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(Recommended Citation)
Abstract
Communication is one of the principle aspects of artistic creation on the Internet and it also characterizes that medium. This text focuses on the creation of social networks on the Internet as an artistic resource and practice1, providing an overview of how these communication platforms have evolved and the resources that were determining factors in that process. Centred on initiatives arising in Spain, it examines creations from the early days of the Internet (late 1994) until the present (October 2006).
An analysis will be made of communication platforms (decentralized alternative channels) constructed by artists or for artistic projects using their resources and tools. It will take a chronological look at different projects related to user networks that have developed along with the Internet, from BBSs to the Semantic Web. Given that their primary purpose is based on creating social communication networks, those projects have a large social component, fostering the use of resources that make users the main producers and managers of information. Communication and collective creation, characterized by the simultaneous action of different users in real time, stand out as the protagonists of these artistic events.
Two different periods have been defined: the first, where the prevailing concept was that of archives and globalized access to information (E-lists, E-zines, and directories); and the second, where what predominates are collective creation, remixing, and classifying information so that it can be recovered and subsequently re-used (folksonomies, blogs, and wikis). Both periods include the idea of an archive where community contributions are gathered and classified. In order to gain a better understanding of the classification concept inherent to the idea of archives, we will review different attempts at order throughout human history.
In his essay The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Michel Foucault establishes three significant phases. The first is based on the idea of similarities (as exemplified by the figure of Don Quixote). The second responds to the Classical conception (until the 18th century) that posed an artificial, unique and unchanging order characterized by identities and differences, which introduced the possibility (it’s just a matter of time) of gathering all human knowledge into one room. Different thinkers as of the 19th century have contributed to the breakdown of the Classical model rooted in Cartesian rationality: Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution; Karl Marx and historical materialism and Marxist economics; Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; and Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. Foucault mentions a third stage, comprising two ways of constructing natural history. In the first, time “draws a line perfecting the set of a classification table”, a sort of memory built piece by piece that ensures continuity (fossil: stable set). The second is constructed out of cases that together form a continuous network of species. That continuity is not assured by memory but rather by a project (monster: emerging set). Foucault demands a place for aberrations, given that, in his opinion, that is where differences emerge.
This double conception of evolution comprised by the figures of fossils (the idea of continuity, memory) and monsters (the idea of aberrations as an element allowing for emergence) can be applied to the two primary models of virtual communities: the first, where the idea of archives is foremost (E-lists, E-zines, and directories) which suggests the continuity of a linear, fixed, and immutable history; and the second, represented by monsters, something mutable, infinite, and emergent. This second idea places us in what is known as Web 2.0, in the construction of archives and social hierarchies of knowledge that attempt to solve problems like information overload and its heterogeneous character.