This Hallowe'en, I'm going as a CGI script:TrAce's Incubation Gallery

work such as this: it's not exactly innovative in terms of presentation (having all the code in the body of a poem or text I guess leaves little room for coding on the inside of the piece, for making the piece responsive to the user), but it is a type of writing born and bred by net culture.

In her introduction to these works, Mez bemoans the plethora of "conventional" works on the net:: "... in a disappointing truncated space and time, many of the artistic potentialities of this [reticulation] technology have crystallized around conventional lines, with practitioners progressing along allegedly _fresh_ artistic trajectories which, in actuality, are still dependent on derivative templates. These templates have been predicated on the linear, on traditional unitary publishing models and the structural/physical nature of the plastic arts." It's this sentence that gives me pause when I look at this gallery. After all, what template is this? Text. Text presented in a static manner on a screen, which is awful derivative of text presented in a static manner on a page. The awesome potential of the net medium (net is short for network, and a network connects nodes together, such as client and server, user and artist, audience and work) doesn't figure into the gallery here, which is not to say that these artists have failed in any way. Sure, many of the text works here were culled from mailing lists and blogs, but I'm not so sure that means that they exist in a "non-physical" space. They manifest themselves that way, but at their heart they are linear and could take physical form quite easily. There's no collaboration between user and artist in this gallery; the old model prevails.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic