Social Media as Art and vs. Art

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Social Media and Digital Identities

• Social Media as Art and vs. Art

• Manthos Santorineos
• Stavroula Zoi

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• The space of the Internet, from its very first days, has been an attractive space for artists. It provided a virgin area of unknown characteristics, dispensable to be discovered, with anticipated adventure and new opportunities, an area that had not been recorded, therefore an open space for a new beginning.

  Artists, professional pioneers as they are (or addicted to the forefront), found interesting the exploration of the Internet and fascinating the ideas of the hidden surprises. To those familiar with technology as an expressive tool, it was the perfect place to develop their art.

  It was a place they could build inexpensively on their own and set their own rules.

  The art that first approached the Internet with significant results was literature to which we owe the term cyberspace. Literature is responsible for the mystification of the new space to an extent that the artists, youth, and people who like adventures, consider it as their own space.

  The first inhabitants of cyberspace originating from the world of art, as well as programmers who considered programming as creation were characterized as Internet artists, and shaped its initial form. Later came web designers, practicing an applied art, and a modern kind of art related mostly with manipulated images, sounds and texts.

  It was a community of cursed, adventurers, explorers, or romantic revolutionaries such as those of the 18 century, in the new American continent that formed the vacant and wild area in a utopian state.

  Gradually the situation changed: Internet space was filled with shops, newspapers, yellow pages, maps, classified or even sexual advertisements. It became everyone’s daily routine.

  On the other hand, visitors could have their own personal space to post artistic pursuits, to display or discuss them.

  Where is the place of the artist in this new situation?  As an animator of visitors through the social web? In the compromise in order to be included to a new populous and commercial Internet? Or in the exploration of virgin areas that are situated on the edge of the Internet?

  This presentation will demonstrate the aforementioned experience and will support the idea that artists need to excess current experience.

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• Full text (PDF) p. 2132-2136

Category:

• Paper