Irational’s Finest, or The Art of Movement Through Space
by Inke Arns Hardly a day goes by without some news item about the discovery of a carefully concealed crop of genetically modified maize, about liquid explosives in airplanes and bombs inside suitcases on trains, about calls for blanket video surveillance, about the global spread of avian ’flu. We wonder when the virus will reach our own part of the world, have long begun to feel the pinch of economic cutbacks in Germany, to notice the effects of climate change, and cannot help but think: Life’s harder than it used to be.
NET(art)WORKING
Selección de proyectos, eventos e iniciativas de Net Art Proyectos: Borderhack (México), Burn Station, (España), Constitución (España), e-valencia.org (España), Fadaiat (España), Infomera (México), Medellín WIFI (Colombia), Re:combo (Brasil), Red Libre Red Visible (España). Selección: Gustavo Romano por Gustavo Romano Podemos definir “networking” como la acción de promover la creación de redes y sacar provecho de las herramientas de comunicación bidireccional que las nuevas tecnologías nos ofrecen. Partiendo de esta perspectiva, vemos que no todo el net art se ubicaría en esta categoría, sino sólo aquellas propuestas en las que el arte deja de ser un "objeto (aún siendo virtual) hecho por artistas", para ser una plataforma, un entorno, una máquina de sentido cuyas piezas se van acoplando constantemente en función de la participación que éstas generen.
On the Contemporaneity of Media Arts
by Inke Arns (published in: Nam June Paik Award 2006, Frankfurt am Main 2006) Almost ten years ago with Language (property), Spanish media artist Daniel Garcia Andujar, better known under his company name Technologies to the People, developed a work which addressed the increasing privatisation and commodification of language. On a simple HTML page he listed phrases which have been registered as trademarks, and with that, had become the property of their respective owners, for example, “Where do you want to go today?TM” (Microsoft), “A better return on informationTM” (SAP), “Moving at the speed of businessTM” (UPS), “What you never thought possibleTM” (Motorola). By entitling this project “Remember, language is not freeTM” Andujar anticipated the disputes concerning “intellectual property”, which emerged in the following years (visible as early as the second half of the 1990s in the fierce battles for the allocation of domain names on the world wide web).