The work of artists in a databased society: Net.Art as online activism - Features - Internet standards and a Free Society - Excerpt

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Richard Miranda Zuniga

(4.) Nancy Fraser presents the concept of "public arenas of citizen discourse and association" in explaining Jurgen Habermas's theoretical definition of the public sphere in her essay. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A contribution to the critique of Actually Existing Democracy" in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993).

(5.) Allan Sekula. "The Body and the Archive" in The contest of Meaning. ed. Richard Bolton (cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

(6.) Email interview with Brooke Singer, December 2001.

(7.) Much of this description is based on the use and structure of Oracle 81 as presented by Shamkant B. Navathe, Ramez A. Elmasri In Fundamentals of Database Systems and Oracle 81 (Boston, MA: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999).

(8.) "Music Software Users Installed Tracking Program Unknowingly" in The New York Times, January 5, 2002.

(9.) The critical Art Ensemble, The electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994).

(10.) Brooke Singer's project can be found at www.bsing.net.

(11.) Allan Sekula writes, "...this archive of images of the body lies in the fact that by the mid-nineteenth century a single hermeneutic paradigm had gained widespread prestige. This paradigm had two tightly entwined branches, physiognomy and phrenology. Both shared the belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of inner character." Allan Sekula. "The Body and the Archive" in The contest of Meaning. p. 347. Where you may have once been displaced by your image, you may now be displaced by your data.

(12.) Media Technology and Society, page 333.

(13.) With radio Bertolt Brecht"s suggestion for its use for dialogue was ignored: "radio Is one-sided when It should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change the apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes." Bertolt Brecht "'The Radio as an Apparatus of communication" in Radiotext(e), Semiotext(e) S16 (Vol. VI, No. 1, 1993) p. 15. When the world of television heralded the first consumer video equipment, introduced by Sony in the 1960s, media artists and activists immediately sprung upon it. Portable video presented immediacy rare in network television. In the pages of Radical Software and in the alternative movement's 1971 manifesto, "Guerrilla Television." written by Michael Shamberg and Raindance, they outlined their plan to decentralize television so that the medium could be made by as well as for the people. Adopting a sh arply critical relationship to broadcast television, they decided to use video to create an alternative to the aesthetically bankrupt and commercially corrupt broadcast medium. Deirdre Boyle, "A Brief History of American Documentary video" in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (Millerton, NY: Aperture/Bay Area video coalition, 1990), p. 55. Due to the expense of video production and broadcast, such idealization of cable and video has been marginalized to public-access television stations (that now run on badly outdated equipment due to the rise of the corporate cable enterprise). The distribution of independent video productions has also been marginalized to small video banks that must overprice their collections, or independent video rental stores that struggle to survive against the Blockbuster monopoly.