getaway experiment @ artthrob

Marcus Neustetter and my net.art project / turbulence commission circa 2005, getawayexperiment.net, has been written up on the project page for artthrob this month, by their newly appointed new media editor, Chad Rossouw. Link.

First, a congratulations to Chad on his new position – I’ve read some of his writings and know he can be very thoughtful and interesting, and I’m glad to have his expertise covering and furthering new media art in South Africa.

I was admittedly surprised to see getawayexperiment.net reviewed by artthrob (again). Not only is it a relatively older work – by net.art standards, anyhow… although, in fairness, it is currently on web exhibition at Greylock Arts in the states, so I can see why Chad came across it and may have wanted to give it some attention now – but it was also already written about, more extensively, on Artthrob’s project page in Feb 2005, by Carine Zaayman. I know Ed Young may have started this trend when he decided he needed to let SAartsEmerging know how much they now suck after a good first year (Ed maintains this original goodness before the suckiness, and this site was also first more positively covered by Zaayman on the same page as Ed’s review – and also a site I used to be involved with; Linda Stupart’s adjoining bloggy piece, around Art Heat’s conception time, is worth mentioning here, too…), but if it’s not a new work you want to write about – and especially because the work has not changed, as opposed to in Ed’s case – then at least a little nod and link to Carine’s original (and much longer and more positive) review by Chad could have been included (Ed fails here, too; and is less generous than either Chad or Carine; and also oddly claims the site is easy to ignore while simultaneously writing the third artthrob piece about it). They are all in the same publication after all, so an ongoing discussion would be appropriate. (Those are some long sentences there, with lots of parenthetical thoughts in both brackets and dashes. Sorry, that’s just how it goes some times….)

All that being said, I can’t deny that Chad’s criticism has merit. While I stand by the strength of both the concept and its resulting pages for getawayexperiment.net (and Chad seems to like this, too), I think that the lack of a large number of participating artists uploading their own images once the work was launched comes precisely from the fact that the world the piece creates is extremely idiosyncratic – his point. While I don’t generally think this necessarily a bad thing in the art world, this particular piece is meant to be both about participation and empowerment, and so while it represents those concepts well, as an interactive work, it does not initiate them, in the literal sense, as much as it could.

I think the piece, overall, is successful in creating various dialogues around these issues, as is evidenced by these two texts, and another by Eduardo Navas. But I appreciate Chad’s fair review and feedback when it comes to getawayexperiment.net‘s shortcomings, and am looking forward to more of the same from him – whether about my own work, or those of other South African artists.