One of the "meta-narratives" that has guided the development of net.art
has been that of the Oedipal struggle against the bureacratic and
commercial structures that gave rise to it. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented
the www always intended it as a managerial tool with commercial potential.
The plateau phase has not come about through the encroachment of
commercial interest in the web but through the self-generated
institutionalisation of the net.art community (and as someone who is part
of a new media organisation, and who currently teaches net.art issues at
an art college, I, along with my students, am part of that). In a talk he
gave at Transmission in 2000, Lawrence Weiner made the statement that
artists should give up on being Oedipal. When Ray from RTMark took part
in Heath Bunting's Paris project, he got bored of clambering over
buildings and asked when they were going to do something constructive ...
I think Carey Young was trying to make a similar point at the CCA
conference.
The implosion of syndicate and the establishment of Cream (the website not
the club) are both symptomatic of the plateau phase. It almost matches
Niklas Luhmann's model of social differentiation: a new practice emerges
in a society which initially gives rise to "perturbations", as the
practice becomes more successfully integrated it begins to establish
mechanisms which are both self-reflective and self-generating
(Kluittenberg's "sovereign media", or media-for-media's sake), "reference
groups" emerge around this (parties who are interested in actively shaping
this), and the practice becomes normativized (ie. "netiqquette" standards
are established). What, partly, led to the implosion of syndicate is that
certain participants (Netochka) began to treat it as a medium rather than
a reflective mechanism, and in a way this made a victim of its own
success. We are now operating in an era of normativized net.art practice,
one in which there is a "canon" of "great names" (Vuk Covic, Alexi
Shulgin, Heath Bunting ...) and "classic works" ("When my boyfriend came
back from the war", "WebStalker"), and people doing Doctoral dissertations
on the topic (myself). The plateau phase is indicative of a success on
the part of net.art, it has successfully differentiated itself as a
distinct area of practice. In this sense it is not necessarily a bad
thing, however, for those who witnessed its growth, there is perhaps a
lingering feeling of things ain't quite so exciting as they used to be.
Personally I'm a fan of Netochka.
Given this, it is interesting, and I think healthy, that several people
contributing to the list have put forward works that pre-date the web.
What is also interesting, is that principles of net-derived practice are
feeding out into other areas, as in the case of SURRENDER CONTROL.
Perhaps net.art needs its Rosalind Krauss .... "net.art in the expanded
field" or "art in the expanded network".
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