From July 15-17, trAce held its second annual Incubation Conference. Billed as an" International Conference on Writing and the Internet", the event drew artists and writers from all over the world for three days of presentations and talks revolving around the ways in which the Internet has changed literature and how literature has changed on the Internet. Some examples of what went on during the conference can be seen at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/index.cfm .
As part of this year's conference, the celebrated net artist Mez assembled a small gallery of work she felt to be important to the debates at the presentation. Called _Net & Codeworkers Inc[ubation]_ , the gallery can be viewed at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/gallery.cfm, and features work from some of the toppermost-of-the-poppermost in online literature: +lo_y+, Alan Sondheim, solipsis, Jodi, Ted Warnell, Brian Lennon, gashgirl/doll yoko...all artists I admire.
The work is mostly text, despite the glorious introduction Mez has written for the gallery: "...these works fundamentally exist in echos and [band]widths of a projected space. They are not designed to concretely reflect economic, narrative, linear, or even [traditional] artistic value. " There's a lot of talk in the introduction about non-physical space, and how these works occupy them. Of course, these works are mostly text; they could just as easily occupy space in a physical book, and most of them (despite the very high quality of the work presented) are only interactive in the vaguest of ways. What Mez has assembled here for the most part is a small text anthology, not a collection of net art.
Which may be the point. There's nothing in the description of this gallery that would lead one to believe that one is actually going to see works of new media here (there are such works, though: Joe Keenan's "polysyndeton" is a shockwave animation, and gashgirl/doll yoko's contribution is an old school hypertext, complete with text links and interwoven lexia). This is a text anthology. Said text is of the "codework" variety: poetry in which the writers appropriate and/or ape computer code. This is I think what fascinates Mez; her own mezangelle language is a mixture of code syntax and deformed English, putting it very much in line with what's presented here. There's much to be said for
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