By Ewa Wojtovicz (Extract)
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 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 noticeable transformations wrought by the Internet are mostly visible in the field of online art projects that toy with questions of embodiment, identity, and – last but not least - locality.
Therefore, the 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.
Zygmunt Bauman 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, being local means being excluded and isolated from the mainstream of global life.
According to Arjun Appandurai:
"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."
_Defining the globalization, Appandurai 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 it 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."
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.
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 Virilio, 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."
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 in the sense of 'no crossing.'
That is the whole question of live transmission, global time, near-instantaneous intercommunication."
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. One of them is The Universal Page by Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin which is based on 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.
