Chapter Ideas

Ricardo, how about writing one?

Id love to see a chapter on Australian hybrid/interdisplinary/media arts practices that have recently evolved and to find out why Australian media artists are so engaged in this field.

As a working artist, I am most interested in the creation of art. This is my first introduction to this networking concept, and am hoping to participate in actual creative collaboration. Is this a realistic expectation, or am I misplacing my ambitions here? Looking for clarification. I have a tangential interest in seeing a chapter devoted to the particular difficulties facing survival of artists, forming accurate analysis and addressing the construction of a knowledge base to ultimately address pertinent issues effecting and effected by productivity and quality of life. Hoping assistance to living/working conditions of artists may be instated in mainstream venues. This may sound redundant, but I have not found sources that are easily accessible and believe we are talking about a fair percentage of the population.

I think that most discussions of networked art focus on the tech and ignore art historical antecedents that occurred before the tech was in place. I would suggest that artists meetings and groups such as DaDA and the Cabaret Voltaire were precedents. You can look at a communication model such as Art & Language or a communal model such as early 112 workshop groups or even Colab from the 1980’s. So I would suggest the idea of for example Beuys notion of Social Sculpture traced through early web groups such as the thing, artNetWeb, nettime, and rhizome.