On Feb 22, 2005, at 8:12 PM, Melinda Rackham wrote:
> Francis wrote:
>> As Caitlin notes, this isn't an entirely new problem:
> Installation and
>> conceptual work have their own volatility issues, and even
> paintings
>> and sculpture age. New media gets a lot of attention here
> in part
>> because works that are intertwined with quickly
> obsolescing technical
>> networks are probably more volatile than anything; it also
> gets a lot
>> of attention because it's new and as such has the halo of
> novelty.
>
>
> I'm concerned by the attitude which says "oh net.art - is
> anti-material, its ephemeral..lets let it go.." as it
> seems an attitude based on financial factors as net.art
> hasnt yet been for the large part "collectable", rather than
> an attitude focused on the common good.
I agree. But it's not a problem that net art suffers in isolation:
Similar fates befall installation and performance. It's worthwhile to
put the issue in context, and yes, a lot of it has to do with whether
the art in question can be attached to a collector's market.
> Interestingly,
> this is not what is happening with digital preservation of
> the internet itself. Globally enormous publicly and
> privately funded efforts are place to preserve early and
> current Internet content.
But are these efforts that successful? I haven't spent that much time
looking at them, but there have been more than a few times I've gone to
the Internet Archives and been disappointed by some of the gaps I've
seen. Seems like trawling an archive that wide means it's hard to go
deep.
> The life span of networked art, apart form those
> carnivores which feed off the net itself, is sometimes
> limited to 2 or 3 years before browser and java upgrades
> make them obsolete to the majority of viewers.
And I'd argue that the situation is getting worse. I think when
Carnivore was first put out, its network-centric approach was
relatively novel, but these days almost all the works I'm checking out
lean heavily on some sort of external resource: Google, images from
LiveJournal, cell phone networks, blogs, etc., etc. (I'm waiting with
bated breath for a major wave of del.icio.us-based artworks, though
it's possible that the net art scene is just sort of burned out on
tagging projects.)
Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
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