The Network — a challenge in New Media

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Session Title:
  • Exhibition Spaces - Virtual and Real

Presentation Title:
  • The Network — a challenge in New Media

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Abstract:

  • “The Network” is the abbreviation for [NewMediaArtProjectNetwork]||cologne, an experimental project environment for art and new media developed, created, curated and directed by Wilfred Agricola de Cologne (AdC), a multidisciplinary media artist, New Media curator and media art activist from Cologne/Germany. Starting on 1 January 2000 as his big life experiment, he uses the Internet as a tool, as an art medium in its complexity and a platform for creating a new type of art, based on communicating — a big challenge in many concerns, also because its purpose is merely non-commercial, it does not require a membership, registration or password.

    “The Network” represents a hybrid, simultaneously a media art project, a manifestation of philosophical ideas around the themes “memory” and “identity”, a research and curatorial project, a composition of dynamic social contexts in progress, a virtual and physical network on different levels, but also a multi-dimensional event environment organised completely online, however, not institutionally structured or associated, but realised in form of an independent art project. AdC himself is acting as a hybrid of different identities, not just as an artist, but also as the programmer, multimedia developer, curator, director in different functions and other virtual and physical instances of different kind, one might even say, he is representing “the Network” himself, re-creating himself continuously, he exists through others. What is now manifesting itself as “The Network”, was not planned like that. It developed from a small cell through exploring the Internet for what is Internet specifi c in terms of art. One can divide the evolutionary processes abbreviated in three phases, which, however, did not follow one after another in a linear way, but non-linear sometimes parallel, at the same time or temporarily displaced.

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