Ewa Wójtowicz

Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland

2002 (revised 2010)

Translocal Art of the Internet (Or Where Does the Art Happen?)

The global village, the network society - these are the essentials of the current
net culture and its discourse. The Internet-based culture has a global impact,
although its origin is blurred. Is it global or local? Are there any tendencies of
locality visible in the world of net art? The status of net art itself is still unclear.
Undoubtedly, this art generates its own discourse and it’s own online
community, based in the mediated, virtual space. Its nature, as the nature of the
World Wide Web is fluent and unstable. However, the impact done by the Internet
is mostly visible in the field of online art projects that deal with questions of
embodiment, identity, and – last but not least - locality. As the editors of Ars
Electronica’s 2002 edition, devoted to the ‘Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts’,
wrote: „Nobody can withdraw from the globally networked World.”1 Therefore,
artists’ interest in the cultural dimensions of globalization is inevitable. The
Internet offers a new visual language as well as the possibility of feedback which
is inextricably linked with the new ways of artistic collaboration.
First I’m going to introduce terms that may be useful in this paper:
globalization, locality, glocalization and translocality. Of course there are some
other notions, like multiculturalism, homogenization, post-geography, de-
territorialisation2, and so on. The latter was discussed by Marina Gržinić, as “not a
process of erasing territories but first and foremost it is a process of re-
territorialisation: constant canibalisation of old and constant re-invention of new
ones”3. Zygmunt Bauman4 then, argues that the opposite and the inevitable
consequence of globalization is the emergence of locality, as the opposite factor.
While ‘global’ means being capable of directing events, ‘local’ means being
excluded and isolated from the mainstream of global life. As Bauman said, the
“local community” is always created by the opposite notions between ‘here’ and
‘there’ or ‘close’ and ‘far’.
“Add a Friend”

The first approach to creating a network of translocal artistic communication was

visible quite early, in pre-Internet era. In 1984 Kit Galloway and Sherrie
Rabinovitz made their project Electronic Café, based on satellite hook up, as well
as their previous project Hole in Space (1980), which connected New York and
Los Angeles. Media artist and theoretician, Roy Ascott , who talks about shaping
“planetary consciousness” at that time, has created himself a few telematic
projects, like La Plissure du Texte: a planetary Fairy tale (1983) in which 14
places around the world were connected.5 In the 80s, Nam June Paik has made
lots of experiments with telematic connection, to name just a few: Good Morning
Mr Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Mr Kipling (1986) or Wrap Around the World (1988).
The pioneering net art project by Douglas Davis, The World’s First Collaborative
Sentence (1994), was about establishing an online communication that would

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reach over local limitations. However, when the global network of
communication, the overflow of information, and the social, economical and
political problems have made a common landscape of what we may call
‘globalization’ – and art movement was created that was an answer to this
situation.
When Zygmunt Bauman says that we are ‘globalized’, he means shrinking
time and space dimensions. But globalization, as we know, has two sides. What,
at the same time, is a globalization to one group, is a locality for the other. When
one group of people reaches for free information, the other cannot enjoy the
mobility and information access. So, according to Bauman, in the globalized
world, being local means being rather underprivileged. And furthermore, the
immanent part of globalization process is the spatial segregation and social
exclusions, for those who stay local. It happens so, because the centres that are
in power of creating meanings and values are exterritorial nowadays.6 Bauman
also notices that the flow of information is crucial, as sending immaterial
information has divided the pure information itself from its material carrier. That
enabled extremely fast access to information of all kind. The World Wide Web has
ended the ‘travel of information’ because the information doesn’t have to travel
anymore – it’s just accessible (in theory) all over the world at (almost) the same
time. We can say then that the same rule applies to art. Media art, especially
Internet art, doesn’t need expensive travel costs, it can be uploaded on a server
and within minutes it’s potentially accessible for any viewer. (and how to make it
not only potentially accessible but also visible among thousands of others is
another question).
Defining the globalization, Arjun Appadurai, the anthropologist, who often
analyzes his own background, usefully sums up the issue of locality:

“Yet it’s hard to know exactly what locality might mean in a world in which other
places are constantly part of our own worlds. For intellectuals, artists and other
cultural workers, especially in post-collonial contexts, being local – in other
words, imagining and representing the here and now – always encounters a
double challenge. One is the burden of repetition I.e. how to be modern or
contemporary for what always seems like the second time. The other is what I am
calling the anxiety of tradition, i.e. how to be local or regional or national or
otherwise culturally distinctive without always having to work through or rewrite
the cultural, civilizational and historical genius of one’s own specific traditions or
localities. The best imaginative efforts to dispel this anxiety and to re-figure this
burden are necessarily both cultural and political.”7

The next consequence is the translocality, which does not mean a location in a
geographical sense, but rather networked individuals and groups of similarly-
thinking people, the translocal agents existing within the cyberspace.
Translocality means a series individual, local nodes situated within the
geographical and cultural system. Paul Virilio argues that after “the end of
history”, declared by Francis Fukuyama, we can talk about “the end of
geography”8. As physical proximity doesn’t really matter, and we make friends
rather on blogging websites or online communities, the notion of distance

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changes profoundly. Virilio declared then, that the immediate communication
without a physical barrier or a time-related distance, means that the old (dual)
division into ‘here’ and ‘there’ becomes useless9. Of course it is not that simple
as it seems, but very close to that. Bauman says, that this removal of time/spatial
distances is not making the human condition similar but rather biased it. So –
instead of similarities we have rather polarization. According to Appadurai again:

“The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenisation, but

globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenisation
(armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, clothing styles and
the like), which are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to
be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free
enterprise, fundamentalism, etc.”10

Appadurai perceives the contemporary world as a pattern of so-called ethno-

landscapes. They are not the same as spaces we live in, but rather identity-
bound 11. Therefore, the difference he makes between the ‘locality’ and the
‘neighbourhood’ is very important. The neighbourhood then is a social
phenomenon that exists in opposition to another neighbourhoods (ethno-scapes)
and within its structure it is based on social network (the real or the virtual).
Nowadays, when the so-called Web 2.0 has emerged, and the social networking
is something we’ve incorporated into our life, our virtual neighbours might be
miles away, but in terms of common interests, closer than ever. Our ‘friends’ on
MySpace, You Tube, Flickr or any kind of web-based community, make a
translocal, social circle.
Among the implications of the World Wide Web there are changes in the
way art is being created, collected and distributed. The global network includes
one of the significant features: the dislocation and delocalisation of art. Paul
Virilio12, argues that the virtual reality created a delocalized art. According to
Virilio, it is a kind of deconstruction but not only in a Derridian meaning. This
word comes from the latin term “dislocare” and brings the question – to what
extent art can be dislocated and delocalized. The answer to this question leads to
virtual reality. "We have gone from spacial dislocation to the temporal dislocation
that is now underway." – says Virilio.
"Delocalization began, with the easel painting that stepped free of the
cave and the skin to become a displaceable, nomadic object. The delocalization
we're dealing with today is nowhere. Art can be nowhere, it only exists in the
emission and reception of a signal, only in feedback. The art of the virtual age is
an art of feedback." 13
This “nowhere art” refers perfectly to net art, as a purely immaterial and
virtual form of art, based on interactivity, assuming feedback as one of it’s most
vital features. Virilio asks about the presence of contemporary art, pointing out
that there is no simple answer yet. Although the presence of art and its
localization are in jeopardy, the immediacy of contemporary art might be a
good answer. As Virilio emphasizes, we have reached the end of acceleration,
near-instantaneous intercommunication, directness and ubiquity: "Virtuality is
the electromagnetic speed that brings us to the limit of acceleration. It's a barrier

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in the sense of 'no crossing.' That is the whole question of live transmission,
global time, near-instantaneous intercommunication."
Seems like art has entered the phase of globalization. Virilio suggests that
the answer is in the questions that should be asked by artists themselves. The
amount of net art collaborative projects seems to be referring to this subject. Net
art that has emerged in mid-nineties, as so-called ‘art glasnost’ was an artistic
phenomenon, connected with the fall of the iron curtain and the emergence of
the network of communication with a great potential. Net art pioneers started to
create projects that were often about a collaboration and they were curated
independently, making a new art circulation: alternative, and free from local
restrictions. The default function of many Web 2.0 sites: “adding a friend”, has its
roots in the text-based communities of early Internet culture. What was the basis
of the WWW 90s’ hype was the simultaneity of experience. As the Ars
Electronica organizers in 2002 have stated: „In their simultaneity, the triumphal
progress of the World Wide Web together with Glasnost and the fall of the Iron
Curtain once provided an occasion for inspiring visions and utopias. A free and
open society seemed to be achieveable on the basis of technological
infrastructure (collective mind, global village, etc.) and (…) many thought they
held the key to a better future in their hands.”14
One of the numerous projects dealing with that was The Universal Page15
by Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin which is all about collaboration and
assumes co-working with someone who is distant – both geographically and
ideologically. Without physical limitations, artists can cooperate and remain open
for the endless possibilities that may result from this collaboration. But any
Internet project can be translocal in this meaning. The famous project Agatha
Appears (1997) by net art pioneer Olia Lialina, is based on a very simple idea. It’s
narrative elements are about a girl named Agatha, trying to teleport herself, but
the important thing happens in the structure of the work. Its networked structure
does not bound the artwork to a physical location. Each file is located on another
server. Each one of the servers is in a different physical location which makes the
viewer not only navigating the project in its narration but also making an
unconscious travel around the world. This work is purely translocal then, existing
in a gallery that is open all the time and available from every (connected) place
on earth.

The Centre Is Somewhere Else

The social networking enables communication on many levels – we can share

multimedia files of all kind, of only the data are well compressed. Reaching back
to the early days of Internet, when the communication was mostly text-based, we
can point at Nettime16, as the good example of translocal artistic community. It
consists of several platforms, each one attracting people, depending on the
language and local culture. There are seven mailing lists: 2 English (moderated
and unmoderated one) – which have international impact, as well as locally-
oriented: the Dutch, French, Romanian, Spanish/Portuguese and Chinese one.
The latest one is especially significant, regarding the limits of free speech and
Internet access in China. Nettime was the spot where net.art community has

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met in mid-nineties and developed its activity. This example shows that within
the global network a new culture has emerged, and it’s the cyber culture and all
its consequences. The emergent net art is one of them. Soon it became clear that
the centre of its art is somewhere else than the acknowledged Western centres of
art and culture. The American new media curator and theoretician, Steve Dietz,
writes in his call for net art proposals for the Emerging Artists/Emergent Medium
317 event, organised in 2002 by Walker Art Center in Minneapolis : “If the
topology of the network is one of connected nodes, every node is global. Is any
node local? No node is the centre. Is every node is a centre?”
The newly developed diasporic groups of artists included Eastern
Europeans, Asians and South Americans, and many more. However, there was
still no visible centre. The network made the world of new art decentralized.
Apparently a new territory was shaped – where old borders were obsolete and
the new ones were created by language which can make the border of the
greatest significance so far. It refers to the limits drawn by language and specific
local intellectual markets.

”Fast, Cheap and Out of Control”

Those Timothy Druckrey’s words can be related to the numerous “Do-It-Yourself”

initiatives that are being launched all over the world, and are easily accessible.
As Zygmunt Bauman suggests, within the Internet globalization seems to be the
fate of the world. But no one seems to be in control of it. Therefore many
decentralized, local communities are appearing. They are essentially translocal
in nature, concentrating on the local interest groups who are sometimes
dispersed over different regions and countries. It seems quite easy and there are
plenty of manuals in the Internet, explaining the aspiring global-thinkers how to
make a D.I.Y. network. Certainly, most of those advices sound very simple and
are not always that easy to follow as they seem. However, there are successful
examples of the global networking. The information circulates within the global
network, without any control or censorship, and makes a snowball effect
sometimes.
One of the first examples, though not an artwork but a political manifesto is the
website of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. Their online activity has
caused a worldwide discussion and made the Zapatistas visible on the world
arena of alternative movements and initiatives. Another example of the
importance of the Internet is a Freenet18 project by Ian Clarke, making the control
of information and communication impossible. This is one of the numerous
attempts to make the Internet the field of a struggle, the place of the
confrontation. Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of
communication over the Internet. As its creators ensure:

“Freenet is an open, democratic system which cannot be controlled by any one

person, not even its creators. It was originally designed by Ian Clarke and is being
implemented on the open-source model by a number of volunteers. “19

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It is designed to let any user have access to any kind of information that can be
published and viewed. It is, to make it simple, a large-scale, peer-to-peer
network, out of any control and uncensored. Although this project may seem
utopian, the Freenet is existing successfully and yet it’s too early to establish its
full impact on the World Wide Web.
The issue of access is vital in this context, and we can recall Jeremy
Rifkin’s theory20 for a further reference. Some of the projects assume that the
web would be for the underdeveloped countries a gate to the most important
thing these days – the information. In that sense border means exclusion,
because those who are excluded from the flow of information are also isolated
and their voices will not be heard.
There is a Tuesday Afternoon21 project (currently offline) by Trebor Scholz
and Carol Flax that analyses the issue of individually experienced border
crossing, while the border can be situated anywhere. While border-crossing is
easy for global capital, the borders are tightened against unwanted migration.
The project is easy-accessible and interactive in the game-like way.
For those, there is a net art project by Heath Bunting BorderXing22 (2002).
It is about crossing state borders in Europe illegally, as the artists have made a
documentation of their routes and ideas how to cross the borders in more than
20 points, mostly through some mountains, like between France and Spain. To
quote Rachel Greene: “Bunting’s access policy showed bias against private
consumption by users outside social spaces or oppressed political contexts. 23”
What the artists do is preventing everyone from the access, just like not
everyone can gain access to the ‘better world’. As the Tate Modern warns:

“The website is not available to everyone who has an Internet connection. People
wishing to view the website must physically travel to one of the listed designated
locations, or apply to become an authorised client themselves. The project
intends a reversal of the way that borders restrict movement and challenge the
supposed liberties that accompany the concept of the Internet as a borderless
space.”24

This project is political in a way, but some of the translocal projects awarded in
the Emergent Artists’ event are more into the re-thinking of geography. The
mentioned above tsunamii.net (Charles Lim Yi Yong and Woon Tien Wei, both
from Singapore) project alpha 3.8 (2001) is about a translocal walk, done in the
physical space, from Singapore to Malaysia. It is currently offline. They use GPS
(Global Positioning System) to walk from one point to another and the GPS traces
their location, so different websites are loaded “according to walker’s particular
position”25. Their later work alpha 3.4 (2002) was done for the previous edition of
XI Documenta and involved a walk from Kiel to Kassel. In Kiel there was the main
server of Documenta, and Kassel is of course the city where this famous
exhibition takes place. In this project we can see the mixed media – not only the
Internet, but another communication system, which moves the problem closer to
mobile networks. Another travel-based project was Platfrom by Rachel Baker
(2002) which was about travelling by train from Paris to London and the artist has
designed a system that enabled train passengers to write their own stories and

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then text then by SMS. Then the common experience of travelling was a multi-
user experience, making kind of a database, that could be accessed by anyone
with a mobile phone. That of course moves us from cable connection to wireless,
mobile networks.

Translocality

“-What is your heritage? -It’s a mongrel.”26 - This was the answer given by
Graham Harwood of Mongrel27 artictic collective and it could be referred to the
issue of translocality. This group creates hybrid projects, like Colour Separation
(1997), Uncomfortable Proximity (2000), or Nine(9) (2003), the latter about so-
called ‘knowledge maps’. The Nine(9) project involved 9 groups of individual
artists to exchange files (textx, images, sounds) and then making the mutual
connection more complicated. The final result was around 729 maps (9
participants, each one with 9 archives, 9 maps per one archive and so on). The
name of the project comes from the year difference in the expected length of
female life in Sweden and Jamaica, which is nine years, according to the
scientists. As Julian Stallabrass says: “So the Net has been a space for contention
between governments, corporations and activists (in marked contrast to the
often acquiescent or cynical conditions of the offline art world) artists have
regularly made pointedly political work.28”
The difference between globality and translocality, already discussed here,
is very important. If the globalization means a transnational flow of global capital,
translocality means rather putting the local issues in the global context and
making it widely accessible. The awareness of the translocality within the
Internet was present among the net artists from the very beginning of the realm.
The translocal thinking, as well as decentralization, were among the most
advantageous features of the cyberculture, noticed in the early days. One of the
net art pioneers, Jodi 29 said in 1998:

“It makes the work stronger that people don’t know who’s behind it. Many people
try to dissect our site and look into the code. Because of the anonymity of our
site they can’t judge us according to our national culture or anything like this. In
fact, Jodi is not part of a culture in a national, geographical sense. I know it
sounds romantic, but there is a cyberspace citizenship. More and more URLs
contain a country code. If there is “.de” for Germany in an address, you place the
site in this national context. We don’t like this. Our work comes from inside the
computer, not from a country. “
Indicating that the cyberspace citizenship really exists, Joan Hemskeerk
and Dirk Paesmans of Jodi, made an important suggestion. After a few years from
their statement we can undoubtedly admit that this cyber citizenship really exists
and we are all its citizens.30 At least we can choose to be its citizens. One can
choose a domain with or without a country code, as well as e-mail address.
Therefore one can cover up one’s tracks completely and dissolve in the cyber
community. The Internet, with all its new channels of communication is enforcing
a new concept of citizenship linked to subjective belongings rather that a state.
This is a chance for those artists who want to forget about their nationally-

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oriented problems and free themselves from the unwanted burden of locality.
The citizenship is no longer relevant, also because the citizenship as such used to
be linked to national and local background. Nowadays, as the problems are
translocal, the issue of citizenship is slowly dissolving.
It was important, however, in the pre-Internet projects, like these of
Slovenian art group IRWIN together with NSK (Neue Slovenische Kunst) collective.
The NSK State in Time project was started in 1989 and it was supposed to be, a
purely virtual state, that took no physical territory, but developed a series of
symbols and items, like a flag or its own bureaucracy based on issuing passports.
As Marina Gržinić writes: “Spaces that had always been considered to be out of
the matrix of art and culture, or at the margins of the system, were suddenly
transposed into the centre of the art system. 31” This state, however, was
sometimes materialized in actions, organized in different places, like establishing
its embassies in a private apartment in Moscow, and then in Italy and Croatia.
The real embassies, established in private spaces were the first step to
establishing THE NSK Electronic Embassy project32, which was purely virtual
documentation of the NSK state and its intentionally created utopias. It enabled a
possible global citizenship, through its virtual existence. Everyone could apply for
a passport online, regardless one’s real citizenship. The NSK artists after
establishing their translocal utopian state, have started a series of actions that
involved locality. These were NSK (State) Guard projects in which hired local
soldiers were standing in front of monumental buildings, holding NSK Flag. The
action was repeated in numerous locations all over Europe (Tirana 1998, Prague
and Zagreb 2000, Rome and Austrian Graz 2001, and so on). The real guards of a
virtual state were making the connection between the local and the global
controversies.
The topic of citizenship and its irrelevancy has been significant from the heroic
era of net art. Alexei Shulgin, another net art pioneer, asked in 1998 about his
status in the cyber society, said:
“I feel much more included that before [the internet – TB] When I was just an
artist living in Moscow, whatever I did has always been labeled as “Eastern”,
“Russian”, whatever. All my work was placed in this context. That was really bad
to me, because I never felt that I did something specifically Russian. “33
This is a remark of a definite significance. The Internet might bring the
long-awaited freedom from being labeled. The unwanted context of locality might
be eventually forgotten and left behind. Disposed of the burden of locality, net
art created its own language, in its early phase, mostly based on technology and
its advantages, as well as the issues developed by the appearance of the world
wide network. All the well-known features of the net art, like interactivity and the
wide access, have changed the reception of art and opened new possibilities.
Therefore, a juxtaposition of some kind takes place. Those, who want it –
step up, build the open access networks and speak about their local matters.
Another – neglect their national heritage and choose to be mongrels in the global
network. One can choose between those attitudes, depending on one’s vantage
point. Everybody is present there – from Zapatistas34 to the defenders of illegal
refugees and immigrants in Europe, from anti-corporate activists to guerilla art
collectives, and the projects vary from complete utopia to the useful know-how

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recipes. However, there is an entrance fee to this world. And it consists of:
knowledge of English, Internet access, having the hardware, software and plug-
ins needed. Therefore, mentioning the global access we must always remember
that it refers to some isolated parts of the world while the others won’t have the
chance to participate for a long time.
There are some net art projects referring to some serious issues of locality,
using the global medium, like The DissemiNET35 by Sawad Brooks and Beth
Stryker (1998) who made a collaborative project involving the testimonies of
children, who have disappeared during the civil war in Salvador. Those reports
were provided by a local group Pro Busqueda de los Niños from San Salvador.
The project is regularly updated with remarks of people who have experienced
the problems emerging from the global/local issue.
Another artwork related to the global/local issue is the project Mythic
Hybrid (2002) by Prema Murthy36. She made a research about Asian women
working in hardware factories in Bombay, piecing micro-electronics together. As
the artist explains: “They are the ones creating this technology for the West to
use.(…) A lot of these women do not even have running water in their homes,
yet at night they piece together chips. Do they know what they are used for?”37
Today’s net art is not only technology-oriented, as it was in its early
stages. It has also a critical attitude, and one of the examples is the Make-world 38
Festival (2001) by Olia Lialina, called BORDER="0" LOCATION="YES"39. The
terms, coming from coding, are used here within a new context, referring to the
issue of global politics. According to Lialina’s statement: “Make-world is a first of
it's kind project dealing with such different subjects as migration and freedom of
circulation, open source and immaterial labor, tactical media and art in
networking environments. (…) the festival aims to track new forms of
subjectivity carried out by current modifications of the world; which until recently
were characterized as "infotization", "digitization" and "globalization". The more
these buzzwords loose their glamour, the more important it is to discuss the role
borders play, and question what restricted and unrestricted locality, mobility and
freedom of movement may mean. Global processes are running out of time and
space. Facing the end of the end, everything - what might happen or has to be
done - starts from scratch. And this new beginning embraces much more than
ever before. It's time to scroll: to look ahead and behind, to step to the side, to
think fast forward.“40
In the raise of a new global sovereignty, and in the decline of national-
based citizenship, net art attempts to illuminate the problems, changes and
challenges of the globalization. The critical endeavours are generated by artists
who understand the possibilities offered by the global medium.
One of the projects dealing with it was net.flag by Mark Napier (2002). As the
artist explains, the project “appropriates the visual language of international
flags to create a ‘soft’ flag that can be altered by anyone that visits it” 41. The
constant changing flag is relating to the fact that the web citizens, or ‘netizens’
make communities that are shaped according to the social topography of the
Internet, but they are also highly personalized. Does the post-geographic world
of the Internet still need an emblem like a flag – we might ask. In my opinion, the

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point is not about creating this flag and have it done, but rather in the endless
possibilities of changing it.
However, it is not only that simple, and not always optimistic. Art was not
only in power to create alternative platforms of communication and collaboration.
It was also endangered in its content by what happened in the ‘outside world’ of
politics. The editors of Ars Electronica 2002 also paid attention to what happens
when art becomes a mirror of global conflicts, or even a scene of it. Actually, it
was important – lets see the case of the famous Wolfgang Staehle’s Untitled
(2001) that was supposed to be a webcam stream, relating to the history of
landscape painting, rather that something else. It was showing 3 locations (a
castle in Germany, TV Tower in Berlin and Manhattan skyline) in the Postmasters
Gallery in September 2001. On September 11, the terrorists’ attack and the fall of
the Twin Towers was documented in this artwork. As the critics noticed: „The
landscape painting became a history painting”42. So, there was no escape from
the impact of global conflicts.

Translocal schizophrenia?

The problem of translocality’s delicate balance between being a uniting power

and a temporary fashionable trend, can be seen also in the offline art world. This
year’s Venice Biennial has shown an African Pavillion under the title Check List-
Luanda Pop curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami, presenting a great
scope of artists, who, sometimes not actually living in Africa, use this background
and discuss it in their works. This notion was seen previously, in the Biennial of
1999, curated by Harald Szeemann, who has presented Chinese art in a very
broad scope again. However even then, as Georg Schoellhammer, noticed:
“Critical voices are being raised in opposition to this new idea of world art of the
hybrid”43. Why is that so? Apparently it’s the problem of being glocal. The
question that Schoellhammer asked in 1999 is still open: “Can local potential still
be seen at all after being transported into the exhibition and art industry of the
western metropolis?44” I would add another question to that: How can we avoid
perceiving this ‘glocal’ art as another series of something as brief and
ephemerical as TV news? Lots of this year’s presentations was even too local
(The Nicaraguan participation by Ernesto Salmeron or the skull-bouncing video by
Paolo Canevari, both in the exhibition in Arsenale). And the digital media seemed
to be the low-budget medium used by those who cannot afford expensive
transport of massive items. The pavilion of Central Asia countries, showing young
artists using digital media under the common name of Muzykstan or the
purposely chosen name for the Romanian presentation: “Low-budget
monuments” may confirm that. The Polish participation of Venice Biennial in
2007, non-digital and so strongly material seemed to be struggling with the
burden of locality as well, by using a skeleton of a modernistic building and
putting it inside the pavilion. The structure of this building was then put under
pressure and deconstruction. As Marina Gržinić has noticed: “Eastern Europe
functions like a symptom of the highly developed West, especially in terms of
media ans avant-garde art strategies. If one observes the parallells between East
and West, then one finds in eastern European media and art production

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important examples of a perverted and/or symptomatic logic with regard to
western strategies and visual representations which are tied with each other in
various ways”45.
There are great expectations aroused by the developed globalizing trends
in the art world, however that there are also some anxieties. As British net artist
Jess Loseby argues, speaking of identity and locality:

“In the beginning of net art there seemed to be this conscious determination that
art should not have any connection with our 'real' lives. I feel this has produced
what could be described as a translocal schizophrenia, a duality between the
artists 'real' lives and their 'virtual' locality and artworks.”46

This attitude may lead to such a schizophrenic feeling indeed. However, this
duality has made an impact on the artistic awareness, as it opened the gate to
many new issues and gave a new perspective for the old ones. Marina Gržinić
again, notices: “The Internet is the purest sign of this process of flexible
accumulation. It started as a territory without borders, without restriction; but
today formal legislative and economic regulations are transforming the internet
into a new territory with old mechanisms of control, distribution of power and
ways of accessing it, colonizing, controlling it daily, by computer corporations,
multinational banking, systems ans investigative federal agencies. (…)
Everything and everybody can be transformed into a new territory and can
become part of the re-territorialisation proess.47”
This is all about post-geography and translocality – states that may be
confusing for us, but they are a part of our life and they make an impact on the
world of art as well. As the Internet continues to be an environment where the
distances are shrinking and disappearing, the space is transformed and the art
can be delocalized. As Paul Virilio says:

“The delocalization we're dealing with today is nowhere. Art can be nowhere, it
only exists in the emission and reception of a signal, only in feedback. The art of
the virtual age is an art of feedback.48

This feedback can be differentiated – from emerging alternative communities to

net art’s presence in the mediated environment of digital networks. Net art and
its community are both global and local. As a result, there are benefits from both
sources. It is global because of the medium. It’s local because of the diversity of
participants’ voices , decentralized and highly individual. It is physically
delocalized but its impact is translocal.
Despite the presence of the utopian visions which embodied the idealism
of a new world order, its identity is globally available but locally-oriented.
Whether we want it or not. Where is the place of art then? “The art happens
here” – states the early work of New York’s artistic group MTAA. In between. In
communication. In the time-based process.

11
1
UNPLUGGED. Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts. Ars Electronica 2002, (ed.) Gerfried Stocker,
Christie Schöpf, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, p. 12.
2
See: Marina Gržinić, Situated Contemporary Art Practices. Art Theory and Activism from (the East
of) Europe. Ljubljana – Frankfurt am Main 2004. Založba ZRC Publishing, Revolver – Archiv für
Aktuelle Kunst, pp. 43-45.
3
ibid. p. 44.
4
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization, Polity Press, 1998; Polish edition: Zygmunt Bauman,
Globalizacja (transl. by Ewa Klekot), Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 2000.
5
See: Roy Ascott, Planetary Technoethics: Art, technology and Consciousness, „Art Inquiry”, vol. IV
(XIII), Globalization and Art, Łodź 2002.
6
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalizacja (transl. by Ewa Klekot), PIW, Warszawa 2000, p. 7.
7
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds Volume
1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, and the Polish version: Arjun Appadurai,
Nowoczesność bez granic. Kulturowe wymiary globalizacji, transl. by Zbigniew Pucek, Universitas,
Kraków 2005.
8
Paul Virlio, Un monde surexpose: fin de l’histoire, ou fin de la geographie?, „Le monde
diplomatique”, 08/1997, p. 17. Z. Bauman notices that for the first time the idea of ‘the end of
geography’ was raised by Richard O’Brien in: Global Financial Integration: The/End of Geography,
Chatham House Pinter, London 1992).
9
Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, Semiotext(e), New York 1991, p. 17.
10
Arjun Appadurai “Anxieties of Tradition In The Artscapes of Globalization”, Magazyn Sztuki 23
(3/99) p. 56
11
See: Georg Schoellhammer, Art in the Era of Globalization, [in:] Oliver Ressler (ed.) The global
500, Edtion Selene, 1999.
12
http://www.magazynsztuki.home.pl/globalizacja/virilio_david/virilio_davis.htm "The Dark Spot of
Art" - Catherine David interviews Paul Virilio (currently offline 16.10.2010).
13
ibid.
14
UNPLUGGED. Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts. Ars Electronica 2002, (ed.) Gerfried Stocker,
Christie Schöpf, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, p. 13.
15
http://universalpage.org (16.10.2010).
16
http://www.nettime.org (16.10.2010).
17
The nominated works were: alpha 3.8 by tsunamii.net (Singapore), PD Pal by Scott Paterson and
Marina Zurkov and Translation Map by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks.
18
http://freenet.sourceforge.net (16.10.2010).
19
http://freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/WebHome (16.10.2010).
20
See: Jeremy Rifkin, The Age Of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a
Paid-For Experience, Putnam Publishing Group, New York 2000.
21
http://www.arts.arizona.edu/boundaries/ (curently offline: 16.10.2010).
22
Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, BorderXing (2002), commissioned by Tate Modern, online:
http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/borderxing/ (16.10.2010).
23
Rachel Greene, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson, London & New York 2004, p. 178.
24
http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/borderxing/ (16.10.2010).
25
Rachel Greene, ibid. p. 177.
26
Readme! By Nettime, Autonomedia 1999: Nettime/Local, p. 306. Interview with Harwood and
Matsuko of Mongrel, 1998.
27
http://www.mongrel.org.uk (16.10.2010).
28
Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing,
London 2003, p. 86.
29
Readme! By Nettime, Autonomedia 1999: Nettime/Art, p. 233
30
Assuming that the term ‘citizenship’ is relevant at all.
31
Marina Gržinić, Situated Contemporary Art Practices. Art Theory and Activism from (the East of)
Europe. Ljubljana – Frankfurt am Main 2004. Založba ZRC Publishing, Revolver – Archiv für Aktuelle
Kunst, p. 13.
32
http://www.ljudmila.org/embassy (16.10.2010).
33
ibid.
34
See: Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art. The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing,
London 2003, pp.82-105.
35
http://disseminet.walkerart.org (16.10.2010).
36
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2171 (16.10.2010).
37
ibid.
38
"make world" is a Unix command used to completely update an operating system. It's designed
to follow the latest developments once local sources are synchronized. Typing "make world" in the
command line initiates a rebuilding and renewal of the whole system while it's running – from
make-world.org
39
http://make-world.org ((16.10.2010).
40
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2859 ((16.10.2010).
41
Mark Napier, NET.FLAG, in: UNPLUGGED… pp. 360-361,
42
Rachel Greene, op.cit. p. 173.
43
Georg Schoellhammer, Art in the Era of Globalization… ibid.
44
ibid.
45
Marina Gržinić, text edited by Christian Hoeller translocation (new) media/art, „springerin” 1/99,
Wien.
46
http://www.artsnet.org.uk/pages/interviewjessloseby.html (currently offline: (16.10.2010).
47
Marina Gržinić, Situated Contemporary Art Practices… ibid. p.44-45.
48
Virilio, ibid.