I included Mark's Grammatron project in an earlier exhibition, Beyond Interface and Alt-X was a kind of "patron saint" for another exhibition called Digital Documentary. Which is to say that I do think Mark's work is important and emblematic "net work," and I was eager to help support his newest project, PHON:E:ME. The Walker commissioned PHON:E:ME for the reasons we commission any work--to help support an artist's vision and as an example of significant work being done in the field.

One aspect of PHON:E:ME that interests me in particular is its focus on sound. It is true that at least since the Futurists and well before there has been this dream of immersion. As Timothy Druckery has written, "The shift from technologies that enframe experience to technologies that immerse experience is portentious." (Revisioning Technology) I know that Mark is very focused on the collage/re:mix aspect of the project, and Joseph Tabbi and Helen Thorington both write eloquently about this context. For me, however, the synesthesia of interacting with and reading the "shocked" texts while listening to a soundtrack that interweaves what you are reading with what you may have read in other Amerika works with who knows what else shifts toward an immersive experience that is quite compelling.

Is painting one big genre? I work at a self-consciously multidisciplinary--not interdisciplinary--institution. The Walker has departments for visual arts, film/video, and performing arts. One of the interesting debates, at least implicitly, has been whether net art is in some sense another discipline or "just art"--or the stepchild of a particular discipline. I think there are interesting arguments on all sides, but I guess I'm becoming convinced that network practice has distinctive characteristics--to use Antin's phrase--that do set it apart and, I would argue, suggest it is more than the art phenom du jour. It has a future.

If you buy the idea of net art, it's certainly possible to sub-categorize it, but this is a potentially dangerous tendency. As Barnett Newman said, "Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for the birds." Or as I often quote the physicist Freeman Dyson, "The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explored." It's important to follow the artists and exciting to explore what they are creating.

Mark is a very self-conscious artist--as are many net artists--and I think he clearly understands his work as being about "writing practice." And then, having said that, he tries to explode the concept--figuratively and literally. PHON:E:ME is the "sound" opus of a trilogy that he sees as having started with Grammatron--text--and will be continued (completion is hard to imagine with Mark) with a filmic piece.

It is human nature to think categorically, which is part of the reason, I think, that net work is so hard to follow for some. For me, the network emphasizes connections and deemphasizes distinctions. It is often most interesting in the interstices. Digital technologies enable--some might argue incite--the interpenetration of all sorts of boundaries--between private and public, life and art, biological and artificial, close and far, real and virtual. Artists will inevitably use digital media to sketch in the neutral zones of these boundaries, and the Walker is committed to enabling these efforts. So, is Mark's work writing or collage? literature or art? sound or interactivity? design or art? art or technology? fixed or ephemeral? performance or text? filter or noise? author or artist?

Yes.

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