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Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net Steve Dietz
Think of this as the "prequel" to the introduction, "Between a Pencil and a Hard
Place," for |
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This online exhibition presents a simple proposition. There is art that
is created to "be" on the Net. After that, it gets more complex very
quickly. Beyond Interface explores some of the complicating issues
but does not attempt a comprehensive investigation. And while in the
context of a conference on "museums and the web," there may be interesting
strategies to learn from artists for presenting a museum's collections on
the Net, the main goals of Beyond Interface are to present
outstanding examples of net-based artistic activity, and to try and begin
to better understand and appreciate this art and its context. In Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, the digital artists of the late 21st century are no longer hyphenated or hybrids. They are simply artificers. And in Interface Culture, Steven Johnson refers to a similar melding, a kind of vocation: "The artisans of interface culture . . . have become some new fusion of artist and engineer--interfacers, cyberpunks, Web masters--charged with the epic task of representing our digital machines, making sense of information in its raw form." We have not yet arrived at the Golden Age of Artificers and Interfacers, but the possibilities can be glimpsed. And it is the artists -- as we now call them -- who have as much if not more to tell us about how to shape and mold and extend this medium as anyone.
Beyond Interface presents the work of a range of artists--and
designers and coders and architects and writers--working with the Net. In
order to incorporate both the collaborative capability and filtering
necessity of the Net, we also bring a range of responses to each of the
selected projects, in an effort to build a broader context for the work in
particular and net art in general. In addition, participants in an online
forum will be able to
add their own commentary about the artwork. Go on to the online exhibition, Beyond Interface.
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