2003-05-26

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Net Gains :As interactive, computer-based artworks are collected and commissioned, are they losing their edge or gaining an audience?

"The heroic period of Net art was, by default, very near the philosophy of open source," says Cosic, who had long conversations in the mid-1990s with Shulgin, Bunting, and others about Futurism, Situationism, and other manifesto-based movements of the 20th century. "Even though we never gave ourselves the fatal label of avant-garde, we were quite aware of what we were doing," he adds. Cosic announced his "retirement" from publicly making art two and a half years ago, he says, "at a moment when Net art stopped being about inventing and keeping some community going and became much more a career option." So what’s wrong with that? other artists wonder. "There’s the political stance that software should be free or something. I have to pay rent," says Simon. He adds, "I don’t think people value things they get for free, and that bothers me." He does make his source code available for some works, but for others, "it would be like giving away the negatives," he says, comparing it to photography. "It’s a struggle because you want the code to be appreciated in text form, but you need to protect it." Like Simon, Napier points out, "In the long run, I’m interested in people putting these things in their homes." And he must still work as a programmer to make money when commissions are thin. For years he put his art on his Web site, potatoland.org ...