Colective Art

As the "Internet Gold Rush" draws to an end and media conglomerates struggle to control the information flow circulating on the Net, the destiny of Cyberspace is still placed in the same hands than ten years ago: the netizens'. The Net of portals has not killed the Net of virtual communities.

Cyberspace dwellers get together in encrypted, censorship-proof peer-to-peer networks. Digital parallel universes are ruled jointly by its thousands of residents, and net.artists build metatools of creation which are given to netizens, so that they can generate their own works. As in a huge hive, the five hundred million net surfers in the world work as a group to discard the noise and preserve the precious information. Out of this effort, and with this material, the Art of the Future comes up. From the parallel universes of online video games, occupied by thousands of dwellers distributed all over the world, to the new information economy of the peer-to-peer networks. From collaborative filtering, basis of such crucial projects on the Internet as Google or Slashdot, to the many distributed computation projects following the trail of seti@home.

What influence will have these phenomena and technologies on the development of new ways of expression on the Net? Roberta Bosco and Stephano Caldana, electronic art critics, will present their project Digital Jam: Collective Art Online, a journey through works of art of community construction in the Internet, specially selected for Art Futura 2001. A session in which the net.artists Bernd Holzhausen (Icon Town), Hannes Niepold (Cointel), and Ricardo Iglesias take part. Icontown proves that a project on the Internet may have a continuous evolution in the course of four years. In this city made of pixel buildings carried out by thousands of netizens, there are skyscrapers and houses, igloos and shacks, churches of several denominations and public buildings, and each one has the owner's name and his/her webpage. Everyone can freely use this icons bank although, being a "donation ware" project, you are invited to donate an amount of money or time to an organization helping homeless. Icontown is a virtual city in constant evolution. Participative, multiracial, multicultural and also supportive. Cointel is a non-lineal net comic in constant growth, whose name is made up of 'co' for comic, cosmic and co-operative and 'intel' for intelligence.

The last vignette of the different stories which are being developed is always empty. Users are invited to fill it before being added to the story, where it will remain with the last contributions, so that netizens can vote for the one which will become permanently part of the project. The works ruled out are not deleted, but they are changed into alternative narrative paths which channel the story into other courses, creating a democratic narrative structure which evolves branching out in different directions..