Thoughts on the "net art programme" for AND

As part of AND, four artists were commissioned to create new online work in a programme called From Now On This Blog Is Going To Be

"Freed from obligation of an indefinite commitment, the artists create time-limited ‘fantasy’ blogs that are realized exclusively for the festival dates. The blogs will become a forum for the alternate personas and quirky ideas of the artists. In turn, the commissioned artists act as official festival bloggers in an Abandon Normal Devices style; not conforming to the documentarian image and likely not even covering the festival itself."

Oliver Laric and Guthrie Lonergan also gave interesting presentations at Chameleon during the Liverpool festival this weekend.

I'm interested, broadly speaking, in notions of memetic activity on the web as a sort of "arts participation" and it was great to see this area touched on and showcased as part of the AND festival. It will be interesting to see how successful AND has managed to be in bringing this area of work to the attention of a broader audience.

A really good example of this new-ish artistic practice of observing/commenting on/manipulating memes is Oliver Laric's Versions  from earlier this year (warning/disclaimer - the video in this link contains pornographic images).

The programme for AND, for the most part, is about artists who's practice observes and comments on this phenomena, rather than a new type of participatory art that  uses the ideas, processes and communication methods involved in internet memes/web 2.0-type things as the basis for engaging/interactive/participatory arts projects, although the artists involved's back catalogues do involve some really great projects that have engaged a (relatively closed) group of web-users in creative participatory activity - c.f. Laric's Touch My Body. (In written material the festival audience was invited to start their own festival blog, inspired by the programme of new artists' blogging commissions, but I can't see any mention of this on the AND website - maybe I've missed something?)

Perhaps the challenge for folly's online programme in the future is not just to draw people's attention to artistic activity in this area, but to actually bring experiences of the participatory acts to a broader audience.

A couple of inherent problems in starting with the goal of initiating a participatory arts project in this sphere are that there is generally, within the closed group of individuals already actively and deeply engaged in internet memetics, a negative attitude towards "forced memes", and for the broader audience we'd be aiming to engage, openly labeling as "arts" has the potential to really affect what's happening, how people engage with/respond to it and why.