Project Netarts.org 2008 - Call for nominations :: Deadline: September 15, 2008 :: First prize: 100,000 yen.

From 1995 to 2003, The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts hosted the “Art on the Net” project promoting the Internet as a space for artistic expression. After the nine years of “Art on the Net,” we launched a new event called the “Project Netarts.org.” The “Project Netarts.org” has been calling on artists around the world to investigate together the relationship between Art, the Internet and the Society. The Exhibition section of the project will feature recent developments in Internet Art and is open to all forms of creative expression that use the Internet as their primary medium.

Although this project is focused on the latest developments in the field of Internet Art, we are also very interested in considering contributions that reflect the influence of Internet Art production on the wider fields of Media-Art, Digital Art, curatorial practice, digital pedagogy, and online publishing.

Call for the nominations

This year, the artworks for the exhibition and the “netarts.org 2008 prize” will be chosen by our Selection Committee: Mark Amerika, Susan Hazan, Agnese Trocchi, John Hopkins, and You Minowa.

The theme this year is The Ghost in the Machine. What role do artists play in haunting the Internet? Is being an art hacktivist part of a larger interventionist strategy to destructively create a spirit world within the network protocols? How can a work of net art set off a viral aesthetics that provokes a chaotic “butterfly effect” in the all-consuming culture of information?

The works we are seeking in this year’s Project Net.Arts competition are ghosts in the machine. They create counter-protocols, hacktivist ethics, or a distributed viral aesthetics whose function is to insert the artist and/or artwork as medium.

According to Arthur Koestler’s “The Ghost in the Machine” (1967), the holon can represents a semi-autonomous unit which is part of complex hierarchies, which both govern, and are governed by other semi-autonomous holons on higher or lower orders of the hierarchy. Holon is a combination of the Greek word holos, meaning whole, and the suffix on meaning particle or part. Koestler argues that parts and wholes, in an absolute sense, do not exist in the domains of life; in both stable social, and biological systems, and the concept of the holon therefore, is then mobilized to reconcile the atomistic and holistic nature of these systems. The relationship between holons is governed by specific rules; rules which serve to preserve the structure of the system. This hierarchic approach, in fact replaces the dualism we so often struggle with in social systems, enabling us to maintain some sort of internal mental mapping of the different hierarchal systems that we are part of; as individuals, in a family, tribes, or nation. We hope to identify those holons that are governed by other holons, and explore the ways these holonistic units are situated above or below other holons in networked systems.

For example, a single instruction from a high level holon can result in the triggering of the holons at lower levels, which in turn, due to their semi-autonomous nature, respond to the higher command only after filtering out the specific information that it considers relevant. The strength of holonic hierarch, or holarchy, lies in its flexibility, in its efficiency respond to disturbances, in its flexible distribution and consumption of resources, and in its ability to adapt easily to change. The characteristics of robust biological or social systems can be transposed to other systems, including those found on digital networks, and we hope that these ghosts we discover will prove to be not only engaging and intriguing but once the whole holarchic system is revealed, will be also illuminating.

The members will make their own nominations, but we will accept nominations from the web also. Please send your nomination to us directly.

The prize fee for the top selection will be 100,000 yen.

3. Nomination Form

To nominate, please e-mail the following information to us directly:
1). The URL address of your nomination
2). If you are the copyright holder of the nomination, your name, physical Address, phone number/fax. number, e-mail address are required.

4. The schedule: We will accept nominations by mail from until September 15, 2008.

The award-winning artwork will be selected by 30th Sept. The exhibition will be launched 15th, Nov. 2008. We will soon announce some physical events to take place in Nov. at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo.

For more information, please visit at our website, http://www.netarts.org.