The following quick essay was for the last and final edition of the annual netarts awards from the Machida Museum in Tokyo:

I spaced-out posting the netarts 2008 selections last November. here’s my brief jury comments:

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces rather than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich
http://www.feraltrade.org/

Again, a complex year for net art, looking at the divergent and still diverging fields of creative production within global networks. This year’s criteria of “Embodied Praxis” was complicated by the arrival of the much-hyped Second Life on the main-stream media stage. But material and very human networking trumped the attenuated virtuality of SL. Making a functional parody of globalized capitalism, Feral Trade seeks to stimulate a direct distribution network that follows the connections of existing social networks. It takes advantage of the un-mediated plurality of human networks and personal connections and constructs a direct affront to the anonymous standardization of global trade. It opens a small crack in the facade of globalization where autonomous collective be-ing can be activated. As a classic example of a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), I hope it takes hold to become a permanent presence that de-powers the dominant and monolithic capitalist structure. At the very least, it points out the deep lack in that structure, and this is a critical starting point for evolutionary changes in human relation.

an honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call

This project emerges out of the long-term network practice of artist Isabelle Jenniches who has in the past worked in a wide variety of creative net-based activities. The particular piece, “The Call,” is one of several process-oriented projects she has initiated that depend on the availability of generic user-controlled Internet web-cams. The works are constructed over a long period of time — time spent watching the selected scenario, remotely — life-time spent observing the world. Thousands of images are made during a methodological process of deep-looking through this mediated network eye. The extended seeing and repetitive digital stitching operations on the thousands of gathered images acts to frame a meditative daily routine. The cumulative practice approaches the classical Zen expression — “there is no web-cam, there is no PhotoShop, there is only the Void” — and it arises through the post-Cartesian possibilities of a commonly accessible network interface. Formally recalling David Hockney’s early Polaroid SX-70 time-space collage work, “The Call” is an intimate and intense personal vision of a scope rarely manifest in the click-through eye-candy world of the net.

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich
http://www.feraltrade.org/

an honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call

spend the morning with Sally Jane, checking out some of the exhibitions including a personal walk-through of the Animalia project with producers Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (more kiwis!). then on to the ART MUSEUM to see THE SHOW curated by Steve Deitz. some amazing works, leading off with the elegant live-chat-based piece.

lunch with Ken at La Victoria Taqueria, better burritos than Macho Taco which was inexplicably closed at lunch-time.

also happen upon the npr (neighborhood public radio) broadcast studio at the downtown cineplex in an unused ticket booth. was wondering where they were broadcasting from — last night I happened to tune them in at 88.9 on the car radio on the commute back to the ‘burbs. so, met Jon Brumit and

hard to begin and end the day with a rattling vibrating swervy commute that lasts about an hour, door-to-door.

some overviews on the conference:

yadda-yadda-yadda; blah-blah-blah.

so many words, so many moving images, so much sound, talking heads, and spectacle. along with nice personal encounters. the monumental, the hierarchic voices along with the personal, networked, and confidential/private.

San Jose is interesting clash of urban-renewal towers of glass and corrosion-resistant metals: ringed some hard-core barrio Victorian bungalow scene, interlaced with the chronic homeless scattered between the shining spaces and conventioneers.

organized networks are interested in new institutional forms. tactical media has come to a stage of confronting itself. question of scalar transformation, (vs) networked organizations. democracy and networks are antithetical. bunk.

prototypes: sarai, iDC, srishdi school of art and media, indy media, etc

end up going to see a Mike Figgis remix of his film Time Code. a pseudo-press guy is giving away a couple tickets, so I snag one. he explains that he’s not really press, but a writer, and is trying to write a history of media art starting with the worldview of Gertrude Stein. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose he very well might be a better writer that explainer. the film is a disappointment — the subject of the narrative is hermetically sealed in Hollywood and lacks any compelling visual or story elements. Mike is there, verily, and does a live “remix” which consists of rewinding the tape(!) and fading in/out the 4 different screen audio tracks. in form — the four frames which simultaneously inhabit the main screen that were recorded in four single simultaneous takes starting at the same time — there is an extremely interesting potential, especially as the overall resolution of video systems for shooting, recording, editing, and playback are gradually increasing. but the possibilities of the form seem completely wasted by the insipid narrative and visual void. is it a joke maybe?

head back to Livermore on the 87-280-680-84 pilgrimage route. not really liking that violent traverse of the land. though one segment moves across the Calaveras Valley which is still unpopulated and sports the rolling amber hills with huge live oaks scattered at stellar intervals.

The netart 2004 exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. Here’s the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary:

Retrospecting on the disheveling week of near-constant stimulation and activity that was the Ars Electronica FLESH FACTOR event. Five hours sleep was a miracle which was as remote from reality as was the idea of downtime. A thrashing whoosh of flesh factors and virtual emulations and emanations and emissions and manifestations accompanied with the appropriate techno-beats, subtronic and subsonic throbbing, visceral vibrations and skittering cathode-ray-tube radiations. I spent a vast portion of my time within the comfortable, though frenetic, Open-X space where something of a revolution took place. A revolution of interface design between audience and artist, participant and observer, creator and consumer, networker and networker. As far as I know or can ascertain in discussion with other networking artists, Open-X is a first as far as restructuring the relationship between artist and audience — although even this pronouncement is a rather näive and surficial reduction. The space was occupied by about 50 networking-artists working on a variety of projects from finished web-projects, to live web-radio, to collaborative events (like our net.sauna), and a full-tilt live documentation of the entire festival. I should point out that this term networking-artist is something of a misnomer, or, at least, a scraping bow to the traditionally relegated identifications of this and that. Previous to this event in the heritage of conference, traditional paradigms have absolutely prevailed for electronic media festivals, exhibitions, and symposium. I came away from the festival feeling virtually invigorated and physically completely wiped-out. The 18-hour flight from Linz to Frankfurt to Washington to Denver was almost total torture for my back. I was constantly checking the count-down timer on my watch, the seconds tripping by far too slowly for me to remember anything through the constant hot-nails in the lower back. In the last hour, I got to digging my fingernails into my palms to make me forget the pain in my back.

The past few days have been spent around Köln and in Rösrath with Volker, an old friend from Avantière days in Aachen in 1990. I had just made a rather long entry here, but inadvertently erased it. Hmmm. Talking about the fragments of dreams, and the paradox of travel. I shall try to reconstruct it for the moment… Chris sent email from Colorado, following his return from a mountaineering trip in the Alps. He suggested that travel is a catharsis.

Yes, so it goes. I spend today and most of yesterday dealing with correspondance — email, snail-mail and so on. I got a package of post forwarded to Volker’s NetArt box here by my sister, Janet, who checks my post box in Prescott, Arizona. Good to see things like job application rejects and the like, eh? And my bank statement which reads a shrinking balance each month … Being on the road like this keeps me on edge for better or worse.

They shall not tame him. — The Lion of Flanders, Hendrick Conscience

The dream of building a house in Crestone, Colorado is no closer to reality than last year, although I do collect fragments of ideas and things to think about in the design. Of course, one of the primary things is simply to have a place with enough rooms that it will comfortably house a good number of folks who will surely visit me there in that beautiful place. Any suggestions?