RE: nettime: net.art and art on the net

[Olia Lialina <olialia@cityline.ru>]

dear j.
thank you for your response and nice interview with jodi.
Yours piece and rachel-n-alexei talk brought a new sense to this discussion.

The connection with video art, well, I don't really care.
Video has never had the potential the net has.

 its very fashionable and easy to compare different medias in nets favor. i dont want to defend video and 
dont have enough experience, but, i repeat myself, it depends upon who uses video or net. i think in one's hands video camera can obtain powerful communicative value, in other's - net dies having no chance to overcome home video barrier


 RealVideo
might finally put an end to this in the future, but we don't know how 
the Internet will develop from the top down (restructuring I refer to).


real video itself and other formats (quick movie, for example) which translate other arts is not a point of discussion for me (but i'll be glad to hear another point of view). they are not real expression, may be could only play a role of words in your net sentence. To take them seriously is the same as to shoot a book page by page, paragraph after paragraph, if book is  with pictures, picture after picture, and after offer it as screen version of a novel.

This is enough about the 'normal' artworld and net.art I think. 
Leaves me with a question towards the net.art group that has been 
bothering me for a while. How can you call your group by this name?


but, its a mistake. where is no such a huge  group looking for name and group identification. 
where are people who work together as well as separately. its more like community (i know several ones) of artists who support  each other or simply communicate.
         i know very well one sad example of misunderstanding. it happened in the end of 80s when russian experimental film community (around ten artists from Moscow and Leningrad) was taken by society (by critics, theoreticians) as an art group. They worked in different aesthetics, they appeal to different traditions  but it was more easy and actual (peak of perestroika) to search them as a group of new artists, who all work apart from state, all shoot on 16mm (not 35), all have no cinematography education and publish one zine CINE FANTOM and so on... As the result, all they got was a lot of researches of word CINE FANTOM and long articles about the idea of notion  "russian exp. film". they became victims of social  interest to a group.
i mean,
 1.if you have nothing to manifest together on aesthetic level there is no sense and even dangerous to appear as a group.
 2.great number of definitions to net art reminds me all these unsuccessful attempts to identify a table instead of people speaking around it. 

There are many outside your group that work
in the net, in similar ways.

sure, fortunately, and not only in similar

olia
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