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Exquisite corpse, cooperation, shared authorship, simultaneousness, recirculation, negotiation, copyleft, Wiki |
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Information recirculation and joint authorship are not new concepts but on the Internet they have found the ideal platform on which to function. The Web's immediacy and its power to go around the world in seconds have allowed humanity to become connected at lightning speed. In the field of art we have gone from taking turns, with exquisite cadavers for example, to the kind of instant negotiation, discussion and collaboration permitted by a “wiki.” The exchange creates a networking behavior which is now simultaneous and recursive rather than just sequential. We can define networking as the promotion of social nexuses and the creation of two-way communication tools made possible by the latest technologies. From this perspective we see that not all net art falls into this category, but rather only those works in which art ceases to be an “object” (albeit virtual) made by “artists” and instead becomes a kind of platform, a space, a meaning machine with parts being added constantly depending upon the participation which it attracts. |
Luther Blissett “Luther Blissett” is a multi-use name, an open reputation informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe since the summer of 1994. For reasons unknown, the name was borrowed from an English football player of Afro-Caribbean origin from the 1980s. In Italy between 1994 and 1999, the self-named Luther Blissett project (an organized network within the community which shares the identity of “Luther Blissett”) became an extremely popular phenomenon and gained the reputation of a popular hero. Antoni Muntadas New meanings – in this case generated in an undesirable way – are the result of translation processes. For the translator, the huge differences between the structures of different languages pose a problem which is magnified by the constant apparition of new languages: the computer languages of each new device, the languages of new urban or cyberurban tribes, the languages of fiction, transhuman languages used to communicate with other species, or those designed for the communication between machines of different “species”. Moreover, these languages are growing at a rate much faster than the rate of extinction of old languages.
Sergi Jordá FMOL (Faust Music On Line) by Sergi Jordá is unique in the field of collective participation and generative processes. This work was an invitation in the form of a software application specially developed for the spectacular Faust v3.0 by La Fura del Baus so that creators worldwide could participate online in the composition of a soundtrack to a show comprising numerous brief fragments (around 60 themes of twenty seconds each). Once downloaded from the Internet, the FMOL software is installed in the user’s computer as an independent application which combines many sound synthesis and composition features, with the option of connecting automatically to a database containing all the themes uploaded to date. Using this software users were able not only to contribute new compositions, but also listen to and even build on existing works. Each participant who accessed the server with the intention of composing a piece could also modify and enrich earlier works, which created a game based on a musical “exquisite corpse” in which it was possible to know the identity of the different authors of any theme at all times, as well as the percentages of authorship of the work in the event that the piece in question was selected and used. Thus, the idea or musical seed created by an author could evolve in multiple directions simultaneously, each one being equally accessible due to their organization in the form of a tree diagram. As in the case of a kaleidoscope, this pre-programmed musical game was enriched by multiplicity, generating new compositions with each movement, each exchange. Miltos Manetas By means of this website Manetas proposes a survey of the theme of author’s rights and copyright, directed at artists, architects, designers, writers, curators, and photographers. Ricardo Iglesias The vestiges of the past is something difficult to associate with the digital world. This is its most abject quality: the digital does not age. It is invariable. It is always itself. There are no sepia tones, its “pages” do not yellow, nor do the originals degrade with each copy made. Nevertheless, in his work Elmundo.es Ricardo Iglesias confronts us with an entropy of the digital in which the front cover of a newspaper published on a website is modified with each visit made by a reader. Unwittingly, the visitor changes the signs which compose the text. Iglesias makes us realize that there are no objective perspectives, nor invisible presences. Each reader leaves their mark, and each reading modifies the text. These traces of time passing seem to return the asepsis to the digital form, allowing us to witness another defeat of technology as a communication machine: once again, a hubbub takes over from the sense of a work.
Taller d'Intangibles (Jaume Ferrer and David Gómez) The Internet 2.0 presents itself to us both as a medium and a system, as a paradigm of coexistence and social contract. Each network requires its communication protocol. All societies need their constitution. Doesn't society in the Internet age deserve an editable protocol, agreed upon in real time? This seems to have been the question posed by the Taller d'Intangibles, which transformed the Spanish Constitution into a Wiki, a webpage which could be edited by anyone from their browser, turning the clauses and articles of the 1978 Constitution on their head. In the time in which the Constitución was working (the wiki has since been disabled), you could access the index, choose the article which you wished to modify, and edit or change whatever you liked. Each article also had a discussion page which encouraged debate. We could question ourselves and analyse the reasons why the wiki constitution project was terminated. While this format has been a tool that generated deferents, which has generated important – today indispensible – sources of agreed information, such as that offered by Wikipedia, we should remember that it has also produced fierce virtual battles such as the one centred on the George W. Bush entry during the invasion of Iraq, which led to the open access to its edition being closed permanently. The Internet is presented to us as a space for free navigation and virtual exchange, but it is also a space for dispute, an ephemeral stage for debate, construction, battle, and sanction. Whenever these hundreds of virtual battles and attacks take place, from that first famous Great Hacker War in 1991 before the World Wide Web existed which was fought with weapons already obsolete, we can trace the mark of a warlike cyber chronicler.
Santiago Ortiz What is the relationship between air and a padlock? Between a dictionary and the Milky Way?
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