[Kuivila in 1991, courtesy soundartarchive.net]

Sound artist Ron Kuivila was in a panel at V2 during the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000, the other speakers being David Blair (Wax Web) and Martin Berghammer (specialist in games). He had the idea to have a net arts notation festival, and would very much like to see it realised. Somehow in the edit he himself made of the interview (I let people do it together with me usually) an interesting aspect of this was lost, namely that it would be very good to also look at which notations would/do -not- get realised and why. Notation/realisation has a long history in performance and music, and a slightly younger one in the visual arts.

Meeting Frederic Madre was a pleasant surprise. Madre had made himself notorious in a very short time by inventing something called a 'spam engine', to create spam art. These days spam (unsolicited advertising in emails) is annoying. In the nineties, when spam was much less pervasive, it was considered not only rude, but also damaging to the Internet. It takes up massive amounts of bandwidth, disrupting the flow of Internet traffic and increasing costs for providers and users.The controversy around spam was easily abused however, by people who wanted to eradicate voices and expression they did not approve of on online platforms. On the mailing list nettime for example it was used in a disagreement between artists and activist and academic users, about what could and could not be posted.

In the interview Madre explains how he uses spam art as a means to criticize the urge to oversanitize the Internet. Frederic Madre's spam engine and mailing list Palais Tokyo (for which it was most used) are some of the most interesting projects in French net art. Yet Madre also talks about his first years online, between 1992 and 1995, and his stories give another interesting view of how early net culture developed. Today Frederic Madre runs an indie record company, 'Bruit Direct'.  The photo below shows Madre with his youngest son.

RTMark was the forerunner of the Yesmen. We met at Ars Electronica in 1997. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno presented themselves as Ernesto Lucha and Francisco Gerrero, otherwise known as 'Frank and Ernest'. Their main focus was fighting the incredible power of corporations, which have the same rights as citizens in the United States. By removing the unfair protection this gives to corporations RTMark hoped to force them to act more responsibly.

At the time of this interview Steve Dietz was director of new media initiatives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since then Dietz has curated several exhibitions, lectured around the world, and he is currenty artistic director of ZeroOne, an art festival in San Jose California. 'The Walker', as the Walker Art Center is often called in short, was unique for its depth of commitment to multidisciplinary (not interdisciplinary) programming for a large part thanks to Dietz' creative adaptation of his job title of head of new media.

"...the netscene wants to stay ascii..."

Station Rose are Elisa Rose and Gary Danner. They are what could be called a multimedia group, mainly doing live performance online and offline. They have been doing this since 1989. In 1999 it was time to ask them a little bit about their motives and ideas after 10 years of engagement in network culture. .

I met Kathy Rae Huffman for the first time at the Digital Chaos conference in Bath in 1996. This interview is from about two years later, and it was published on nettime and in 'Netzkunst' edited by Verena Kuni in 1998. It is a very interesting interview in that it covers a very long period of time, from the early work Kathy Rae Huffman did as a curator with Bill Viola, to her work with Van Gogh TV at documenta 92, to her online art project Siberian Deal (with Eva Wohlgemut), and her work with the mailinglist for women in new media 'Faces'.

foto: Jan Sprij for V2

In this interview Jeffrey Shaw talks, among other things, about the net.art browser he built for the exhibition Net_Condition in 1999.

Musaic was originally written for the music and new media festival Futuresonic. There it was noticed by Kathleen Forde of the SFMoma who asked whether it could be included in the online sound art exhibition Crossfade, which was a collaboration of three art institutions: ZKM, Walker Art Institute and the SFMoma. Musaic also appeared in Sandbox magazine in New York.

(This image was borrowed from the website visualcomplexity.com, purely for illustration purposes. It shows a screenshot of a software tool "The World of Music, by researchers at Standford, MIT and Yahoo!," which "intends to render the music space in an unprecedented way. This visualization shows 9,276 artists and how they are related to each other.")

Igor Stromajer is a Slovenian artist. I interviewed him in Moscow in 2000. Stromajer talks about how he moved from making art purely for the Web to doing net art performances at the end of the nineties, whereby he would sing or dance the HTML code his website was built from. Nowadays Stromajer mostly does online performances uses robots. Interestingly also his work with robots still shows great sensitivity and the robots are easily given human or emotional traits as they dance, battle or fight for survival.

Prema Murthy is an artist living and working in New York. She is one of the founders of the online performance group Fakeshop. Fakeshop is well known for their performances in which a poetic mix of both on and offline environments created a powerful immersive experience. Other Fakeshop members have been fellow founder Jeff Gompertz, Eugene Thacker and Ricardo Dominguez. The interview concentrates first of all on the effects and experiences of CUseeme performance. After that Prema Murty explains why she left Fakeshop and why she has decided to make a video documentary about women working in computer hardware factories in Asia.

This short but sweet interview about Tanaka's Global String was never published. In this beautiful installation Atau Tanaka uses the Internet as a musical instrument, in which the connection between two sites serves as a kind of guitar string.

Eugene Thacker is a writer, theorist and artist. I know his work mostly through his collaboration with the New York based net performance group Fakeshop, but he has also done solo projects and is mostly a writer and theorist. Eugene Thacker's work centers around bio tech, science fiction, experimental literature, art and science. We talked at DEAF'00, The Dutch Electronic Art Festival organized by V2 in 2000.

This is an interview made with Gerburg Treusch-Dieter made at V2 organisation in Rotterdam December 19th 1999. It is only a brief introduction to her work, but Treusch-Dieter is one of few who deal with the tension between biotechnology and feminism. Gerburg Treusch-Dieter is a sociologist, and she works at both the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Vienna. She also teaches genderstudies, plus she has "a history" in the women's movement (as she calls it: the second or 'new' women's movement.) The interview was roughly translated from German.

Experimental text. Rewrite of an essay/lecture by the Dutch poet Komrij, originally: how to read poetry. Everywhere where Komrij wrote ‘poetry’ I replaced it by ‘net.art’, and where he wrote ‘poem’ I changed it to net.artwork. The text was and is meant to make people see net artworks individually rather than from general assumptions about what net art is. Like Komrij's text, this re-write has no paragraphs. The picture with the quote by Vuk Cosic does not belong to this text, but seems to breath the same spirit.

This interview was made for a publication of the Walker Art Centre in Mineapolis.

Mark Bain "I guess my Vibronic system attempts to question this architectural authority in presenting art."

Bruno Beusch and Tina Cassani founded TNC network four years before this interview was made. Their work is interesting in that it serves as one of few examples of complex network art, in which audio plays an important part. Here we don't have audio or netradio so much though, but a form of network art that covers many layers of public life (in which media play a basic part) at the same time. Not only media are used as an instrument, but also human participants are carefully chosen for their speciality.

This is a very short and simple interview with N. Katherine Hayles, who spoke at the DEAF symposium November 20th. Her lecture was very hard to understand for most of the audience, and left people afterwards asking eachother what she had been talking about. I decided to ask her some questions out of curiosity, as I was one of those that lost track at some point during here speech. She was most patient.

This interview was made for the newsletter Cream after a symposium on net art criticism in the Balie, Amsterdam. In it Graham Harwood talks about his views on art criticism and specifically about the beauty of systems. 'It is useful for me if people that do net art criticism can write about the context in which the work that I am making appears.'

JB: Can you tell me your point of view on art criticism and net art?

Lecture written for the Electrohype conference 2002, in Malmo Sweden. In this text I present a new work by Graham Harwood, a piece of software that is based on a poem written by William Blake. The software can be used to calculate the total amount of last breaths of people dying in a inhumane situation over a specific period of time, in order to then use the outcome of this calculation to determine the length of time a horn or siren should be played throughout a city. The last breaths play the horn.

Deze lezing is in verschillende versies gepresenteerd in BAK te Utrecht en bij Digital Exposure 3 in Den Haag.

This is an early attempt of me to develop my view on net art discourse. The title reveals how I saw (and mostly still see) art discourse as popular in its approach of net art. What happens in most art discourse relating to net art barely scratches the surface of what is going on, and this was definitely the case in 2000, when this was written. However, much of what is said in here I would say different today, at the very least.The lecture is a bit 'incrowd'.

 It would be foolish to state there are no developments in net.art. The developments are simply more difficult to follow, as they are squeezed between a relatively rapid expansion of the net.art field (in what some would call a commercial way) and the growth of 'offical' recognition of net.art by 'high art' institutions. At the same time these two things of course also are developments in net.art, or they for sure produce them. We just need to think of Peter Weibel's project 'the net.art museum'.

This interview was never published because it took a long time before I got to transscribing it. Marko Peljhan thought it was outdated by the time I got to it. It might be interesting nevertheless. Note that the interview was made before the first appearance of Makrolab (at Documenta X) and before Ljudmila Media Lab in Ljubljana got problems that led to its closure.

Helen Thorington is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore), and the founder and producer of New American Radio and Turbulence.

This one digs a bit into the history of net.art and it shows net.art did not start as a joke or as a hoax. It's made at the infamous nettime meeting in Ljubljana. After the rumor earlier 1997 that net.art would be declared dead in Linz, net.art gets taken to a higher plan instead.

Q: Did you start off as an artist immediately or was it more media activism?

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) was interviewed about the text 'As Above, So Below', which they wrote with Faith Wilding. The collective included 5 people at the time: Steve Barnes, Dorian Burr, Steve Kurtz and, (not appearing in Ljubljana) Hope Kurtz and Beverly Schlee.

Olia Lialina is a net.artist. She lives and works in Moscow. She is also a filmcritic and filmcurator. We talked in Ljudmila Media Lab in Ljubljana in May '97, on the first day of the nettime conference, while the conference was in progress with an American history lesson of the Internet in the main room. We were sitting between other escapees that were doing mail or surfing and the friendly kitchen crew. (JB 1997)