Re: <nettime> Goodbye Classic ?

[Garrett Lynch <lists@asquare.org>]

On 14 Nov 2007, at 11:00, nettime-l-request@kein.org wrote:

>Thanks for the kind words about my net.art book, even though I do not
>think that a book is old, if it was published 8 years ago...

Hi Tilman

just to add my praise about this book (version 2) and particularly
it's approach of a series of interviews - nothing has come close to
it in print media just a shame the first edition seems to be only in
German. I use it in my teaching and can't recommend it highly enough
to those of you who have not read it.


>I do not think that anybody would be terribly impressed with this
>piece today (Alexei wisely took it from the net a long time ago,
>and the version at Rhizome is "members only"...). It is basically a
>collection of screen shots from the desktops of some members of the
>mailing list "7-11", that was an important sand box for net art people
>in the late 1990s. The project grew out of the discussion on the list,
>even though I do not really remember the exact circumstances. (If you
>would want to archive this piece, the debate that preceded it would
>be an important part of the documentation.. Then there was an ongoing
>debate during the time the piece was put together, so a semi-public
>discourse went on during production....)

your right and of course this idea has been done to death since
by other artists but since the net in part is supposed to be an
information store - all information will now be forever online,
it's a shame that 5-10 years down the line in fact much of the
early information (and as a result art) are in fact not because of
redundancy etc.


>These social specificity is
>something I really miss in contemporary art most of the time, be it on
>the net or not, and that is also a reason why I lost interest in it to
>some extent after the early net art experience, where projects like
>that seemed to happen every other week. Then again, it is also the
>reason why people not involved in these activities were usually much
>less enthusiastic about this type of work.

there is always however a ten year period after a movements creation
when it is flooded with work, when artists play/experiment and this
can give extraordinary results. i remain optimistic that net.art is
developing/maturing now (perhaps we should call it a networked art
now) and we are starting to see less work focusing on abstraction by
networks and more work about how networks change relationships between
things - users / artworks / spaces / places etc. this is what net.art
originally set out to do but got distracted.


>
>PS: My net.art book is still available, and since the publishers took
>a great risk to put it out, I do not want to put anything from it on
>the net right now. However, I promise that once it goes out of print,
>I will have the whole thing scanned and put it on my website.

petition the publisher to do an English edition of 1.0? all of this
online would be a great resource!!!!

a+
gar
_________________
Garrett@asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/
http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch/






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