Net.Art conference 'Anti With E'
+ local-to-global meeting at London's Backspace.

Anti With E was a 1 day event focusing on the relationship between art
and communication, and Net.Art in particular, held on 29 January in
London, England, located at Backspace, South London, Bonnington Cafe,
Vauxhall, and various other venues.

Presented as part of the Backspace lecture series, Anti With E was a
major international 1 day conference meeting of electronic art. With a
focus on the changing relationship between art and communication, this
event managed to be a landmark in the presentation and discussion of
Net.Art, and media art in Britain.

The conference centred on an afternoon of presentations with speakers
drawn from an international field of practitioners, thinkers, writers
and polemicists from art, communication, philosophy and cultural
studies. The conference provided a critical framework through which to
explore questions around the re-positioning of both art and
communication within wider culture. The theme was reflected in the
presentation of a large number of individual projects in a series of
short talks given by artists and critics.

Anti With E incorporated the first or second major meeting held in
England, of the pan-European Net.Art community.

The conference comprised a plenary panel for all delegates, interspersed
with a number of longer breaks forsmall meals, networking, parties and
walks.

Speakers included: Kathy Rae Huffman, Alexei Shulgin, Graham Harwood,
Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Diana McCarty, Andreas Broeckmann, Olia
Lialina, Rasa Smite, Pit Schultz, not however John Perry Barlow, who
will be at Backspace two months late.

The event took place across a number of venues clustered in the centre
of London, offering a unique insight into the city and providing a
backdrop to the debates reflecting the shift from mechanical to
electronic culture. Anti With E sought to locate recent developments in
electronic art and the current enthusiasm for Net.Art in wider culture
within the shifts in the traditional opposition of "objective"
communication and "subjective" art. The event also sought to provide a
meeting place between disciplines and to be of interest to practitioners
and theorists from across the fields of art, pure and applied
communication, history of art, theory of science, cultural studies,
electronic music, design and architecture.

Programmed by Heath Bunting for Backspace Productions. Supported by
Obsolete, Soros Foundation, Tesco and Silicon Graphics.

Backspace is an art space based in London, England, that develops new
strategies with communications artists for different contexts and across
formats. It offers cheap access to the Internet for its members and
opportunities to use its digital production facilities for project work.