This paper considers some important precursory events in the formative history of Australian media arts. These events have anticipated the post-object, serial conception of arts practice that Nicholas Bourriaud has called relational aesthetics. Relational aesthetics interpret both artwork and audience in differential, highly idiosyncratic ways; ways that have become important to our contemporary vocabulary of interactive, immersive and interfaced art. This paper will consider the ways in which the concept of the network was important to artists such as Philip Brophy & Tsk-tsk-tsk in the early 1980s. It will also explore related notions of “audience manipulation” in the work of Martine Corompt.

Anna Munster & Geert Lovink - Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not

In this essay Lovink and Munster set forward a number of proposals for a distributed aesthetics. If new media artistic practice and aesthetic experience were most often characterised by recourse to computational culture, then distributed aesthetics is dominated by networks. Networked media and technologies help to disperse experience so that we never seem to be having our experiences in the one place anymore. However, the authors suggest, most of the images and rhetoric attempting to characterise this distributed experience are drawn from the cartographic traditions of geographic information systems and/or conceptions of biological networking and growth. These do not assist in coming to terms with the specifically social aspects of online networking. The authors speculate that a distributed aesthetics must take into account the collective and personal 'aesthesia' of online networks - the experience of labouring towards new forms of social collectivity that produces not only euphoria but also boredom and frustration.

Gregory Turner-Rahman - Sharing Styles: New Media, Creative Communities and the Evidence of an Open Source Design Movement

This article derives from an ethnographic study of online creative communities and, more specifically, it explores the sharing of resources and knowledge in design culture websites. Design culture encompasses a number of creative disciplines - Web design, graphic design, industrial design, architecture, fashion, filmmaking and even music – and is marked by the production and consumption of exploratory interdisciplinary work intended for others in the community and not for broader corporate commercial application. Design culture websites often provide links to inspirational projects, resources, tools, how-to discussions, communal projects and small-scale e-commerce sites targeting other designers.

This article argues that design culture websites are fertile grounds for cross-disciplinary dialogue and interdisciplinary production. More importantly, one could argue that the websites provide evidence of a reputation-based system of knowledge and resource distribution roughly akin to open source software development allowing for creative cultural production to grow outside the commercial realm. This amounts to an online open source design culture that stands apart from traditional design practices and forces an expansion of our notion of a cultural economy. The analysis also reveals the dialectic of corporate control and the Internet’s oft-touted freedoms playing out not only in the community sites but in the work as well.

Mark Amerika - Excerpts From‘Portrait Of The VJ’

In this experimental artist essay on VJ practice and theory, the author generates an improvisational writing style that spontaneously theorises on the interrelationships between a poetically engaged VJ style, Happenings, the beatnik counter-culture, creative writing, and consciousness studies. Locating the VJ as a distributed media fiction, the author explores the potential applications of contemporary remixology to pseudo-autobiographical fiction, personal memoir, digital poetics, and network infused language art.

Simon Biggs - Multiple Perspectives / Multiple Readings

People experience things from their own physical point of view. What they see is usually a function of where they are and what physical attitude they adopt relative to the subject. With augmented vision (periscopes, mirrors, remote cameras, etc) we are able to see things from places where we are not present. With time-shifting technologies, such as the video recorder, we can also see things from the past; a time and a place we may never have visited.

In recent artistic work I have been exploring the implications of digital technology, interactivity and internet connectivity that allow people to not so much space/time-shift their visual experience of things but rather see what happens when everybody is simultaneously able to see what everybody else can see. This is extrapolated through the remote networking of sites that are actual installation spaces; where the physical movements of viewers in the space generate multiple perspectives, linked to other similar sites at remote locations or to other viewers entering the shared data-space through a web based version of the work.

This text explores the processes involved in such a practice and reflects on related questions regarding the non-singularity of being and the sense of self as linked to time and place.

Vince Dziekan - Beyond the Museum Walls : Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic Overlay and Three Movements)

In recognition of digital communication’s profound effects on social relations and institutions, this paper explores the influence of digitisation on our notions of art through the design of its institutions. No longer can the museum, as the primary technology of art, be viewed as just a physical container. With the additional of the hidden infrastructure of electronic and multimedia technologies that are to be found “behind the walls”, as it were, the architectural issues of negotiating spaces and manipulating locative settings for displaying artworks are as much virtual as physical.

As a contribution to the negotiation of a distributed aesthetics, this paper entertains the possibility that transplanting art to the virtual site of the Internet disrupts our understanding of art itself. From presence on the gallery wall to the plane of the screen, if this translation offers an alternative way of seeing, then what does the Web offer to a different apperception of art? How to position the digital in the discourse surrounding art and the role it plays within contemporary cultural practice?

In an attempt to ground these concerns, I will frame the subsequent discussion by focussing my attention upon one particularly representative instance: The National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Gallery of Australian Art; recognising in this localised, site-specific experience a microexample of a much more ubiquitous phenomenon.

Edwina Bartlem - Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics

Although discourses of immersive aesthetics and distributed aesthetics may evoke associations with different media, creative processes, modes of audience engagement and even political ideologies, artists using these aesthetics often share similar interests in transforming and enhancing notions of the body and perception through technological intervention. This paper undertakes a comparison between immersive and distributed aesthetics in relation to Virtual Reality (VR) and Networked Art (net.art), particularly networked installation art. It focuses on the ways in which both VR and networked installations immerse the viewer in states of perceptual and cognitive transition. Central to this article is the argument that VR and net.art are able to generate immersive experiences in the viewer by creating the sensation of being (tele-)present in an electronically mediated environment that is illusionistic and sometimes remote from the physical body of the participant. Furthermore, the immersive and distributed aesthetics generated by specific VR and net.art projects have revolutionary consequences for traditional aesthetic theories of spectatorship and art appreciation that assert the need for critical and physical distance.

Susan Ballard - Entropy and Digital Installation

This paper examines entropy as a process which introduces ideas of distributed materiality to digital installation. Beginning from an analysis of entropy as both force and probability measure within information theory and it’s extension in Ruldof Arnheim’s text ‘Entropy and Art” it develops an argument for the positive rather than
negative forces of entropy. The paper centres on a discussion of two recent works by New Zealand artists Ronnie van Hout (“On the Run”, Wellington City Gallery, NZ, 2004) and Alex Monteith (“Invisible Cities”, Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, Christchurch, NZ, 2004). Ballard suggests that entropy, rather than being a hindrance to understanding or a random chaotic force, discloses a necessary and material politics of noise present in digital installation.

Keith Armstrong - Intimate Transactions: The Evolution of an Ecosophical Networked Practice

Intimate Transactions is a networked interactive installation for two participants located in different geographical locations. During a 30-minute, one-on-one session they individually and collaboratively explore a range of virtual, interactive environments mediated by digital image, sound and haptic feedback. This major work evolved from a single site, non-networked version to a multi-site, server-driven artwork that operates in mixed online/offline modes. In 2005, the work was awarded an Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica and began an international tour of several high profile festivals and arts’ venues. Intimate Transactions is a product of the Transmute Collective (http://www.intimatetransactions.com).

Intimate Transactions networked inter-relational design was inspired by a range of conditions, discourses and practices drawn from scientific and critical ecologies, new media and innovative performance that I collectively name ‘ecosophical praxis’. An inherent part of this approach involves the continual development of contextualizing questions, which in turn mould the work’s practice and presentation. This paper considers the issues and implications of applying this approach during the Intimate Transactions project. The concluding questions are relevant as a guiding method for othercreative practitioners similarly interested in eco-social and eco-political engagement.