Thanks, Tom, for the reference to the Routledge anthology on Network
Art--I've pre-ordered it :)

Another anthology just published by a British press is 60: Innovators
Shaping our Creative Future, produced for Thames & Hudson's 60th
anniversary. This doorstopper includes a handful of artists who use
networks--not surprising, given that Joline Blais and I wrote the New
Media section. What I find more telling is how painfully derivative
the "innovators" featured in the Visual Arts section are.

That said, one of the points Joline and I try to make in our section
is that the latest generation of new media innovators are applying
lessons learned from the Internet back to the real world. An excerpt
follows--more about the book here:

http://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500514924.html

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Excerpt from 60: Innovators Shaping our Creative Future
Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito

It's difficult to think of any field where innovation occurred in the
last decade and new media--whether wielded by artists or architects,
developers or dressmakers--did not play a critical role. But what of
innovation within the field of new media itself? Who offers vision to
the next generation of visionaries?

The first wave of new media practitioners in the 1980s and 90s
fashioned tools to network the globe in a pervasive electronic glow.
As this wave spread, it ramified--from a data packet sent from UCLA to
Stanford, to a tangle of Web pages joined via hyperlinks, to a
community-edited constellation of images, sounds, and news, to a swarm
of satellite-enabled handhelds capable of mapping environmental
destruction and coordinating political movements. As virtual reality
gave way to augmented reality, the archetypal new media user went from
a white male "data cowboy" with no social life to a Japanese teenage
girl with too much social life. Gawky VR helmets have given way to
Treos and iPhones, and people use these stylish wireless devices not
to escape bodies but to find them.

The latest wave takes this networked community and extends it further
into the real world and its denizens, human and nonhuman. These
innovators think quite literally outside the box, recognizing that new
media were never about communicating with machines, but with other
beings. But something has changed. In the first wave, the "new" in new
media placed undue emphasis on the ephemeral--exemplified by the
accelerating cycle of obsolescence of hardware, software, and
everything built with them. The latest wave, on the other hand, sees
nothing new in newness. Change is everywhere: in energy descent,
climate change, corporate overreach, and constantly mutating
technologies. The challenge for this generation is how to accommodate
change--how to grow the agility and robustness of networks from a
proof of concept into a long-term strategy for survival.

For networks are the battlefields where these creators wage war.
Networks offer a level playing field that favors the innovative,
whether that field is made of bits, sod, or kin. Ten dollars will buy
you a domain name, whether it's GWBush.com, GATT.org, or
TheWorstDomainName.net--an egalitarian ethic that empowers The Yes Men
to impersonate presidential candidates, multinational corporations,
and influential NGOs. The artists of 0100101110101101 faced down a
50,000 euro lawsuit from Nike, thanks in part to the anonymity of the
Internet. By networking a dozen law students across the US, Wendy
Seltzer can protect inventors from the chilling effects of
intellectual property law by exposing the overreaching tactics of
corporate lawyers. Natalie Jeremijenko lays soil on sidewalks and
invites geese to a human lunch, reminding us that our food webs
include the flora and fauna in driveways and rooftops. And Miigam'agan
and gkisedtanamoogk are rebuilding the Longhouse, one of the most
successful networks of the past 10,000 years, starting with little
more than their own convictions and good will.

[....]the Internet is less a technology for wiring routers via packet-
switching as much as a technology for social intelligence. So perhaps
we shouldn't be surprised that the Internet built by white male
engineers is a barely sustainable system beset by viruses, spam, and
vitriol. It is precisely social intelligence that Euro-ethnic culture
lacks, and that the Wabanaki remember: the Longhouse is *their*
Internet. In place of flamewars, indigenous people had talking
circles; instead of money, they had trust. Rather than entrust care of
their networks to top-down organizations like ICANN and Verizon, the
Wabanaki created an inverse hierarchy, where decisions by the highest
intertribal council could always be overruled by local communities.
Their vision is broad, their communities dense. They recognize that
the real doomsday invention of the 20th century was not the nuclear
bomb, but the nuclear family.

Nevertheless, the digital media newly birthed by Euro-ethnic culture
offer many practical strategies that innovators from all networked
cultures gladly exploit. These creators don't fashion rarities for the
white cube or its elite gatekeepers, but unleash their executable
creations on the email inboxes and street corners of ordinary folks.
Junkyards and e-commerce sites aren't subjects they paint or sculpt,
but sites where they act. As we argue in the book _At the Edge of
Art_, the Internet has enabled creative people to make and distribute
work far outside art's traditional confines. To be sure, there's no
gallery to fund high-tech installations, and the lack of a "dot-art"
domain to go with "dot-com" and "dot-org" means viewers have to decide
for themselves what is or isn't art. But these constraints have also
freed new media artists from the art world's narrow purview and
dependence on the market, helping them learn to survive in a world
much bigger than the its cloistered hothouse. Much as art world
cognoscenti find titillation in a set of handcuffs or a Barbie doll on
a gallery floor, new media artists aim to do more than retrieve a new
readymade into the Duchampian frame[....]

In his 1946 essay "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush pinned the cause
for the last century's two world wars on the fact that human
intelligence was separated socially and geographically. His vision of
the Memex heralded a global network of distributed information. The
cyberspace of the 20th century was a first draft of this vision, but
today's real innovators in new media are taking taking that vision
back down to the earth and all its beings. That cross-species
intelligence is our past--and our future.