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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Spring/Summer 1999, Volume 26, No.1 WWWdotNETdotART Table of Contents • In This Issue • $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart] table of contents 1. In This Issue by Marnie Gillett and Alicia Miller 4. Net Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction by David A. Ross 10. The Virtual Gaze by Reena Jana 14. Public and Private in an Age of Dataveillance by Steve Dietz 18. Vital Signs: Social Exchanges in a Virtual World by Trena Noval 22. Songs to Make Love To: The Web as Narrative by Margaret Crane 26. Faraway and Nearby: The Province of Telepresence by David Hunt 30. Connective Lenses: When Cameras Become Intelligent by David Goldberg 33. Exhibition Review Phenomena: The Poetics of Science The Ansel Adams Center for Photography, SF Review by Steven Jenkins 36. In the Gallery Recent Exhibition at SF Camerawork Archival Quality: Christine Tamblyn's CD-Rom and Installation 42. Books Received and Noted Reviews by Rodrigo Diaz 44. Books Received in this issue This issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts is devoted to exploring the burgeoning new medium of “Net art.” The growth of the Web over the last ten years has been transformative-no social, economic, cultural, or aesthetic realm remains unaffected by this technological innovation. It seems to be, increasingly, all we talk about. The “Information Superhighway” has proved to be, oh so much more. It has changed more than our information access, business practices, and global interconnectivity; it has opened a new philosophical dialogue redefining how we understand our world and our place in it. To this dialogue come artists, who are beginning to investigate the potential of the Web as a new creative space. With each new project, they mine the particular qualities of the Web, developing new paradigms of representation that are original and, as yet, uncharted territory. The essays in this issue attempt to lay a framework for theorizing Net art. David A. Ross examines the nature of the medium and its relationship to earlier technologies that have transformed art practice, and offers the beginning of a list of properties unique to the Web. Reena Jana considers how the computer and the electronic imaging systems it has generated are changing the act of looking. Steve Dietz, Trena Noval, Margaret Crane, and David Hunt each, in turn, take up a different aspect of the Web expanded and exploited by artists working in this medium. And in conclusion, David Goldberg imagines a future beyond the Web, where artists might take us. What arises again and again through these essays are references to the precedent set by photography for electronic imaging systems. Will we someday historicize photography as a proto-medium of the electronic imaging systems brought to us by the computer? It heralded the arrival of the mechanized image, and of technology’s introduction into art practice. (Even before its chemistry was perfected, the camera obscura and camera lucida were longtime artists’ aids). Certainly no medium in the arts has been affected as radically by the arrival of electronic imaging systems as photography. Since the mid-eighties, critical discussions about how these new technologies would transform the medium and whether photography’s “death” was imminent have been at the forefront of the medium’s discourse. But far from bringing about its death, digitization has instead developed and transformed what photography offered us into something new. As the years progress, it is becoming apparent that the digital image has not been photography’s executioner but rather its spawn. Net art is the next generation where we go after the digital frontier has been crossed. In looking at this developing medium, we hope to give some insight into where photography and broader art practice might be heading in the cybernetic age. Marnie Gillett and Alicia Miller home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 1999. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.