| Why is it still easier to get an entire museum collection on the Internet than to get a single work of Internet-based Art in a museum space? As with the nature of this question, both aspects have to be taken into account: the field of Internet-based Art with its characteristics and proponents, as well as the mechanisms that allow institutions to filter what the public at large understands to be art. The book “Content | Form | Im-material” analyses how artistic creation on—and based upon—the Internet and the processes of its re-formulation in the real space can be developed in order to find appropriate presentational modes, suitable for both sides—the Internet and the art world—in favour of interdisciplinary discourse. It also represents a synopsis of the activities of the art collective CONT3XT.NET over the past five years, since it was founded in Vienna in early 2006 by Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Birgit Rinagl and Franz Thalmair. Programmatically, this group of artists, curators and authors—their different roles and functions sometimes regarded strictly, sometimes as a fluid continuum—work at the basis of contemporary visual, textual and networked practices. Always starting from the idea of the context as the most indecisive and variable but relevant constraint of any situation, the collective analyses the spatial, temporal, discursive as well as the institutional framework that conceptual artistic practices are rooted in today. Here the main point of interest is the exploration of creative territories shifting between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ as well as between the dimensions of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the field of art. This book can be read as a loose documentation of projects as well as a screenshot of tendencies that have emerged and disappeared within the past few years. Anyhow, it is a protocol of workflows concerned with matters of content, form and im-material. |
