Has the immaterial networked art scene started to yield to the organic/analog establishment? Even if the network can\'t be stopped and the world community is constantly growing, signals of crisis are threatening the Net art community, questioning its anti-market model during the current global recession. First came the nth censorship of a parody web site. The Internet service provider Verio has decided to rescind the contract made with The Thing, a seminal association of electronic and Net artists that has been active for more than ten years. Verio was giving in to pressures put on it by the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was annoyed because of a satirical site directed against it. Verio suddenly informed The Thing that it would have to move all its services somewhere else, including those offered to the PS1/MOMA gallery, the magazine Artforum, and the Nettime mailing list. An understandably furious Wolfgang Staehle, director of The Thing, has declared: »They could have resolved this matter directly with the owners of that particular site without cutting the connection to our entire network... besides damaging our enterprise, this action establishes a dangerous precedent for the freedom of expression on the Net.« For this reason, the next strategy will be to manage a block of IP addresses and host them on different providers to avoid similar problems in the future.

Another important signal is the much-debated switch of Rhizome services from a free registration model to a paid subscription model. Even though the fee is quite fair, at five dollars per year, the move has generated a storm of protests, mainly expressed in the mailing lists, complaining about the reduced accessibility of resources originally created through community effort. The main problem seems to be the lack of a sustainable long-term financial model for supporting network art production and research. As Geert Lovink succinctly put it, this is »the (absent) economy of critical Internet culture«.

But critical and tactical works are constantly produced, even in hard times. Making successful artworks for the Net often means attracting the attention of other media, priming a public reaction to controversial statements and concepts. Seen from this perspective, the Net becomes »the critical medium«. Not a completely independent medium, but a free place where it is possible to create collaborative and bottom-up scaled work, ready to intoxicate newspapers and TV-related journalism. The Net is then a distorted mirror of reality that can show the boring monotony of the broadcast paradigm.

During the recent »Digital is not Analog« Net art festival in Campobasso (Italy), different artists with a »hacktivist« kind of approach presented their work in a 13th-century church, which provided a striking historical contrast. The European way of mixing activism and net.art was well represented by first-class exponents like 0100101110101101.ORG, Ubermorgen, Jaromil and LAN. The Institute of Applied Autonomy introduced different social robots, demonstrating the American version of hi-tech activist. And fresher stimuli came from less celebrated artists. Gentian Shkurti, for example, is a young Albanian artist and author of »Go West«, a sarcastic 3D videogame that puts the player on a rubber dinghy dodging the Italian Coast Guards to reach Italy. Shkurti thinks that »illegal immigration seems to be the main way to fulfil Albanian people\'s desire of integrating with Europe, and that makes them blind. When they finally get to Italy, they discover it\'s all a different story. The whole thing seems to be like a videogame, fated never to succeed.« Reversing the conglomerate media perspective, Shkurti lets the user experiment with a different reality. His ›game‹ becomes a medium carrying its message under perfect playing rules.

A different kind of approach is adopted by the BIT (Bureau of Inverse Technology, http://www.bureauit.org/), an international collective of engineers »devolping strategic technoproducts to address contemporary technical and social conditions.« Natalie Jermijenko (Australia/USA) and Kate Rich (UK) were the two members of BIT physically present in Campobasso. A large number of different projects were shown by the duo, all concerning a subversive use of the media. »Suicide Box« was a provocative work dating back to 1996 and consisted of a webcam aimed at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, one of the places in USA with the highest suicide rate. The BitPlane was a different story. BIT was able to launch a spy plane (»generous residues of cold-war precision«) operated by remote control. The plane, equipped with a minuscule camera, flew over Silicon Valley above buildings belonging to IT corporations (Apple, Netscape, Xerox Parc, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Yahoo, SGI, Sun Microsystems and many more). It was able to shoot aerial views of all these places with a camera, thus ideally circumventing the prohibition of using one inside the same buildings. A more pragmatic spirit underlies the »Autopirate Bit Radio«, an automated system that can insert short unauthorized messages in FM frequencies. It was successfully used to break into the internal radio station of the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York. Leaflets with detailed instructions of how to »build-it-yourself« were available to the public for free, and they sold out in a couple of minutes.

The hunger for this type of social art work seems to prove that there is a public demand for a critical use of digital media. Collective efforts, like The Thing, receive substantial support and money when threatened, proving that a global community is always ready to react to the menaces of normalization. New metaphors, innovative perspectives and alternative datascapes are always needed to escape the emptiness of corporation advertisements, and the vacuous illusions of a clean, innocuous and senselessly »digital lifestyle«.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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