined in this contemporary era.
Tyrell.Hungary is, in a virtual sense, a slice of reality." Amen.

All in all, RHIZOME has chronicled symptoms that suggest the
interface-centrism and playful email culture of net art are recherch