FREE ART GAMES
Free Art Game #3:

Create a group exhibition containing only links to pages within personal
web sites. Bonus points for including a workable theme. Extra bonus
points for fitting work into that theme which is antithetical to the
works original intent.

The basic ideology that internet art was founded on, was the fact that
any student with some peripheral understanding of a computer network
could get online and create content- the main idea, of course, being
that CONTENT was CREATED.

Early on, works like ada'web- essentially a gallery- were neccessary, as
the people doing this content creation were lingering nowhere; JODI not
linked in the yahoo indexes, etc. But with ada web came the first
net.art exclusion…because it was a gallery, which creates an idea of
in, vs out. This could be a matter of practicality and "editors choice"
but it still remains that a gallery structure imposes an external and
internal relationship with art, particularly on the web.

On the web, the gallery structure is not so important; group shows can
be arranged as simply as placing the a href=tag into a html document.

The "webzines' and galleries of the web- places like wigged.net, or
k10k.net–a very design-centered variation–are useful to a degree.
While wigged seems doomed to failure on the very simple point that it
does not understand how the web works, does not favor simplicity over
show (and to such a degree that the "show" is, in fact, not worth it)
and does not work with the internet as anything more than a medium….
refusing to accept works via the net, for example, is a ludicrous
blasphemy for any "online" organization that takes the internet
seriously. If wigged is to believed as a worthy organization, it must
prove that it understands the world wide web to the point that it
accepts email as a valid exchange. Otherwise, they run the risk of
appearing as opportunists; maybe not for money, but eventually
so- keep in mind that wigged has a section for people interested
in advertising on thier site. In other words: collect work, collect
cash.

This is the same problem with almost any "archive" done for profit.
MP3.com, for example, is making a killing off of musicians whose work is
neccessary for mp3.com to survive. Of course, MP3.com now offers its
payback for playback promotions and manufactures cds for half price of
the sale cost. Still absurd, but leeway that would make it worth it for
a casual bedroom producer to put his mp3's there, especially since
geocities etc have restrictions on the .mp3 file extensions.

But meanwhile a site like k10k- whose site design is innovative, clever,
and, most importantly, knowledgeable concerning the net.politik. You
will not find a snail mail address on k10k, sponsorship is underplayed,
and the people behind it are people doing thier own thing, as well.

But while the personal site is a neccesity for any artist in working in
this media, its also important to understand that the nature of the
personal domain is not locked into a vaccuum. The web is a collaborative
place, naturally, as the www is a collaboration, and the contexts of
boundaries/domain are merely abstracted versions of this concept.

For example: http://j3bd8lx.n3.net/ Is one web site, hosted on four
seperate servers. What is the value of the domain name, then, besides a
mere abstraction? Is this a "group show" or is it a solitary site?

What I have against wigged.net, mostly, is it is artists who are working
for wigged.net, who seem not to have an interest in developing their own
sites. This affects another problem I have with the state of new art on
the web: The group show seems to have influenced the personal page into
a resume rather than the "site as art" idea that was predominant years
ago. I'm not sure of who the last person was to buy a domain name from
scratch and just build on it. It seems like this notion is going to be a
romantic cliche; as now, we have no need to do it; artists can create a
piece and find a server, some group deal, to host it for them, in a
context they cannot control, with restrictions on file sizes, content,
and a link to thier mailbox, which represents thier sole internet
prescence. Now, web sites are created with galleries, museums, and what-
not, the whole deal with Harwood at the Tate, was it? Audacious, and
deserved.

Free Art Game #4:
Start your career as a net.artist.

1. Buy your own domain. $12.00. Get a server. $10.00 a month. None of
this geocities stuff.

2. Create your own content. Use HTML and Javascript if you want. Build
for whatever browser you use. Look at it through the other two once in a
while, to see if it looks cooler. If you don't know javascript, steal it
from superbad or JODI and change the text/images/color. No one cares.

4. Don't worry about site navigation. Just worry about content. The
content will navigate itself.

5. If you get money, wealth and power, good. If not, you've got a web
site. And its yours.