ICC
Media & Art Square Guide






KNOW
(The Net as a Medium)

Electronic networks are racing forward, and taking our perceptions along with them. Even in the traditional mass-communications industry, CNN, for example, has always placed a premium on this interactivity. Now global weather services are on the horizon ready to deliver local climate forecasts straight to our hard-disks. More and more Net sites are working with Net specific media grammars. Crayon and FEED are two services which select information suited to the user's interest profile and deliver it daily. However, overall, Networks are by and large still grasping in the dark for ways to function as unique communications media. Of course, the media and art square is one such experiment.


LOOK
(The Net as a Telescope/Microscope)

The WWW is still not a daily occurence for most people. It is however an important experiment in distributed information systems. For example, with NetNews, each administrator is repsonsible for their own site. Both producers and consumers of that information are simultaneously accessing the same sites. On the WWW, however, each person in each locale merely makes available certain files for public consumption, and the public accesses them at their leisure. You might compare the relation to that of a shopkeeper and the customers that randomly enter and leave their premises.

One genre which allows us to experience the unique structure of the Web especially well is tele-visual broadcasting, exemplified by Kouichiro ETO's "Peephole." At present there are basically two types of "live broadcast" on the Net. The first attempts to "broadcast" beautiful images, and two good examples are FishCam and BayCam. The second offers a steady stream of images from daily life, which those on the Net can see at their leisure. Well known examples include CoffeeMachine, CokeMachine, and PeepHole. With the former, the result is a pleasing aesthetic experience, largely consistent with the grammar found in most broadcasting to date. The more interesting, however, is surely the latter. For example, with PeepHole, both the observer and observed experience a certain unique tension about who the other will be and when they will appear. Of course, these images are, unlike TV, not always of a perfect world. If someone accesses PeepHole when the research lab it is installed in closed, they will see nothing but a black screen. However, this element of chance is also part of the thrill.

Present Net tele-visual broadcasting is hanging between "broadcast" and "voyeurism." Of course a steady diet of images from daily life can be boring, but by the same turn, a steady diet of TV hype can also be boring. Therefore, doesn't the greater future potential lie somewhere inbetween?




MOVE
(The Net as a Tool)

On the Net, there are some things which you can get your "hands on." For example, using a regular phone line to access the Web you get a peculiar sense of distance perhaps unavailable in the off-line world. On the Net, foreign countries can seem closer than your own. You can find yourself travelling foreign lands in order to arrive next door. In such instances, you could say that you are experiencing a globe unlike any you've seen represented.

There are other, different forms of experiencing Net "tele-presence." Though in physically seperated places, though the mediation of the Net, you can somewhat more literal "hands on" experiences, manipulating Telerobots and Telegardens, for example.

One interesting question about these experiences is whether we are manipulating information, or physical things. Of course, the answer is not either, and both. Simply put, we are living somewhere within a multilayered configuration of material and ideal worlds. In this sense, even Pizza Hut's on-line delivery services take on a certain philosophical aspect.




OPINE
(The Net as Voting Booth)

Within electronic networks exist the atmosphere of streetside cafes of long ago. Whether politics or the arts, a vast breadth of opinions are given free range. For example, at the Social Cafe, from the latest news to entertainment, and everything inbetween is discussed with equal fervor. Of course, a visitor to this site can also search the archive files of past topics--the characteristics of electronic media in full effect.

Vote Link is a site where participants close discussions voting yes, no, or abstaining from joining either side. Of course, the results are posted immediately, and shown to all of the participants.

In contrast to these essentially unbaised electoral expression of group values, Artists Against Racism, and Toyama Prefecture Museum of Modern Art's HomePage of legal petitions take more direct forms of political assertion. As the cost of information transfer continues to fall, and of course with ever easier ways to access, ever greater numbers of voices are coming on-line to make their views felt in the real-time world.




MEET
(The Net as a Place)

Net encounters are quite often the result of relations in the "real" world. Yet with the appearance of the Net, any number of previously inconceiveable communities hae also been born.

For example, in KidSpace, children from around the world gather to paint, make stories, and enjoy themselves. In World Birthday Web, you can find other people who have the same birthday as you do. In the Virtual Press, there is a continually updated, "living" classified advertising section.


There are also a number of experiments in real workshops and working groups on the Net. Some important examples include OTIS and the ArtWire.




CONNECT
(The Net as a metanetwork)

Many people imagine a network as a coagulation of points connected by lines. While that may be close to their physical nature, it belies the fact that when applied to life styles, networks are not about connecting points so much as they are about collaborative groups and people with common interests. Consider the metaphor of electronic mail. It is common practice to send the eaxact same message to many people simultaneously. This is not an extension of the mail that we stick a stamp on and put in a roadside mailbox.

A network is neither a cluster of individual sites, nor as a single entity. The very nature of the Internet is that it is a network of networks. Each is dependent on larger and smaller n, furher iterrelated networks. It is like a 3-dimensional tapestry possible of linking in nearly any direction. It is not only simply meta-networks like The List and the Cyber Cafe Guide, nor is entirely like the interactive TV Net which links outwardly to other, non computer network media. Rather, it is a matter of of how each of these networks can accomodate the functions of each other, and be transformed in the process.




MAKE
(The Network as another world)

Recently "Virtual Reality" has attracted a great deal of attention, as has the attendant dream of photo-realistically precise computer generated worlds. The sites introduced here, however, are not merely trying to correctly represent reality, but rather build worlds unique to the peculiarities of networks in general. Waxweb, for example, is an on-line world built out of a work of electronic cinema. Weaving through a surprizingly multiplicit narrative line, an eloquent application of hyperlinks create a story space for the movie on the Web.

Digital Cities are places where the individuals who choose to live there can built their own houses, from which they access their individual home pages. Here physical distances are superceded for networks which redefine ideas such as urbanity, suburbanity and the neighborhood. From now on, more and more people may come to define their lifestyles in terms of their on-line communities.

The Virtual FlyLab is a site where users are allowed to select eyes, wings and other fly parts, create two flys which can then mate, to then produce a third fly. Through repetitions of this, the user can experience simulated forms of evolution. More than an attempt to develop virtual spaces, FlyLab might be called an attempt at creating virtual time.

In either event, is seems fair to say that a distinctive sense of time and space that exist only on the Web is quietly, certainly expanding all around us.