Many early dreams about radio and telecommunications predicted a system that would be open, multi-directional and shared. In the early 1900's radio was in its infancy. Marconi and others constructed huge spark transmitters that could broadcast very simple Morse code like messages over the Atlantic. Each transmitter had a unique sound signature. Radio worked much like early telephone "party lines" with receivers that picked up a broad range of overlapping signals (and background noise). Operators listened for the differences in the sound signature in order to discern individual sources. In December 1906, Canadian engineer Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (*), broadcast music and voice using an enhanced version of the spark transmitter. Fessenden went on to develop the theory and practice of continuous wave transmission that we use today for AM and FM radio broadcasts. But in 1906, the ships and coastal stations that communicated with key codes were astounded to suddenly hear a ghostly human voice coming out of their ear-sets.

During the early days of radio, notions of the broadband receiver led journalists and poets to imagine radio as a global network often bordering on telepathy. Radio would bring all peoples together in a giant communications network that would aid in the removal of misunderstandings, cultural collision, war, etc. Radio would move stories around the world, it would save boats at sea, it would democratize journalism and politics. Radio would enable mankind to achieve its ultimate goal of reaching into the afterlife to talk to the dead. Mankind would evolve a new consciousness. (One of my favorite poetic images of the spark-transmitter as democratized radio comes from "Snake Train" by Velimir Khebnokov (*). In 1915, Khebnokov imagined an elaborate system of writing on clouds. This "sky writing" would be fed by spark-messages from fishing villages along the Volga.) In some ways, Fessenden brought about the end of this dream when he made it possible to broadcast and receive on a single narrow frequency. Fessenden believed in broadcast to the masses. By the early 1920s, the broadband era of radio was over. In 1932, Bertolt Brecht proposed a restructuring of radio: to "change this apparatus over from distribution to communication" (*). This illustrates that within the space of 10 years, the broadcast model of radio had become embedded in Western culture. Radio was still used as a two-way system in shipping, the military, radio-telegraph systems, CB, etc., but the idea of a larger system that would be accessible by all and thus "a network" had been lost.

Starting in the 1960s, telecommunications networks (pioneered by HAM radio operators, scientists, and artists) went back to some of the early ideas of network as a shared communications space. This is somewhat ironic given that the telephone lines used at the time were very much point-to-point connections. The network was created by opening up many telephone lines at the same time through an elaborate system of relaying messages from one point to another. The relay network was enabled by audio and video recording technology. At any particular node the artists would: make the phone call, record the exchange, hang up the phone, make the next call, playback the recording from the previous call, record a new exchange, etc. During these events, the network invariably became a vast, ephemeral collage where the playback of recordings would be interrupted and altered with each new transmission. Faxes could be altered with the pen, sound and video could be layered, the modem tone signals themselves (images encoded as audio) could be altered by singing into the telephone line during transmission (This was done with Slow Scan TV, video phone, and Fax). Some of these networks existed without the need for relaying. Telephone companies would occasionally sponsor a conference call between participants. In 1980, Robert Adrian X worked with the Vienna office of I.P. Sharp Associates to develop ARTEX (Artist's Electronic Exchange Network) - an "intercontinental, interactive, electronic art-exchange program designed for artists and anybody else interested in alternative possibilities of using new technologies." (*) This electronic mailbox network for artists existed until 1991, during a time when international electronic networks were confined primarily to academia and large corporations. It became a focal point for organizing and realizing a number of pivotal projects including The World in 24 Hours (*) (1982), Wiencouver IV (*) (1983), and La Plissure du Texte (*) (1983) - this last work used ARTEX as a medium for passing text around the world, with artists at each location adding to a collaborative on-line narrative.

In the early days of the Internet, Jeff Mann's TV Freenet (1994) (*) predicted a future where the TV audience would become the content generator through an elaborate interface of old and new technologies. Mann imagined a system that included input from many different devices, a system that allowed people in different parts of the world, working with different types of technology, to feed into a common output (the television screen). This idea relates closely to Kunstradio's vision of extending the traditional realm of radio to include physical spaces and networks. This has led to many projects involving performance, sound installation, telecommunications events, and Web-casting. Kunstradio has played an important role in fostering collaboration between artists over distance and in developing a unique style of networked-radio-art.

Starting in the 1970s, parallel and interconnected experiments in telecommunications and network art have taken place at the Western Front - an Artist Run Centre in Vancouver, Canada. The Western Front has a long history of correspondence with artists in Vienna - in particular Robert Adrian X - and has developed many long distance projects in collaboration with Kunstradio. From its inception in 1973, the Western Front has promoted ideas of cultural exchange and cross-discipline pollination through artist residencies, social performance events, and networks. Early network projects include Mail Art, artists traveling as part of collaborative projects, gatherings such as the Decca Dance (*) in Hollywood on Art's Birthday 1974, and the use of Slow Scan TV (*) on long distance telephone lines starting around 1979. One of the artists who visited the Western Front in the 1970s was Robert Filliou, who, along with his collaborator George Brecht, proposed Art's Birthday and the Eternal Network (*) - two manifestations of network that are still active today. As an artist and curator of the Western Front's media arts programme, my own interests and experience in this medium start in the late 1980s with collaborative long distance radio programs, Telecommunications Art events in the 90s, and the subsequent movement of this type of work to the Internet.

In 1988 I was doing radio; a weekly program of live noise art; feedback, intense collage, crashing and banging, tape loops, field recordings (found sound), ethereal phone-in manifestations; no distinct voices. The program, Absolute Value of Noise, became notorious for annoying angry mothers, rock-and-roll addicts, and others who didn't have the capability to either turn off the radio or tune to another station (in the 1980s and 90s, listening to radio was like a religion - many people chose a station and stuck to it, regardless of the quality of the programming, or whether or not it appealed to their sensibility). The Absolute Value of Noise also garnered a cult audience and a dedicated group of contributors who would show up each week for in-person noise making. G.X. Jupitter-Larsen (aka The Haters), would bring cassette tapes by artists from around the world. More often than not, these tapes would form the basis of that week's collision of sounds. At this time, I was introduced to the network in two forms: Mail Art and Telecommunications Art in the radio-zone. I was first introduced to Mail Art networks by GX Jupitter Larsen who handed me a list of addresses and encouraged me to send out audio cassettes to other artists, radio show hosts, and zine publishers. Within the radio art network, exchanged audio included everything from rough recordings (to be used as components of a larger mix) to finished works and cassette releases. Ron Lessard of RRR records used to have an open call for cassette tapes. People from around the world would send him material, he would use it live on air and send out copies of the resulting collages. In response to mail outs, artists sent back a variety of materials: audio tapes, CDs (which were very new back then), poems, books, zines, etc. In 1989, I worked with Hank Bull of the Western Front on Hyperspace Radio (Art's Birthday, January 17th, 1989) - a project that joined together four radio stations in Western Canada through a conference call. The hosts then participated in an elaborate journey into the future, based on a loose script that ultimately fell prey to technical glitches, telephone system echoes, feedback, and the nefarious natures of the individual radio programs. Ironically, my awareness as an audio artist started in December 1987 with the first broadcast of Absolute Value of Noise radio. This was the same month that French fluxus artist Robert Filliou died, and since that time his ideas about art, communication, and network have had a growing influence on my own work and philosophies in relation to the network paradigm.

Filliou traveled across Canada in the mid and late 1970s. He had a significant impact on the Artist Run Centre (*) movement, particularly in Vancouver (Western Front), Calgary (Clive Robertson and Arton's), Toronto (Art Metropole), Montréal (Véhicule), and Québec City (Le Lieu). In Canada, Filliou was introduced to video and the possibility of translating many of his ideas (that had been realized through objects and text) into this new (at the time) electronic medium. Filliou's work in the 1960s was intent on separating the creation of art from art institutions (galleries, dealers, museums). He worked with the idea of Permanent Creation, of incorporating the creative sense into aspects of every day life. He also worked with the absurd - putting forth proposals that were tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time conveyed serious and profound ideas about life, art, economy, social responsibility, and the importance of individual creativity. Along with his collaborator, George Brecht, he developed the concept of the Eternal Network and used this in his writings and Mail Art practice. In the 1970s, many young artists in Canada were struggling with similar ideas and the inclusion of Filliou (both as collaborator and mentor) within this crowd was a natural fit. These artists brought Filliou into their world of youthful performative happenings, dinners, tennis matches, video art, and excursions up the coast. Through this exchange and the correspondence art that ran through it all, the concept of the Eternal Network became firmly incorporated in the work of groups like the Western Front. Hank Bull suggests that the concept of the Eternal Network was appropriated by the many artists who worked and corresponded with Filliou at this time (*), thus creating a network that had a life of its own. Keith Wallace, writing about the Western Front, paraphrases the ".. Eternal Network. This term was coined by French artist Robert Filliou, who optimistically expressed a belief that artists should be in communication at all times in all places without dependency upon art establishment. Within the Network, artists most often used correspondence through the postal system as a means of exchanging ideas and images. In this context, making art was a shared activity and not dependent upon the individual artist creating objects within the isolation of the studio. The Network also challenged the idea that certain cities constituted geographical art centres; through the medium of correspondence each artist could be connected internationally without having to live in a major urban centre." (*) Filliou's writings indicate that the network exists whether we acknowledge it or not. It is inherent in the space where people come together to share knowledge, ideas, skills, criticism, food, etc. From this point of view, Filliou's Eternal Network is a way of looking at the world. As an economist, philosopher, and artist, Filliou's ideas went beyond the realm of art by artists (and activism by artists) and were put forth in the context of a larger society. Eternal Network de-emphasizes the "director" and emphasizes the collaboration that we engage in in our daily lives. It strengthens the role of the individual within a "collaboration of life (and art)" that promotes social responsibility. Eternal Network also puts forward the idea that the complexity of knowledge and ideas makes the concept of objective experience passé. Experience becomes increasingly subjective and notions of assessing art ("what is good and what is bad"), as well as notions of the "avant garde", become obsolete. Within this network, art is a never ending exchange of objects, ideas, and social contexts.

One of Filliou's projects within this realm was Art's Birthday - an extension of his ideas about the creative enactment of leisure time, La Fête, and the importance of playfulness in life and art. Art's Birthday was first realized in 1973, on January 17th, in Aachen, Germany where a municipal holiday was declared. Filliou proposed that "1,000,010 years ago, art was life, 1,000,010 years from now it will again be." Art's Birthday was embraced by Mail Artists in Canada and the U.S.A. who celebrated it in tandem with a Mail Art awards ceremony, the Decca Dance, in Hollywood in 1974. Filliou first proposed Art's Birthday in 1963, suggesting that "1,000,000 years ago there was no art. One day, on the 17th of January, Art was born." Since his death in late 1987, many artists from around the world working with telecommunications and Mail Art, have collaborated to keep Art's Birthday and it's underlying philosophy of exchange and the Eternal Network alive.

Starting in 1989, the Western Front has hosted annual Art's Birthday celebrations. Over time these events have evolved to include four to five days of activities both local and networked, tied in with events at other points around the world. In recent years (2004 - 2006) each celebration has taken on a theme which the remote participants interpret in their own way adding or subtracting local interests and ideas. Participants from around the world (Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Taipei, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Sackville, Baltimore, New York, Madrid, Paris, Marseille, Baden-Baden, Weimar, Berlin, Vienna, Hainburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Prague, Moscow ..), work with mediums of exchange: Telematics, Telekinetics, Telephone music, Slow Scan TV, Web-casting, Radio Broadcast, Neighbourhood TV (low power TV narrow-casting), Fax, etc.. The work is focused around performance and social activities in local spaces, with connections through the Internet, and satellite radio broadcasts in Europe. The Western Front acts as one hub of this global network, situated on the Pacific Rim, connecting the participants together through the "artsbirthday.net" Web-site. Kunstradio acts as another important hub, situated in Europe, connecting the artist network into the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) radio-scape. The contemporary Art's Birthday network takes as its starting point Fillou's promotion of a culture of collaboration, exchange, creative enactment of social space, and his original text entitled "Whispered Art History" (*) (the story of Art's Birthday). Filliou's idea of Art's Birthday doesn't necessitate the long distance connection of social-art environments through telecommunications technology or the Internet, but it is interesting to note that artists inspired by the idea chose to realize Art's Birthday through an electronic network.

"So the way I see the Network, as a member of the Network, is the way it exists artistically through the collective efforts of all these artists in Europe, in North America, in Asia, in Australia, in New Zealand - everywhere. In Africa also (I have received communication from Yemen for instance) each one of us artistically functions, in the Network, which has replaced the concept of the avant-garde and which functions in such a way that there is no more art centre in the world."

"Concentrating silently. Sending waves of greetings. Weatherluck. Manluck. Womanluck. To any or all of the members of the Eternal Network the world around."

One of the earliest telecommunications networks that I was aware of was documented on video in 1979. Bill Bartlett, working at Open Space (an artist run centre in Victoria) and the Vancouver Art Gallery, organized Pacific Slow Scan - a network of scientists and artists exchanging black and white video images at 8 seconds per frame. Within this project, it is interesting to note the instant collaboration among people from very different backgrounds - artists, scientists, Western academics, communities in the South Pacific, etc. Each participating node sent live images over Slow Scan TV to the Vancouver Art Gallery, which recorded them and sent them on to other participants. This work didn't differ very much from the nature of artist-only telecommunications exchanges that followed it in the 80s and 90s. It is the exchange of stories that gives life to the network, whether real events (the butchering and cooking of a giant sea turtle as transmitted from a beach in the South Pacific) or imagined narratives (performance art activities, poetry, and animations).

Telecommunications Art focused on the telephone as a means to provoke exchange, build networks of artists, and engage in discourse around the role of global networks in culture (it was informed by Utopian ideas of electronic networks and the history of artists communicating and collaborating across distance through travel, Mail Art, and other forms of dissemination). The traditional European model of the artist is an individual who produces work that is then sent out into the world for many people (as many as possible) to see. This is mirrored in the broadcast model of media (radio and TV) where a show is transmitted from an elite creator to the masses. Telecommunications Art broke down notions of the elite creator and the audience. Projects were aimed at connecting people (artists in particular, but not exclusively artists) over distance to create what was effectively (perhaps ideologically) a long distance community. In this sense the art form is about "communication". We can think of Telecommunications Art as a foreshadowing or as a "crude precursor to" the Internet, but early artist networks imagined something quite different - an empowerment of individuals in their own network, under the radar (or beyond the control) of the commercial networks. The Internet both enables and contains this imagined network, but this type of network is not the entirety of the Internet.

This duality of the Internet provides an interesting context for developing projects that attempt to alter the information-interface and question the mass-media approach to the world wide web. My own forays into this realm include four main bodies of work: .. devolve into .. (2000 and 2002) (*), Scrambled_Bites (2004) (*), Reverie: noise city (2005) (*), and two recent projects (*) that use wireless Internet to connect autonomous robots, enabling the robots to take on social behaviours without human intervention or awareness. As a radio artist (starting in the late 1980s) who has moved into the realm of the Internet through involvement in Telecommunications Art projects in the 1990s, I tend to look at networked-radio-art as the conflating of Telecommunications Art and Radio Art Broadcast. In some ways the Internet enables the merging of these two forms. You can realize a project that has both elements within a single medium. The network allows artists to communicate, exchange material, and build live collaborative systems; and at the same time, the same network can be used as a distribution media to take the work out to a larger public. On the Internet there is a place in between the purely insular social environments and the mass-media promotion, advertising, and broadcasting efforts. This place is evident in chat groups, electronic forums, and BLOGs that have a core group of active participants who collaborate on creating content, and then also have an audience of "lurkers" who are allowed to join the creative process if they like, but are also allowed just to read and browse through the content purely in the role of audience. In many cases, an audience member can, at any time, choose to make contact with the creators, or go so far as to become an active participant.

I'm interested in how this plays out from the point of view of taking early Telecommunications Art ideas onto the Internet. The projects that I have produced typically involve gathering a collection of artists and artist groups in a dozen different locations. These groups develop individual ideas within a specific framework designed for collaboration and exchange. The artists talk to each other, develop performances, images, sound, text. One artist's idea will spark a flurry of related activity. It is a community where the focus is in the content (the sounds and images that are transmitted). This is identical to the activities of earlier Telecommunications Art projects, except that now there is an invisible audience on the Web that didn't exist prior to the Internet. You have the long distance collaboration plus the notion of a "radio audience." This is a powerful form of "radio" extended into the network - the exposing of large scale collaborative art projects to an audience that can view the work live and as a document (left on the Internet after the project is over). The invisible audience provides a certain impetus to the work and validates it within an institutionalized art-world that requires art to have an audience outside of the artists themselves.

"There's a growing recognition that the culture industry is doing for our culture what the forest industry is doing to our forests. The Big Media want to sell us 500 more channels where 'interactive TV' means you get a 'buy' button on your remote. On the net there are an infinite number of channels; every viewer is also a transmitter, and this has seen the blossoming of an incredible on-line culture. We hear that in the future we'll be able to send video over the phone. I want to prepare for this using desktop video technology, low-power transmitters, VHS cassettes, the Internet, and whatever means necessary."
      Jeff Mann, article about TV Freenet, FRONT Magazine, volume 5, number 4, March/April 1994.

Contemporary Telematic art (art using computer networks) from the Western Front, Kunstradio and other progenitors of this form ultimately refer to (and sometimes include) other mediums of exchange: old communications technologies that are "semi-simulated" on the Web, radio networks, pirate broadcasting, telephones, satellite transmission, etc. Each medium or method of sending sound and image over long distances has its own peculiarities and its own history in terms of its use by artists. Early works used text, single-line telephone connections and modem tones to transmit video images and MIDI information (musical notes encoded as digital information). Telephone Music I and II, in the early 1980s, encouraged artists to compose music that fit within the frequency limitations of the phone line. In 1991, Text Bombs and Video Tape - a reaction to the Gulf War - had one of its most interesting manifestations as Fax-Art: collages and hand drawn protests, scattered around the world by Fax, often altered and sent onwards.

On the Internet, software and software development become a key feature of this type of work. In my own practice I use software to create collaborative frameworks, to incorporate different (often older) technologies into these frameworks, and to enable autonomous-seeming software organisms. One example is Scrambled_Bites, produced at the Western Front in 2003. Scrambled_Bites played with the idea of a "data stream" connecting robotic devices, sensors, and noise makers in different locations around the world. Here the idea was not to become transfixed with the Web as the focus of network activity, but instead to use the Internet as a means of shipping data from one location to another, to be activated in a space with a live audience. One of the inspirations behind this project was an interest in subverting the concept of Internet streaming at a fundamental level. This was done by introducing a new self defined form of streaming and reducing the entire system to something very minimal. The Scrambler (our home-made server software) did not stream audio or images. Instead it transmitted a slow collection of numbers that were largely abstract and removed from their origins. The Internet and communications technologies in general can rapidly become vast complex systems. The intent of the Scrambler was to strip back this complexity to reveal the basic underpinnings of data flow, exchange and intersection.

A certain amount of early critical writing (*) (c. mid 1990s) about the Internet was fascinated with bandwidth, virtual communities, and networked Virtual Reality. The world would be such an amazing and wonderful place when we could finally push full frame multi-dimensional video through an Internet connection enabling people to live in each other's imaginations (or imaginary living rooms). Some people view the emergence of cable-modems as an important leap forward in the history of the Internet. Others take a different approach and view "access" as the most important historical change in the 90s. Ultimately a network is made up of individuals and for the network to have a significant impact on society, a significant proportion of the world's population must be connected to the network and be able to participate in it's cultural structures. This idea of accessibility is key to networked-radio-art both in terms of audience and in terms of enabling remote participants to collaborate from disparate cities and cultural milieus.

Designed in the era before the ubiquitous cable modem, the ".. devolve into .." pieces were achingly conscious of bandwidth. In any work of this nature, it is important to enable both the artists and the larger public to access a high degree of depth and complexity on a connection that may be slow and prone to disconnection. Within this context some ingenious work has been done. In the 70s and 80s when artists were working with Slow Scan TV - where it takes up to 48 seconds to send a single frame of colour video over a telephone line - live animation (and interference) was the pinnacle of the art form. On the Internet in the 90s, using the browser's cache effectively enabled you to send little pieces of sound and image over a 14400 baud modem and have the receiving computer use those tiny segments to create something that had the sound and look of a denser, more complicated broadcast. .. devolve into II .. played specifically with these ideas and techniques by managing live and recycled content and running simple generative algorithms to create a landscape that felt much bigger then the original pieces that were fed into the system. The first version of the piece from 2000, played with questions of predetermined navigation by forcing the browser to travel through an ever changing matrix of works in order to find all of the different streams. Architecturally, the premise was simple, providing the browser with four routes from each "room" in the system to other rooms. .. devolve into II .. (2002) produced in collaboration with Roberto Paci Daló and Kunstradio, focused additionally on ideas of the ephemeral (live streams) versus the document (recordings of those streams), and the notion that all digital material will eventually mutate (as it is copied and moved from archive to archive) and go through a process of decay over time.

"Clicking In," (*) a collection of essays edited by Lynn Hershman Leeson (published in 1996), includes a number of different views of the network and virtual reality from the mid 90s. One thing that I find interesting is the fascination that many of the academic authors had with MUDs (multi user dungeons / multi user domains). MUDs at that time were generated entirely with text. A participant would log on, create their own persona, create elements of the environment, and then navigate through a text based game world to meet and interact with other participants. The MUD (and other interfaces for social interaction on the Web) provide a way for people to be social while at the same time anonymous (if that's really possible). The virtual social space allows people to leave fear of rejection based on physical typecasting behind. It doesn't necessarily allow one to leave other types of prejudice behind, but ultimately one enters a fantasy world constructed by a collective of a few hundred people who gather there to share common interests. It removes all of the billions of people who don't share those interests from the map.

Reverie(2005) was a virtual city of sound-art on the Web. It referred to William Gibson's "Walled City" (*) and other non-fictional on-line virtual communities (MUDs, chat groups, networked gaming groups, BLOGS, etc.) "Walled City" exists as a distributed network game that requires continuous human interaction to keep it alive and functioning. The players adopt a persona and take responsibility for maintaining different parts of the city. These parts are then passed from player to player as the participants log-in and out of the game. In a similar fashion, Reverie imagines a city that is activated purely through the ongoing activities and exchanges of sound-artists. This project was initially inspired by an early version of antartica.ca (a map of Antartica that acted as an interface to organizations and information on the Web) and Alien City (http://alien.mur.at) an artwork by Alien Productions created by Austrian artists Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, and Andrea Sodomka, that explores the concept of the city as a dynamic, evolving place for exchanges and cultural practice. An early proponent of the virtual city, within the context of communications technology, was Hank Bull who invented Wiencouver. Wiencouver is a virtual city in space that was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It became the basis for one of the first consistent series of telecommunications events that linked artists around the world and created a community through long distance exchange.

"Wiencouver is an imaginary city hanging invisible in the space between its two poles: Vienna and Vancouver. Seen from Europe, both cities are at the end of the road, one on the Pacific Rim of North America, the other just 65 km from the Soviet Bloc. They are each on the edge of the art world's magnetic field, able to observe from a distance, and equally able to turn the other way, one towards the far east and one towards the near east. Vienna and Vancouver are wealthy, regional cities with international perspectives. This, coupled with their linguistic and historical differences, makes them ideal for correspondants."

By creating network projects that refer to earlier (pre-Internet) experiments and models, we can explore the larger history and context of this shifting realm. One of the reasons that I like to embed seemingly archaic technologies in with the new is to imply that perhaps the world isn't evolving as fast as we think it is. There are more and more new products every day - but the idea of "product" is far from new. There are more and more software tools - but the concepts of software and hardware, biology and consciousness are also very old. What we are seeing as technological leaps forward are most often improvements on existing ideas - make the hardware faster, smaller, cheaper, more disposable; make the software bigger, flashier, more complex, more essential to work-flow, less compatible with older versions.

I stopped programming computers for about six years from 1988 to 1994. When I returned to it, mostly out of interest in the Internet and the potential of networking, I was surprised to see how little had changed in that time. The structure of the Internet (its raw underpinnings) was almost identical to earlier network protocols, operating systems were much as I remembered them. The rapid development of the Internet seems mostly in the area of interface, tools, and toys, rather than in structure. This had a great effect on my view of technological development. Obviously the notion of rapid development of software and hardware is evident in usage and access, but is not necessarily reflected through or into changes in the basic paradigm or structure of the system. I realized that transcendent development (changes to the fundamental building blocks of a system) isn't necessarily about speed, bandwidth, etc. but is instead about ideas and experimentation. From that point of view, I don't worry about having access to the latest technology. What I am interested in is access to ideas and the time to explore them.

One of the most fascinating aspects of change within contemporary cultures is our relationship to software. Software has its origins in a very particular scientific-military-industrial ideology. It mutates, expands, works its way around the world and into many aspects of life. It affects the way we work, the way we play. it creates a peculiar symbiosis between the machine and the "user", a symbiosis that alters our consciousness and cognitive processes. We change our languages so that software can encode them more easily. We change our methods of remembering and relating stories - from mnemonics, to the printing press, to the word processor. To what degree is this a process of enlightenment or, ultimately, cultural reprogramming?

One of Kunstradio's most interesting (and ambitious) early Internet (net-radio) projects was Sound Drifting (1999). It "was formulated as an experimental non-biological organism: a network or community of generative algorithms constituting a virtual autonomous organism living, interacting, breeding and ultimately dying in the matrix of the Internet." (*) Sound Drifting referred to the idea that all complex systems have an inherent intelligence and consciousness, even if the human mind and body is unable to measure it or relate to it. Sound Drifting also referred to the ephemerality of networked communities and saw this as a natural phenomenon. If the network exists as communication and exchange (real-time occurrences) then the network does not exist when the communication ceases or fades away - in the same way that a dinner party is over when the guests go home. The existence of ephemerality in the network can be a point of difficulty in many network art projects. In most of the projects I've done on the Internet, the artists want the work to live on without them after the project has finished. What is this fascination with storing and retrieving data rather than viewing connectivity and connections as the essence of the network? By emphasizing the information or documentation of a work, we de-emphasize the human component of the process. Perhaps within this realm of networked communications art, we can view the human interaction (and thus human memories) as more important than the computer memory.

In his book Silence Descends (*) (1997), George Case describes the end of the Information Age from a vantage point five hundred years in the future. He describes a world that has suffered through a series of natural disasters. People have left the virtual behind in order to survive. The virtual does not only exist in the electronic domain of information systems and global networks, but is also evident in the capitalist, consumer driven society where economy is linked to purchases and market shares instead of to the well being and health of a community. George Case's future is not a world without network(s), but it is a world without the virtual trappings that are used as rational for oppression. In an age of increasing noise and the ever present nostalgia of historical media and new media forms, it is appropriate to look forward and wonder about society's evolution. Will the world be enveloped by a glut of endless storage? Or will the Information Age burn-out like so many social and political movements that have come before it. As more and more information is added to the system it becomes impossible to maintain. Links are broken, older software fails to run. The integrity of the data is lost. This broken information becomes less important than the references contained within - the articles and people who, like ghosts, are implied by the vanishing content. In 2005, I worked with several artists to produce Reverie: noise city. In the space of a few months, this virtual city went from inception, through rapid growth, and into the realm of historical architecture - a process that takes a real city many decades, often centuries, to complete. As time passes and technology evolves, the city will slowly decompose. The sounds will become incompatible with new software and the design will shift with browser obsolescence. This is a metaphor that the artists discussed in the early phases of the project - the idea that at some point the city would crumble into digital dust. Like many experimental contemporary practices, Reverie is ephemeral. Projects of this nature are interventions into a public (yet virtual) space that are intended to make passers by stop, look, and experience something out of the ordinary before continuing on with their daily activities. These projects are also intended as social networks between collaborators. This particular network space is transcendent; it is the Imaginary Network that is yet to be fully realized; an economy that is poetical (*); perhaps it will be found five hundred years in the future.

(*) John S. Belrose, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden and the Birth of Wireless Telephony, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 2, April 2002, pp. 38-47.

(*) Velimir Khlebnikov (translated by Gary Kern, 1976), snake train, excerpt from "The Steppe of the Future", 1915-16.

(*) Bertolt Brecht, "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication," translated by John Willett, in John G. Hanhardt, editor, Video Culture: A Critical Investigation (New York: Peregrine Smith Books/Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986), p. 53. Requoted from Anna Couey, "Restructuring Power: Telecommunications Works Produced by Women", published on-line at http://www.well.com/~couey/, 2001.

(*) Robert Adrian X, ARTEX, and the I.P. Sharp network. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/communication/15/

(*) The World in 24 Hours (1982), http://alien.mur.at/rax/BIO/telecom.html is a good chronology of telecommunications projects involving Robert Adrian X and his various collaborators.

(*) Wiencouver IV (1983), is described in: Heidi Grundmann, editor, Art + Telecommunications, Vancouver: The Western Front Society, and Vienna: Blix: 1984. This book also describes other Wiencouver events from 1979 to 1983.

(*) Plissure du Texte (1983), is described by Roy Ascott in his essay "Distance Makes the Art Grow Further: Distributed Authorship and Telematic Textuality in La Plissure du Texte", in Annemarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, editors, Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005, pp 282-296. Contains many interesting essays on telecommunications and artist-activist networks. The Western Front component of Plissure du Texte is described in: Keith Wallace, editor, Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993, pp. 82-84.

(*) Jeff Mann, TV Freenet, artist residency project realized at the Western Front in 1994. Conceptualized in a text in FRONT Magazine, volume 5, number 4, March/April 1994. Video documentation of two realizations of TV Freenet are available in the collection of the Western Front Society.

(*) The Decca Dance, January 17, 1974, was organized by Image Bank, Lowell Darling, Willoughby Sharp, Ant Farm, General Idea, and Western Front. It was a celebration of Art's Birthday and a Mail Art Awards Ceremony that took place in Hollywood with a host of correspondence artists from across North America. Documentation is available on video in the collection of the Western Front Society.

(*) Slow Scan Television (SSTV) was a method for transmitting video images over radio or telephone lines. In Black and White it took 8 seconds to send an image, and in Colour, it took from 12 seconds (low-resolution) to 48 seconds (hi-resolution).

(*) Eternal Network is both a real network (put in place through Mail Art, correspondence, and later Telecommunications Art) and a philosophical proposal about the nature of network and knowledge. A brief text of the proposal is published in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, 1995, p. 8.

(*) The Artist Run Centre movement in Canada started in the late1960s. Influenced by Fluxus and ideas of the "artist determined culture" that could (and should) exists outside of the control of institutions, many groups created their own gallery, studio, and performance spaces. In 1973, the Canada Council for the Arts decided to provide funding for several centres across Canada. This movement has continued to this day and includes both gallery spaces and media arts production centres.

(*) Hank Bull, "Conversation with over under around about to and for Robert Filliou," between Kate Craig and Hank Bull", published in Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, 1995, p. 64.

(*) Keith Wallace, "Introduction" to: Keith Wallace, editor, Whispered Art History: Twenty Years at the Western Front, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993, p. 2.

(*) Robert Filliou, "Whispered Art History", published in several places including FRONT Magazine, January 1990, p. 9 - within an article by Alain Gibertie, translated by Phillip Corner. This is the origins of Art's Birthday as related (paraphrased) above.

(*) Anna Couey. This idea was put forth in a loose Web-text communications art project from 1996. I have read two versions of it. It is posted at http://www.well.com/~couey/interactive/bull.html, as "A Conversation with Hank Bull", Interactive Art Conference on Arts Wire, November 1996. Related conversations on Arts Wire can be found at http://www.well.com/~couey/interactive/guests.html. This is a strange text to read if you don't have any personal knowledge of the participants. It is a conversation between friends that takes place over an extended period of time on the Web.

(*) .. devolve into .. (I and II) (2000 and 2002), http://absolutevalueofnoise.ca/2000_devolve/ and http://absolutevalueofnoise.ca/2002_devolve/online/

(*) Scrambled_Bites (2004), http://scrambled.aaeol.ca

(*) Reverie: noise city (2005), http://reverie.aaeol.ca

(*) Mawhrin_Skel (2006), http://aaeol.ca/pages/2006/mawhrin_skel/, and Preying Insect Robots (2006), http://absolutevalueofnoise.ca/2006_preying/. These are two projects that use low level wireless Internet devices to connect robots together in a network that makes use of the Internet without any human presence or intervention.

(*) Heidi Grundmann, "But is it Radio?", published on-line at http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/grundmanntext.html.

(*) Radiotopia (2002), http://www.kunstradio.at/RADIOTOPIA/ (*) (2002), quote from the "call for participation", posted on-line at http://www.kunstradio.at/RADIOTOPIA/

(*) Lynn Hershman Leeson, editor, "Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture", Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. (*) ibid. "Clicking In".

(*) "Walled City" was described in Idoru by William Gibson, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1996.

(*) Heidi Grundmann, editor, Sound Drifting, Introduction, Vienna: Triton, 2000, p. 3.

(*) George Case, Silence Descends, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997.

(*) "Poetical Economy" was an idea put forth by Robert Filliou, initially as part of a manifesto: "A problem, the one and only, but massive: money, which creating does not necessarily create. A Principles of Poetical Economy must be written. Write it." (Robert Filliou: From Political to Poetical Economy, Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, 1995, p. 21.)

(a) There are many related essays on-line at http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/

(b) Annemarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, editors, Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005. Contains many interesting essays on telecommunications and artist-activist networks.

(c) Judith Barry, Public Fantasy, London: ICA, 1991. This book has little to do with network and a lot to do with capitalism and shopping. The essay "Casual Imagination" influences .. devolve into .. (2000) and its relationship to architecture. Something that I was reading as I was writing this ..