Another extension of the < body > of net art is its facilitation of growth and change over time according to what different people do with it collectively. For instance, a Wiki allows people to edit the pages of a website. Perhaps the most significant Wiki is wikipedia.org; for more Wikis, google the term. Ideally, this results in stronger pages, over time, despite common fears of inaccuracy in public knowledge. In any case, the edited page is stored permanently not on the reader’s machine but on the server from which the page was retrieved. This is not so much a “mental function of the brain of the work of art” so much as a type of memory available to the work of art. And this sort of memory would be important to any possibility of the work of art coming to learn anything over time. If it can’t change over time, it also can’t learn. Neither can it become a kind of collective work of art.
Client-server architecture can be used not only to save information from different contributors (and present viewers with all the different contributions) but also to facilitate and coordinate live communication between participants as in chat applications, where what you type is sent first to the server and then to the other people in the chat. Sometimes all the server does is let people establish a direct connection, bypassing the server, with other people involved in the communication (such as in many P2P applications).
The desire for “direct connection” is echoed in TCR 2-50 contributor Kevin Magee’s poem to write as speech: “It is not that I desire blind-html, imageless, text-hysteric; it’s that there is an additional dialog, with email, that reconstructs the possible.”
I suppose you can think of the server as a type of web service. But, typically, web services do not store any significant information from their clients. They receive requests, process the request, return the results, and that’s the end of the transaction. Whereas client-server relationships usually involve some storage on the server of information that is crucial to either later connections or to current connections by other people.
Excerpted from Jim Andrews / The < body > of Net Art
Some works that involve client-server architecture:
Panel Junction by Andy Deck artcontext.org/act/05/panel
Participatory Poem by Jim Andrews, (within a larger work called On Lionel Kearns) vispo.com/kearns
Granular Synthesizer by Chris Savage japanesefreeware.com/granular
Gary Rosenzweig’s Gamespark gamespark.com/game.php?lobby
To add to this list, comment on this post.
other islands in this text-fed stream
