Dear all 
interesting discussion, and hope I’ll be able to add some of my devil’s 
advocaat perspective.
Yesterday I found myself conducting studio visit at an MFA program in some 
American university. One of the students, who spent the best part of the last 
two decades painting water and reflections using pastels was seeking my 
advice if she should move to oil, acrylic or water colours.  This highlighted to 
me the issue if generic sameness, as an artist I should know what to advise 
her…but I could not connect to her subject matter nor to her media. It would 
have been the same to me if some net artist would seek my advice concerning 
the best software to use for some type of self obsessed exploration. The 
reason I raise it is that in the context of this discussion, and more generally in 
the discourse of new media, we might be falling down the same trap of 
samenessness of new media or emerging art or whatever the term we choose 
to use. 
My experience of presenting my work in the context of new media or 
electronic art was in many cases a painful one, because the curators felt that 
by engaging with one form of technologically or “scientifically” based art they 
can deal with all. However, the materiality of manipulated life in an art context 
was not something that fit comfortably with their idea of art or media. 
Plugging a projector and turning on computers in not the same as maintaining 
a fragile life form that needs care and appropriate conditions. Many so called 
new media curators cannot even deal with dead materials – see the case of 
the Canadian artist Tagny Duff in ISEA couple of months back. The reminder 
of the flash seems to really disturb some fantasy of dematerialise uploading.

Gavin and melinda are right in asking thier questions, however, I might add 
that one of the fundamental questions was omitted, and the lack of this 
question was apparent also in some of the other posts. Let me pose it quite 
bluntly; in the service of WHAT art operates?  I am always suspicious of art in 
the service on anything beyond story telling. In the context of global worming, 
for example, is our role as artists to engage in didactic propaganda that would 
elicit some behavioural change on a global scale? Aren’t there other people 
better suited to do it? I am concern that art would lose one of the last 
remaining privileges of being human – that of non-utilitarian explorations, many 
sciences are loosing it already. Do we want to make art totally applied? In 
particular when art deals with new knowledge, it should strive to be a non-
applied questioning force, not resolve anything, be in the service of none, be 
ambiguous, Problematise. This, I believe, have a stronger impact on human 
thought, it opens up rather then shut down possibilities.  If the artist’s agenda 
is too obvious, she looses this very unique privileged place – the discourse 
become about opinions rather then issues.  

I am currently immersed in an ecological project and one thing that is become 
more and more apparent to me is the immense complexity of dealing with the 
issue, any action I postulate raises possibilities of good and harm to different 
aspects of that ecology, and this is without even considering the unknown 
unknowns (to quote Rumsfeld). My challenge as an artist is to tell the stories 
of these complexities but not to solve them.

As for Roger plea for more scientists; this is understandable – but what 
scientist would you like to join, who is this generic scientist you talk about? 
Would a climate change denier scientist do? 

To be continued 

Best
oron