[iDC] Essay: Web 2.0 as a new context for artistic practices

[Juan Martín Prada]

Dear IDCers,

Apologies for cross posting and for this long post.  It is an essay on web 
2.0 and artistic practices  that I presented at "1st Inclusiva-net meeting 
[New art dynamics in Web 2 mode], Medialab-Prado, Madrid, Spain, july, 2007)
http://medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net
Thanks!
best

Juan Martín Prada




"WEB 2.0" AS A NEW CONTEXT FOR ARTISTIC PRACTICES.
Juan Martin Prada

(Paper presented at "1st Inclusiva-net meeting [New art dynamics in Web 2 
mode], Medialab-Prado, Madrid, july, 2007)
http://medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net



1. The inclusive logic of "Web 2.0"


The economic model for what is called "Web 2.0" is based on promoting the 
desire to share and exchange things, an attempt to make profits from the 
voluntary collaboration of its users and its potential for compiling data 
and making them available to the public. The new companies operating on the 
Internet base their role on promoting cooperative communities and managing 
access to the data and files contributed. This business model increasingly 
tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the 
consumer to the product, integrating the user and the files he or she 
contributes into the actual service being offered.

The user and his or her contributions are the main content being distributed 
by networks. They channel and use as an economic force the desire felt by a 
multitude of users to be part of social networks, to share and make public 
their interests, to dialogue, to communicate with others, to express 
themselves publicly, to feel useful, and to cooperate. That is, what is 
exploited (if we can understand something like that happening today in the 
field of networks) is users' capacity to produce sociability and their 
desire to do so. Now the actual user (instead of only his or her needs) is 
the true origin and destination of new technological developments.

The inclusive logic of Web 2.0 is based on an elementary principal: the more 
users there are, the better a given application or social network will be. 
That is, there is a value to volume. The quantitative becomes qualitative in 
this second stage of the Web. And since the quantitative is one of the key 
elements of today's production, it is understandable that the new companies 
on Web 2.0 are striving to generate a need for belonging and participation, 
to stimulate our need to feel tied to a group, a digital community, to 
collaborate and contribute things to share them on the new social networks 
(be they videos, photographs, comments, etc.). One thing we must keep in 
mind is that even those people who do not want to contribute to the 
conformation of these gigantic collective databases will do so collaterally 
by using them, involuntarily increasing the value of those applications 
because the routes they use will be offered as orientative data for other 
users. For example, on many Web sites, once a user has purchased something, 
he or she is offered information about what products other people bought, 
what they were interested in, and so on. The way Web 2.0 works is based on 
managing to add the user to the available information. That is why it has 
been so often said that today, we are all turning into software components 
or "bionic software", and that Web applications "have people inside them". A 
recurring simile is comparing Web 2.0 to the 18th century automaton that 
played chess because a person was hidden inside it[1].

The "input" for the new Web is the users themselves; however, that does not 
mean that there is open possession of the databases they generate. Although 
the majority can be used freely, they are the property of the company that 
manages them, which also holds the rights to how they will be used in 
future. This has led to intense criticism, leading to the inevitable 
development of an intense parallel movement to the one for "free software": 
the movement for "free data".

The fact that the central axis of Web 2.0 today is the production and 
management of social networks proves that it brings together social and 
economic production. Companies on the new Web try to produce social life, 
human relations, in an extremely profitable strategy that does not 
distinguish among the economic, emotional, political and cultural. The 
design of forms of human relations comprises the instrumental base of 
production. The new businesses of today are the new economy of the 
immaterial.

The promotion of collective experiences of users, the enhancement of 
emotional interactions among participants, and making the aggregation of 
information originating in those networks based on affinity groups possible 
has required the development of huge efforts to advance in "social software". 
That refers to software used to manage the needs and potentials of 
aggregating data, exchanges and communicative interactions among users in 
the on-line social networks.

In this respect, identifying art works as "social software", which would 
seem to fit with what we may understand by the term "net.art 2.0", would 
influence the idea that the most committed art practice would aim to 
reconfigure the ways in which personal and social interactions take place on 
today's Internet Web. Of course, many of the principles of what was called 
more or less improperly "Relational aesthetics" are found, in fact, in the 
area of the new networks, one of its best possible fields for future 
development.



2. Power 2.0

With the process of involvement and inclusion of individuals in economic 
production and subjective systems which are part of the Web, the new forms 
of power today are trying to organize our entire lives. In the current 
network society, power blends into life, becoming abstract. It is no longer 
exercised over individuals; instead, it circulates through them (we all more 
or less consciously make it circulate) with the result that it seems logical 
that the most effective devices for the exercise of power are based on 
participatory logic, on flows of social activity.

In contrast to efforts at homogenization, of treating everyone in the same 
way, the economic logic of Web 2.0 is based on differentiating and singling 
out each procedure or allowing each person to use it their own way. The goal 
is for there to be nothing we can be against, by offering a super-abundance 
of free choices and freely taken decisions. There is a proliferation of 
constant strategic games of personal initiatives and freedom. The system 
aims to correspond to the multiplicity of singularities forming the 
connected multitude by forcing the multitude into submission through its 
involuntary conversion into a transmitter of the new forms of power.

However, in this second stage of the Web, we should speak not of power but 
of the relations of power, given that dominion is not a unilateral relation 
here, but rather it operates through power plays that are mobile, unstable, 
based on diffuse circulation strategies and the transmission of individual 
initiatives and freedom.

We could even say that in the context of the new culture of digital 
participation, politics can only be conceived properly as the organization 
of social interactions. Ideally, the most appropriate political model would 
be that inherent to the connected multitude itself, self-organizing its 
interactions in the full exercise of its decision and participation 
possibilities. The autonomy of politics, as a notion that implies separation 
or representativity, would thus no longer have any meaning. This political 
and social model would begin to take form today in those forms of 
organization distributed in networks, in the multiplicity of all the 
connected singularities, characterized by that Spinozan thought, where 
beings are constituted through desire, through the pleasure of being alive.



3. "Amateur" creativity

If we look back in time to the beginning of the Internet network, the 
contents it offered were generated by professional suppliers who 
incorporated a variety of information on their Web sites, and users were 
essentially consumers of that information. On Web 2.0, in contrast, many 
service platforms such as Myspace, Youtube or Flickr, allow their users to 
participate in community, collaborating and sharing files, photographs, 
videos, etc. They even transform and re-edit them (e.g., Jumpcut) in such a 
way that users are no longer mere consumers of information but also 
suppliers of contents. Therefore, ideally, Web 2.0 would be a Web "for" 
users and also generated "by" users, on the basis that any of its services 
improves if more people use it. Essential catalysts of this process are the 
large blogs for uploading photographs and videos, as well as the huge 
development of "do it yourself" platforms proliferating on the Web.

The fact that anyone can be a producer and distributor of visual and 
audiovisual materials of all kinds has led to an unstoppable, intense 
"amateurization" process of the creative practices that statistically 
comprise a significant part of the contents available on-line. This 
"amateurization" is clearly a contrast to the professionalism that 
characterized the 20th century on all levels. In today's world, that former 
concept of a given individual as the exclusive location of "artistic talent" 
and the accompanying suppression of that talent among the "great masses" no 
longer has any meaning. It increasingly belongs to the past, following the 
extreme attenuation of all divisions of work (which Marx saw as the main 
cause of that suppression).

Undeniably, many hopes have always been focused on the conversion of 
consumers into producers of means. For Guy Debord, to cite one example, 
there was no possibility of freedom in the use of time unless one possessed 
modern instruments for constructing everyday life. Only through their use, 
he said, could one progress "from a utopian revolutionary art to an 
experiential revolutionary art"[2]. Hardt and Negri proposed the conversion 
of the multitude into an autonomous agent of production and that could be 
channelled through trying to achieve free access to and control over the 
primary means of biopolitical production, which would also involve the 
production of subjective means. Those are knowledge, information, 
communication, and emotions which certainly constitute the primary elements 
of the production fabric of our time.

An increasingly minor part of aesthetic innovations occur nowadays in a 
professional or industrial environment. Many of those aesthetic innovations 
occur in the "social fabric" formed by users; that is, after industrial 
production[3]. That is why there has been talk of an emerging process of 
"democratization of innovation"[4], or of "open innovation"[5], related to 
the "customer-made" formula. It implies an active connection between 
companies and users in the production of goods and services. What is 
happening is that this way, consumers are becoming producers of certain 
products, which means they are both consumer and producer, giving rise to 
the newly coined term "prosumers".

The contradiction between producers and consumers is certainly not inherent 
to current digital means. And while that is true for creative fields, it is 
even more so in information technology environments. The "blog phenomenon" 
is clearly the best example of the emergence of massive "amateurization" of 
the production of information and opinion. Almost all of the large 
information media include a section for blogs or even what some call 
"citizen journalism" or "participatory journalism". Spaces like Wikinews[6] 
have proliferated, where information and articles are written by readers, 
and they can decide what news they want covered.

However, many people see this growing hegemony of the amateur as a danger, 
considering the cultural model of Web 2.0 to be an "oclocracy"; that is, mob 
rule, one of the specific ways democracy can degenerate[7]. These 
standpoints rest on the suspicion that society, though it has all the media 
at its disposal, has nothing to say, or worse, is "unable to make the 
necessary social use of them"[8]. Faced with these issues, it seems only 
sensible to view the field of participation that was opened by the evolution 
of networks as a horizon full of possibilities for achieving many of the 
social and political objectives that Debord and Enzensberger, among many 
others, set forth decades ago. Moreover, we can say that the Web today may 
have reached a first stage of true fulfilment of its communicative and 
social possibilities, offering us a glimpse of what may someday become 
actual proof of Dan Gillmor's statement that identified "us" with "the 
 media" ("We, the media")[9].

At the political level, the new collaborative paradigm of the second stage 
of the Web protagonized by that connected multitude that expresses itself 
and shares on networks is one of the clearest steps toward the effective 
existence of a social model that considers a "democracy of the multitude" 
(in keeping with the thought of Occam, Marsilius of Padua, or Spinoza, among 
others) as the absolute form of politics. Accepting this standpoint, the 
connected multitude, an infinite multiplicity of active singularities, could 
be considered in its most emancipatory and creative potentials, as the 
origin of a politics not over life but of life, that is, a clear example of 
the introduction of "the power of life"[10] into politics.

The connected multitude poses no threat to individualism, given that 
homogenization is not a part of its constitution. It is a multitude that has 
nothing to do with the concept of "the masses" which played a major part in 
political thought in the past. To the contrary, we should consider its 
presence as our most efficient, promising possibility for resistance in the 
face of attempts at an undifferentiated unification, attempts at the 
destruction of individual singularity that has always been the goal of the 
traditional mass communication media.

However, one inevitably must admit that "amateur" creative production is 
plagued with repetition and imitation, as examples of singularity in that 
milieu are statistically extremely scarce in relation to the number of 
participants. However, behind the repetition and what is of no interest we 
should also be able to see the vitality underlying that show of free 
creation and public sharing, as well as imagining with Blochian hope all 
that it promises. For there is nothing sterile about this intensification of 
creativity on everyone's part; nor about the independence of their 
productions from any professional context of receivers and any compensation 
other than that of making those creations available to the public, free of 
charge.

On the Web, a whole new field of social opportunities is arising from the 
creative and communicative potentials that are taking form in the infinite 
number of social networks and cooperatives that make up Web 2.0. This 
progressive indifferentiation between information transmitters and receivers 
means, above all, that the production of representation and the ordering and 
organization of contents is no longer a monopoly of professionalized 
sectors.

Anthropologically speaking, the most important characteristic of the 
majority of the images and videos we see on photoblogs and videoblogs is 
that they do not depict other, possible worlds or even variations and 
extensions of this one. Instead, the images portray the world we inhabit. 
They are images of our life in this world, life that aims to intensify 
itself through permanent self-representations and visual records of events 
and pleasure. Millions of photographs and videos of all kinds of things and 
moments have escaped from their former privacy in private albums and are now 
available to millions of people. A community is thus created of people 
taking part in a representation that fundamentally is also a reflection of 
themselves.

Each photograph, each video that is uploaded onto the Web is a small sample 
of its authors' lives. In sharing it, they are trying to pass along their 
enthusiasm to others. Their aim, beyond publicly communicating any 
particular experience, may be to feel a certain kind of "communion" with 
many others in the experience they share through that file. For all 
expressions of life, especially all images of pleasure, always seek the 
confirmation of their experience through the figure of the collective, and 
at this time that is completely possible.

In this new context, the most effective criticism can only now be conceived 
in terms of creating something new, as a production of alternative imagined 
realms. Maybe we should even accept that we can now only interpret the world 
by transforming it, recreating it. The clearest foundations for the proposal 
are to be found, without a doubt, in Foucault, for whom political 
resistance, conceptualized only in terms of negation, would represent only a 
minimally effective form. Thus, resistance should be understood as the 
creation of new forms of life, of a new culture, where minorities should 
affirm themselves "not only as far as their identity but also as a creative 
force"[11]. They also propose the development of an alternative ontological 
base, centred and sustained by the multitude's creative and productive 
practices, for its constituting force would be the product of its creative 
imagination, which would configure its own constitution[12].

The development of the participatory possibilities of the Web today has 
certainly facilitated the construction of new circuits of value and meaning 
charged with great creative autonomy and a notable subversive capacity. The 
creative potentials of the diversity of the connected multitude hold great 
potential which is already being activated. And that given the fact that 
almost all offers for participation in the current Web are formed by a 
studied system of economic management. The development of that huge power to 
create and share is incomparably more important in the new stage of the Web 
than anything that business parasites can obtain from it. The possibilities 
of production of differentiation and singularity that appear on the networks 
are much more powerful than the patterns of repetition and imitation of 
stereotypical commercial and professional models which, statistically, 
comprise the majority of contents on those networks.

However, many detractors of Web 2.0 see that interest in other people's 
images, videos, experiences, opinions and private lives as similar to what 
already happened with the "Big Brother" television phenomenon. A certain 
fascination for what is not worth reading, seeing, or hearing, which means 
the Web is being filled with records of completely irrelevant events, 
following the overbearing logic of "you are the information".

What is definitely happening is an abandonment of privacy at all levels, 
perhaps because we are increasingly less able to understand it and value it, 
given that it practically does not exist in our lives. Today the multitude 
of users on the large participatory Web platforms upload videos and 
photographs of their most personal experiences, making them public, showing 
no hesitation but rather enjoyment in giving access to images of their 
private life to anyone who comes across them or looks for them. Perhaps an 
explanation lies in a certain effect of a new stage in the process of 
exteriorization. In the 1960s, McLuhan pointed out that people were 
beginning to wear their brains outside their skulls and their nerves outside 
their skin[13], and subsequently there was an enormous exteriorization of 
memory through the development of personal digital storage systems. Today 
that exteriorization has taken another step, where users store things in 
memory systems they do not even own. That is, the collective memories of the 
large Web 2.0 platforms that have become gigantic files, eliminating any 
relation of necessity or dependence linking privacy and a space that is 
private or with limited access.

A new challenge of the utmost importance in the field of "non-amateur" 
creation is posed by the fact that much of the visual production that is 
enjoyed and shared on the networks is not made by professionals in 
image-making fields. We might say that today one gets a glimpse of what 
Rousseau proposed in his Carta a d'Alembert (1758), where he suggested that 
public festivities replace theatrical performances. "Place a post crowned 
with flowers in the centre of a town square, gather the townspeople, and you 
will have a party. Do something even better: offer the audience as the 
performance; turn them into the actors"[14].



4. Art 2.0?

Admitting that Rousseau's idea fits the present does not mean that the role 
of the artist has dissolved in the infinite stream of unintentionally 
artistic, or purely amateur, images and visual productions. At this point, 
in the field of the networks, the possible differences between "art" and 
"not art" are a matter of nuance in terms of the intensity with which each 
creation reveals and expands upon the essential aspects and potentials of 
living and of the critical consciousness possible in that connected 
multitude.

The most effective artistic thought would not be limited merely to forming 
part of the expression of the vitality of the productive multitude. It would 
also generate the most intense evocations of the infinite wealth of 
differences that form the connected multitude, while also revealing the 
multitude lying beneath each single subject. In this sense, if the on-line 
multitude is formed by infinite subjects that, like atoms, move and find 
each other according to "clinamens that are always untimely and exceptional"[15], 
then perhaps it is an essential mission of artistic practices to show the 
emancipatory potentials that, still dormant, lie beneath the exceptional and 
single nature of those clinamens.

What we could call "art" in the context of Web 2.0 is certainly what most 
reinforces our belief in the potentials of the connected multitude, in its 
possibilities for the free production of critical thought and new life. That 
all means that art, the optimal form of resistance in the context of the new 
networks, would be an extreme herald of the constituting power of the 
multitude. That is, the world that the multitude can build is foreshadowed 
in the best artistic proposals, always manifested from the demands of 
interpretive thought, of critical and meaningful communication. Through the 
most interesting artistic proposals an attempt, at least, would be made at a 
poetic reconfiguration of the social interactions of the connected 
collectives.

Given the above, an essential aspect in assessing the relative interest of 
2.0 creative productions would be the degree of intensity with which the 
creations express and foreshadow a form of "liberated freedom" as opposed to 
freedom as merely a business strategy, which is what the majority of 
"amateur" creative production is subject to. Thus, the success of any given 
artistic proposal in the Web 2.0 context would depend on its capacity to 
evoke in the interior of the singularity of that specific creation not only 
abstract aspects of the life of a global space but above all the tensions of 
renewal and transformation, of critical thought, pleasure, more freedom and 
more singularity that are inherent to the connected multitude.

That means in no case can we conceive of the idea of art on the networks as 
an element transcending life. To the contrary, it must be seen as an element 
able to penetrate life, affirm existence and the power of difference, of the 
exceptional in each of the infinite elements forming the infinity of 
connected lives. At the same time, we must view it as what proves the common 
underlying that whole world of singularities: a need to live more fully, 
with more shared expressions of solidarity, of a life accommodated to others 
not through homogenization but rather through an enjoyment of differences. 
Accumulating evidence of that "common" through the celebration and 
identification of the infinite singularities is, in a way, advancing in a 
form of resistance that foreshadows what is affirmed in the slogan "Another 
world is possible" and which, as Negri said, implies "an exodus toward 
ourselves"[16].



5. Social networks and affectivity

In this second stage of the Web, we see how vital interrelations are fully 
productive economically. A new theory of value must be put into place given 
that the new informational economy, the production of social networks, is 
based on increasingly immaterial work, almost completely based on emotional 
production: on the manipulation and management of emotions and sociality. 
Given that, we can affirm that the nature of production mechanisms of 
collective subjectivity are already intrinsically emotional today. That is 
why, in the emotional application of social relations, the new cultural and 
entertainment industries are expected to possess a greater transformative 
capacity of the social as their major lucrative potential. That is why, to a 
large extent, the artistic projects that explore the world of the social 
networks, the places and the ways that encounters occur, dialogues and 
exchanges on the Internet are fundamentally approximations to the problems 
that arise in relation to the emotional nature of biopolitical production.

It seems almost impossible to question that, in the context of the connected 
society, the possibility of efficient political resistance should be 
approached from the appropriation and recognition of the emancipatory 
potential of the principles that form an essential part of productive 
biopolitical dynamics such as affection, cooperation, and friendship. The 
mission of the new resistance is to rescue them from their domestication by 
companies. That resistance should make the potential they contain for the 
production of a new community clear, to generate an active set-up of the 
principle of the common. And perhaps artistic creation (let's remember that 
traditionally, aesthetic experience has been considered purely emotional) is 
one of the best means for carrying out this rescue.



6. Filtering and "tagging"

Participation and synergy in real time is what this new stage in the Web 
should ideally offer; that is, broadening potentials for acquiring 
knowledge. No one knows everything but everyone, jointly, can know 
everything. An extremely important step forward in collectivized, mutualised 
knowledge. It is the arrival of a stage of broadened "co-intelligence", of 
the reciprocal production of knowledge among infinite persons, of a 
multitudinous cooperative development and of the increasingly open 
possession of knowledge, all channelled through inclusive systems, and not 
designed to prevent anyone from the possibility of contributing. 
Undoubtedly, the potential illuminators of "general intellect"[17] are none 
other than teleology of the commons on linguistic interchange and 
cooperation.

This all leads to constant attempts to apply the free software model to any 
field of creation and knowledge[18] and explorations in relation to 
"Commons-based peer production"[19], are not few in number either. That is, 
the study of modes of production based on the cooperation of autonomous 
agents in coordinating the creative energy of a huge number of persons, in 
which the efforts and pleasure of a multitude of singularities are joined, 
and in which each of its members has different abilities, very different 
knowledge, properties that are added up and creatively complement those of 
others.

More so than in the field of collective creation, the requirements for 
applying these models when the amount of available data of all kinds 
circulating on the Web is so huge make the tasks of tagging, filtering, and 
prioritization of the available information much more crucial. In fact, 
applying the cooperation potential inherent to the system of the connected 
multitude in this direction and specific applications are one of the primary 
operating fundamentals on Web 2.0. We mustn't forget that what can be 
understood as this second stage of the Web consists of "content generated by 
the user" as much as "content filtered by the user"[20]. That is, its 
primary action axis would be the implementation of strategies allowing 
"collective intelligence" to act as a filter and engine for the efficient 
organization of the available information, and that ordering can be useful 
not only for the main flows on the Web but also for more specific, 
particular ones. Going from the task of offering "data" to providing 
"metadata" is a step forward that would also explain the complementarity of 
the concepts of Web 2.0 and semantic Webs, based on the incorporation of all 
kinds of metadata (descriptors, identifiers, etc.)

The essential character on Web 2.0 of activities such as classifying, 
tagging, selecting, voting, scoring, etc. makes data organization methods 
for the culture of the networks one of the areas of greatest interest in 
on-line artistic creation. And of all the paths initiated in the artistic 
themes of data filtering, identification and assessment, those focused on 
"tagging" have generated the greatest interest. Examples of this path are 
some of the initiatives of Les Liens Invisibles and Jonathan Harris, among 
many other authors[21].

Undoubtedly, the relation between images and identifying terms, or "tags", 
is linked in the field of the theory of contemporary art to an old relation 
between image and word, and between art work and title. The problematic 
nature of the relations established between text and image, that were 
essential in conceptual art, have once again been activated by the new 
dynamic of "tagging" as a practice of social organization of the visual 
elements of the culture in which a huge field has opened up for artistic 
reflection.



7. Blog art?

A key element of many blogs is that personal life, information and opinions 
are not separate. One of its most interesting potentials is its capacity to 
create collectivity through resources and positions that in many cases are 
merely autobiographical; that is, through subjectivity expressed, shared, 
and commented on. The blog phenomenon is surely the clearest return to the 
"self" and to subjectivity itself in the field of media, the activation of a 
certain "egology". It is about reclaiming a democratization of the 
possibilities of the expressive "self", of subjectivity made public, that is 
shown and exhibited, as a catalyst of many other internal voices that will 
be encouraged to follow the exercise of a "self", giving public voice to 
personal consciousness that is expressed and investigated, practiced in 
writing, in the collection and interrelation of things and aspects that it 
finds of interest.

Obviously, many of the propositional, creative and expressive aspects of the 
blog phenomenon make many of their authors define their blogs as art works 
in their own right. Of course, many blogs show extremely creative and poetic 
qualities that make them much more than alternative systems for personal and 
interpersonal expression and communication. Actually, the most interesting 
cases are true examples of the possibilities of artistic thought to act in 
the reconfiguration of models for communicative practices and of cultural 
and social criticism of networks. In many of them, we see the huge capacity 
that poetic activities have, through the interpretive demands of art works, 
to effect an intense, efficient criticism of current processes for the 
inclusion of the subject in the society of interconnected media. Of course, 
the perverse irony that characterizes the majority of "blog art" proposals 
actively collaborates in the suspension (and even subversion) of the most 
deeply rooted expectations about the communicative interactions that we 
consider to be informative, normal, or useful in the present field of 
networks. The proposals of blog art also constitute intense questioning of 
whether the world is, as many blogs seems to show in their extreme 
intensification of the presence of an ego, a correlate of what "I perceive", 
"I feel", and "I believe".

Some of the most interesting results so far of "blog art" have emerged from 
projects centred on studying the recording of time innate to blogs. Only 
from the field of artistic propositions could we understand, for example, 
the extreme degree to which life is subject to recorded time in projects 
such as "Obsessive Consumption"[22] by Kate Bingaman (2007) or the work 
titled "Eat 22"[23] by E. Harrinson (2007). These two examples evoke the 
huge set of proposals of blogs taken to the limit which are only 
comprehensible from the perspective of conceptual art. They refer to the 
complexity inherent to the time relationship established among the blog, the 
subject who "posts" something, and the readers, which is none other than 
that relationship of life itself in the shared recording of its passage 
through time. These projects emphasize the fact that we are fundamentally 
shared time (which is exhibited and recorded on media in today's world). Due 
to the above, "blog art" can be said to be an experiment not with a new 
media but rather of the artist in it (while being watched by many others).



8. Artistic practices in the reconfiguration of communicative interactions

Of special value is creativity oriented to the production of cooperative 
devices for activating and developing communities, of means for free 
communication of the parasitic behaviour of companies dominating the Web 
today. In fact, many of the most interesting projects we can identify within 
the broad group of artistic practices are centred on promoting the public 
domain, on how to facilitate the voluntary provision of public goods that 
are communicatively and experientially meaningful.

One of the traditional definitions of artistic creation has been a critical 
experimentation in language or the invention of new languages. Perhaps in 
this sense, many of its still to be revealed capacities will reconfigure 
communicative interactions in the new era of digital political activism. 
That is, provided that it is based on the belief that it is possible to 
solve many of the new social and political problems of new societies through 
developing a different kind of public communication. It is reasonable to 
think that it possesses a hugely valuable capacity to diminish the effects 
of the colonization of communication by economic interests.

And perhaps we can affirm that the role of creation most committed to social 
and political reflection in the new networks resides in its capacity to 
overcome a certain incommunicable character of the battles in the network 
society. There, everything seems to be legitimated on the basis of 
principles such as progress, communication, participation, etc., which seem 
to strangle all types of effective dissention. Perhaps the critical thought 
innate to artistic practices can help us immensely in gaining a better 
understanding of what we can consider as truly social with respect to some 
new technologies and applications that, as in the context of Web 2.0, are 
always presented to us as completely social media.

It is clear in the most interesting proposals of the new "on-line" artistic 
behaviours that art can make part of the information and data circulating on 
the networks not only consumed but also properly situated in relation to 
their existential elements. That is, one of the major commitments of the 
best artistic creations in the context of Web 2.0 would be to design new 
paths for taking the interpretive experience model inherent to artistic 
practices to the field of social and communicative interaction. It behoves 
us to give intensive thought to the possibilities of artistic practices in 
the face of an ecological recomposition of communication.[24] This would be 
a new attempt to overcome the imprisonment in the constant but banal 
communication process inherent in mass media, and also to define that 
refusal to communicate that Theodor Adorno considered as a measure of the 
truth of art works in a cultural system where communication is organized via 
manipulation in order to produce a given effect, where the former would only 
have an alienated existence[25].

Due to the above, it is logical that nowadays there are quite a few artistic 
proposals centred on the ways the new digital social networks function. 
Their intention is to bring to the forefront of public attention the ways 
language and communicative interactions in general can be toyed with. That 
is, showing how the economic appropriation of free communication and the 
desire to cooperate is carried out, offering a poetic rendition of how the 
ideal of interactivity is truncated. We can only imagine that ideal as 
giving oneself linguistically to another, as an exchange of what one does 
not have, that is, what one is. The great challenge of artistic creation 
then is, in the boundary-crossing dynamics of human presences in network 
environments, to build flows of value and meaning independent of the logic 
of markets and corporate interests.

The fact that the most recent artistic proposals on the networks are so 
ironic and critical instead of optimistic is because Web 2.0 has been 
presented to us corporatively as an idyllic field of happiness, joy, 
friendship, sharing, and communication, all increasing endlessly. With 
networks today defined through these principles, there is an assumption of a 
blanket neutral ideology. The most critical of these art works and actions 
oppose the acceptance of that assumption, and will do so repeatedly.  The 
subjects of those art works and actions coincide with specific ways the Web 
2.0 works. Interpreting them demands an interpretive, critical and political 
reflection of the ways the Web works as well as the mediation mechanisms and 
socialization control predisposed by the Web.

It is quite likely that the interpretive values of the new "on-line" 
artistic practices are based on the important possibility of opposing the 
disappearance o fan awareness of reality as a pace full of oppositions and 
frictions. That awareness is becoming increasingly difficult given that 
everything is veiled behind continuous telematics, set out through 
principles and promises always linked to communication that already impedes 
a perception of any contradiction whatsoever.

This attempt would explain that a recurring purpose of artistic practices is 
to reveal what interests are behind those business mediators and how they 
manage to regulate communicative interactions on the networks, in addition 
to merely making them possible.



NOTES


[1] I refer to the false automaton known as "The Turk", built in 1770 by 
Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804).

[2] Guy Debord, "Tesis sobre la revolución cultural", in Textos 
situacionistas sobre arte and urbanismo, La Piqueta, Madrid, 1977, p. 122.

[3] See Johan Söderberg, "Reluctant revolutionaries - the false modesty of 
reformist critics of copyright", [Internet]. Journal of Hyper(+)drome. 
Manifestation. 
<http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html#_ftn16>. 
[Accessed  20 July 2007].

[4] See Erik von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, MIT Press, 2005.

[5] See Henry William Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for 
Creating and Profiting from Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

[6] <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page>. [Accessed 20 July 2007].

[7] See, in relation to these aspects, the book by Andrew Keen The Cult of 
the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, 
Doubleday/Currency, New York, 2007.

[8] Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media", in 
John Thornton Caldwell, Theories of the New Media, The Athlone Press, 
London, 2000. p. 68.

[9] See Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for 
the People, O'Reilly Media, 2004.

[10] According to Roberto Esposito "if, as Deleuze believes, philosophy is 
the practice of creating concepts appropriate to the event affecting and 
transforming us, this is the time to rethink the relationship between 
politics and life in a way that, instead of subjecting life to political 
leadership (which occurred over the last century quite clearly), introduces 
into the power of life into politics". Esposito, Roberto, Biopolítica and 
filosofía, Grama ediciones, Buenos Aires, 2006, p. 17.

[11] See Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, iv, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 
741.

[12] Michael Hardt - Antonio Negri, Imperio, Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, 
Barcelona, 2002, p. 43.

[13] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964.

[14] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carta a d'Alembert, Editorial Tecnos, Madrid, 
1994.

[15] Según Negri, "las multitudes son conjuntos de átomos que se encuentran 
según clinámenes siempre intempestivos and excepcionales". Negri, Antonio, 
"El arte and la cultura en la época del Imperio and en el tiempo de las 
multitudes", [Internet]. Ediciones simbióticas, 2005. :
 <http://www.edicionessimbioticas.info/article.php3?id_article=553>. 
[Accessed  20 July 2007].

[16] Ibid.

[17] See, referring to this concept, the work of Pierre Levy, Aux Origines 
de L'Intelligence Collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace, La 
Decouverte, Paris 1994; of James Surowiecki Cien mejor que uno: La sabiduría 
de la multitud o por qué la mayoría es más inteligente que la minoría, 
Ediciones Urano, Barcelona, 2005; and of J. Heron, Cooperative Inquiry: 
Research into the Human Condition, Sage, Londres, 1996.

[18] This would in fact be one of the basic premises inferred in the 
expression "Free Open Knowledge of Production" (FOKP).

[19] See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production 
Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, 2006.

[20] Ross Dawson, Web 2.0 and user filtered content, [Internet], 9 September 
2006. <http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/Weblog/archives/2006/09/post_2.html>. 
[Accessed 20 July 2007].

[21] Of the many existing proposals, the artwork titled "Subvert" 
<http://www.subvertr.com/de> Les Liens Invisibles may be one of the most 
clearly oriented to politically subvert the relations between image and 
word. The application "10x10T" www.tenbyten.org, designed and developed by 
Jonathan Harris, attempts to represent visually each hour as well as, 
through 100 images and words,   the collective imagination of news at a 
global scale. It would influence more than any other project the 
possibilities of artistic practice as a visualization system of the 
relations of images to news events in the era of globalized communication, 
of the forms of its repetition and dissemination at a global level.

[22] <http://obsessiveconsumption.com/>. [Accessed  20 July 2007].

[23] <http://www.eat22.com/>. [Accessed 20 July 2007].

[24] See, in relation to this idea of an ecological recomposition of 
communication, the interview by Futur Antérieur of Félix Guattari titled 
"Hacia una autopoiética de la comunicación", [Internet]. 
<http://biblioWeb.sindominio.net/telematica/guattari.html>. [Accessed  20 
July 2007].

[25] See Theodor W. Adorno, Teoría Estética, Taurus, Madrid, 1992.