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I've been taking a little while to digest this conversation of sorts, and 
while there has been a little heat here and there, this case study of 
SpacePlace does not seem unusual in that it shows some of the concerns of 
(new) media art, and some of the reasons why artists are often accused of 
disengagement with their audience.  

Of course, there is school of artistic expression which feels that the 
artist is the only voice which is important in the process, but I find this 
solipsistic and often makes for less compelling work.

At this time, I salute Peter and Philip for making an effort to address this 
forum.  However, Peter's reply seemed to be mostly expository in nature.  In 
his position as administrator, he has every right to keep his part of the 
discussion at that level, but consideration in a little more discussion of 
the work could have been illuminating. 

In addition, Philip's first repies seem to be apologetic for a bad 
experience with an open curatorial system which may have had some problems.  
Fair enough.

I am assuming that the last posting is (in part) due to a misunderstanding 
regarding the way the conversation has been conducted through CRUMB.  This 
is the assumption that I would like to maintain.

What follows is a negation of Roger's and Sarah's position vis-a-vis the 
SpacePlace installation (rather than a statement of difference), along with 
a great deal of obfuscatory text relating to highly speculative ideas.  Of 
course, speculation has often been the milieu of the artist. 

What it seems to me is that SpacePlace was a project designed to explore 
various techniques of the creation of media narratives using new media 
technologies under the loose metaphors of 'space' and 'Orbit'. 

So, we have a mediaspace that uses new technologies that incorporate 
elements of the metaphors in the content, but don't communicate a clear 
intent beyond wondering where this body of threads and their resultant 
mutations will lead.  Unless i totally misunderstood the piece, all of the 
text on orbitization, orbit being sculpture, the piece being datatecture, 
leave a lot of broken linkages which are not resolved. 

Where I see little of 'orbits' and space outside of the texts, tenuous 
assiation with sculpture beyond the intersection of the architrecture and 
the  noosphere that Philip wants to create/access, There seems to be some 
problems with the associations beween architectural space, informational 
space, and orbital space.  

Perhaps this was a piece that was much more about the results of the process 
of the technology's effects on the information than the content of the piece 
itself, but in that event, focusing on technology as process often leaves me 
wanting, with a curiosity of the effect or affect of the piece.

With the declaration of a lack of 'meta-ethics', possibly alludng to  an 
ethics, macro or micro-ethics, SpacePlace delegates ethical responsibility 
to the technology, and also some of the intentional as well.  Not all of 
this can be abrogated, as the artist, institution, and curator are still (in 
part) responsible for the work's implementation, if not its actions.  
Therefore, to not acknowledge the piece's possible ramifications would 
suggest a mix of a lack of knowledge of what the piece might do, or again a 
delegation of the responsibility of the piece's functions to the piece 
itself.

I don't know where I stand on that.  I would probably admit the possiblity 
for misfire, but then, many speculative artworks do.    

The explanation of much of this work and its rationales (I thought of using 
raisons d'etres) conflate and obfuscate many issues, genres, and topoi in 
order to justify a work that has other worthwhile points of investigation.  
If this statement would have been tendered at my graduate school, it would 
have been sent back for re-write for clarity and to describe what it's 
really about; which is the exploration of different spaces and (space-based)
narrative through publicly-accessible information technologies.

Crits aside, what I think this conversation is getting at is responsibility 
for open systems and their ramifications.  This relates to artworks, 
curation, WIKI, communities, and so on.  

Perhaps SpacePlace suggests that merely building the field and having people 
come does not create intent given a certain set of content, or that emergent 
mass intent for a publicly accessible artwork has potential problems.  This 
is something that's still being explored, though.  

From all this, methods of engagement and hyperbolic writing aside, I hope 
that this discussion of an evidently problematic work is revealing useful 
information about how/if we can create compelling public new mediaworks.