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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathCommunication
 
Muser's Service (Plewe, Daniela Alina), 1994Opus (Raqs Media Collective), 2001
 
 
 

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in real time.»[71] Reader-authors therefore work on a vast web of text in which the individual words are automatically linked with already existent keywords, resulting in a textual fabric which is, as the initiators write, «what many people thought the WWW already was.»[72] The entries in the web cannot be read in «linear» sequence; instead, users jump from one text to the next on the basis of their interconnections. Due to the infinite chain of associations that results, the «Association Blaster» is related to another project that encourages its users to daydream: Daniela Alina Plewe's «Musers' Service» (1994), which started out as an interactive offline installation before subsequently going online.[73] The «Opus» project (2001 onward) of the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective offers visitors an Internet platform on which they can view, swap, download, manipulate and re-upload digital objects (video footage, images, sound, text) and thus place them in the public domain. The objective is to create «digital» or «creative commons» in compliance with the «Copyleft» rules for a collaborative software culture. In that way, «Opus» makes explicit the principle of authorship as a principally collective or common authorship.

 

Participation and interaction in a telematic culture

The Net art produced in the 1990s is often said to have carried on where the first telecommunications projects of the two preceding decades left off. Although the usage of telecommunications media initially makes this assumption seem apt, striking differences exist, particularly with regard to the notion of participation. Participation in early telecommunication projects was confined to a small group of users; the audience remained in its traditionally passive role (of watching or reading). With the advent of wide Internet access in the 1990s, by contrast, Allan Kaprow's demand for the abolition of spectators could be met, in some degree, for the first time. On the Internet, the possibilities of participation are far greater than in the time in which the early telecommunications projects took place. In the 1990s, the open structure of the Net as well as the increasing affordability of Internet access and above all of computers and other ‹small media› made participation possible on an unprecedented scale. That is not to say that all Net art projects were happenings–on the contrary, there was a wide range of different formats and of forms of interaction[74]–but explains why so

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