twhid wrote:
I agree with most of what Curt writes here and I'm going to add-to or
disagree with small parts of it.

more below:

At 13:17 -0400 7/2/03, Curt Cloninger wrote:
>So far in this thread, Mr. Lichty seems the most perspicacious. I'm
>always amazed at the sort of patronizing,
>look-what-the-cat-dragged-in reaction that net artists have toward
>Flash. The tenor of the dialogue usually runs like, "Could this be
>art? Do you think so? Really? No! Could it be?"

++
twhid wrote:
In discussions on RAW, maybe. But one of the most talked about and
exhibited pieces of net art is Galloway's Carnivore and among the
Carnivore clients there are many Flash and Director-based pieces. I
would say there is a general acceptance of all networked and
web-based mediums here. Except for Eryk and his 6 rules of course but
he's explained his position on this numerous times and it seems like
a valid place to be coming from to me.

>
>Miltos Manetas forms the Electronic Orphanage around something as
>inconsequential as "works done in flash," and it's greeted as a
>novel movement. Even Lev Manovich gets all happy writing a piece
>about Flash paradigmatics.

++
twhid wrote:
Miltos frames his discussions so that traditional curators may be
brought into web art, he's not that interested in the net art core
which makes up Rhiz IMO.

>
>The implicit assumption that a Java applet is a more legitimate net
>art medium than an .swf file struck me as bizarre the first time I
>heard it, and it still seeems very parochial to me. One may just as
>fruitfully have begun this thread by asking, "what is the best work
>on the Web done in Java?" Pieces by golan levin, casey reas, martin
>wattenberg, and bradford paley come immediately to mind; and then
>I'd be hard-pressed to come up with more. For a NET artist, the
>question is not what the Java programming language will let you do
>in terms of creating stand-alone apps, the question is what will it
>let you do on the net? Particularly on the mac, java BROWSER
>support/implementation is much slower, glitchier, and kludgier than
>Flash plug-in support/implementation.

++
twhid wrote:
I agree with this, partly. Flash was invented for animators,
designers, etc: visual people. One would think that it would lend
itself to visual artists on the net as well. So I find the arg
strange too. But just as Java is aimed at the software INDUSTRY so
that artists need to bend over backwards to get it to work for their
ends, so Flash is aimed at the culture INDUSTRY. It's meant to create
advertisements, web sites, and (recently) 'rich media applications'.
It's tools are meant to create *slick* work. An artist sometimes
needs to bend over backwards to avoid the sheen of the Flash
aesthetic.

One thing that is misleading in the above, as of Mac OSX 10.2 and
Windows XP Java support is much better on the Mac than on Windows.

<snip>

>
>It's facile to say, "I don't like Flash art," or "I do like Flash
>art." Just like it's facile to say, "I don't like internet art," or
>"I do like internet art." Flash has its constraints, as the
>internet has its constraints, as watercolors have their constraints;
>but these constraints still allow a fairly wide berth for stylistic
>approaches and content choices.

++
twhid wrote:
I don't think you can argue with this point (culture critics could
argue i suppose, but we're artists here mostly). Those damn
watercolor paintings! they don't move and their refresh rate is
abysmal! So yeah, every medium has it's constraints. Comparing Java
to Flash is like telling someone who specializes in pencil drawings
that they should use watercolor because it has *color* and her medium
is black and white so it's obviously inferior.

What one chooses to do within the constraints of the medium chosen
for a particular piece is how we tell the good from the bad.

>
>Likewise, it's parochial to say "all Flash art looks the same."
>It's like your grandfather saying, "all that rock & roll noise
>sounds the same!" There are subtle differences within the genre of
>rock & roll that your grandfather either can't discern or doesn't
>value. I should also point out that there is an entire culture of
>Flash-prodigy experimental web designers that visit Rhizome and say,
>"all that net art crap looks the same." But our ideas of
>"legitimate" net art are more "right" than their ideas because...?
>Because Duchamp [mis-]signed a urinal 80 years ago, our predecessors
>agreed that his doing so mattered, and we assented?

++
twhid wrote:
now this is where i will really disagree. the visual has been in the
mainstream of art since at least the 80s. but you'll find more
conceptual art in net art, i agree. why is this? it's because it
suits the medium. the original conceptual artists thought of their
work as *information art*. they reduced their practice down to simply
passing information from artist to viewer and it was a very radical
notion for the time. Passing information between computers is the
essence of the 'Net. no wonder artists use conceptual strategies via
the net.

Artists who are interested primarily in visual aesthetics will find
the constraints of the web unbearable. A computer screen's resolution
is minuscule compared to the infinite resolution of oil paint, or
bronze, or paper, or pencils, or watercolor, etc. If visual
aesthetics are your primary concern, you would be best served by a
medium other than the computer screen. If your primary concern is
passing information to individuals, then the web makes perfect sense.

--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

interesting take on tech from the well-known NYTime's foreign affairs
dude:

from the column:

'Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can
operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will
be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that
Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless,
God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout
history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions
in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without
wires, too."'

overblown hyperbole?

http://nytimes.com/2003/06/29/opinion/29FRIE.html
--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

E-Mail Mob Takes Manhattan

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59297,00.html

from the article:

"The crowd of people was participating in the Mob Project, an
e-mail-driven experiment in organizing groups of people who suddenly
materialize in public places, interact with others according to a
loose script and then dissipate just as suddenly as they appeared. "

and:

"It's hardly even an idea at all: a mob, for no reason. That's it."

guerrilla theater meets smart mobs meets the absurd. brilliant.
--
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

Regarding the Website Unseen
(http://www.mteww.com/websiteunseen/list100.html) opportunity announced
here and elsewhere back in May (for reference:
http://www.mteww.com/cgi/mtaa-rr.pl/twhid/wu_2003.html)

We're pleased to announce that Patrick Lichty will be the proud owner
of "Website Unseen #9. Images From Our Better Days In Hell (30 sec.
loop)"

Thanks to everyone who submitted an offer.

We'll be launching this website unseen on August 16, 2003.

--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

chopping out some of quoft (quoted kruft), comments below:

On Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 03:43 PM, Jim Andrews wrote:
>>
>>
>> LOL, cooperation between Apple and Microsoft. The last time there was
>> cooperation between Apple and Microsoft, Apple took home $150 mil in
>> exchange for Apple bundling IE on every Mac sold (farewell NS...NS/AOL
>> doesn't count).
>
> I still have ns 4.78 on my pc. Because there is some work I like I
> need this browser to view,
> and also to test my work in it, as I do with NS 7.02 and IE 6.
>
>> Mac users have been saddled with a fairly standards
>> compliant, yet feature poor, slow rendering, and buggy browsing
>> experience ever since. IE Javascript and Java integration (not
>> invented at M$) seem to be purposefully hobbled in the Mac version.
>
> "purposefully hobbled"...give your head a shake. it's because the
> person dev-hours that go into
> Mac products produced on the level of a browser engineering project do
> not match the person
> dev-hours that go into a project that has 97% of the market. it is not
> economically feasible to
> put the same number of resources on each project. that is why the Mac
> has been inferior in its
> browsers.

that was his point. the code was there in Windows IE, why not port it
over? luckily we've had Mozilla so OSX has had plenty of good browsers.
IE has been the crappiest browser on OSX since OSX was released, most
of those in the know were using Camino (formerly Chimera) up until
Safari came out.

>
>> Meanwhile lazy web designers cater to M$ specific "features" that lock
>> out alternative platforms.......(gotta stop, now)
>
> who you calling lazy, jack? there are interesting DHTML features in IE
> for the PC that simply
> are not supported via, we might as meaningfully state, the lazy Mac
> developers of IE. It makes
> the same insipid lack of sense. fact is the platforms differ
> substantially in their DHTML
> support and not many of us have the opportunity to test on both
> platforms. so that even
> relatively simple commands like window.open have subtle differences in
> how they react to
> parameters and even the sizes of the openable windows. never mind
> esoteric methods such as
> innerHTML. i go where my imagination leads me, mainly. i have no
> devotion to standards in art
> or technology. art is invisible; slips past the borders.
>
>> I don't think that what Apple is doing with Safari can be compared to
>> what M$ wants to do via "browser/OS integration." In terms of it's
>> relationship to the OS, Safari is little more than a replacement for
>> the subpar M$ Mac IE implementation. Apple is saying, "Ok M$, if you
>> aren't going to provide us with a suitable browser, we'll make one
>> ourselves!"
>
> Alternatively, they perhaps both realize that the 'next step' for the
> Mac browser is
> OS-integration that MS is not positioned to accomplish for Apple. Once
> the browser becomes *not*
> a standalone installation but something *meaningfully and usefully*
> part of the OS install, you
> can see the dev initiative falls more to the core OS programmers than
> third party developers
> such as msft'ers.
>

yes but at the same time that Apple is aggressively developing it's own
standalone browser, MS is saying that they are killing ALL standalone
versions of IE! as i've repeated over and over, only the HTML-rendering
and Javascript engines will be integrated into Mac OSX, the Safari
browser is still STANDALONE! this is the *opposite* of what MS is doing
on Windows (tho it seems similar). Hope you got the hundreds of bucks
it'll take you to upgrade to Longhorn (and the hardware to run it)
because that's the only way you will EVER get meaningful new browser
tech on Windows. not to mention waiting until 2005 to get it.

--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>