http://net.artmadrid.net


This site hosts net.artmadrid.net—the first net art exhibition to be held in Madrid. Organized by the Centro Culturale Conde Duque, the participating artists were selected by José Luis Brea, editor of “Arts.zin,” critica online de las nuevas práticas artisticas, an e-magazine devoted to contemporary art. The site hosts the introductory text written for the exhibition, some articles that analyze the Internet as a new creative media, a list of the various projects created for Internet—including Victorial Elevation by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer—, and a brief presentation of each artist taking part.

http://www.impresacultura.com


This is the web site of the “Premio Guggenheim Impresa & Cultura,” an initiative of the Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim in Venice. Promoted by Confindustria, the ICE, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Philip Morris Europe S.A., the Veneto Region, and the newspaper “ Il Sole 24 ore,” the prize has been held every year since 1997. The award is aimed at those companies that have shown creativity in investing in culture as a strategic resource for development. The site, on which it is now possible to vote for one’s favorite project, is in Italian only. It provides details on how to take part in the initiative, lists the names of past winners, and contains information outlining the philosophy and objectives of the prize. Recently, the site has launched a further competition entitled “Il Circolo Virtuoso.” Open to artists, curators, organizations, and associations, participants are invited to present cultural projects of various kinds directly online. The winning proposal, chosen by a jury of experts, will be awarded online.

http://n2art.nu


n2art is the first project backed by a public fund for arts in northern countries and part of the “CultureNets” network—to which Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden all pertain—that represents a virtual space dedicated to net artists. Translated into six languages (English, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic), the site presents a virtual exhibition curated by Atle Barcley, Peter Hagdahl, Martin Pingel, Perttu Rastas, and Katrin Sigurdardottir. Amongst the projects created specifically for Internet are: Molecubes by Peter Fieldberg, The Way That You Love Me by Tore Nilsson, and Emma23 by Thomas Brommé. The site also presents “The 10^th City: Share Life,” a sort of online game in which visitors can share the same space, by exchanging audiovisual documents that relate their personal life histories.

http://www.newmuseum.org


Last November, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York launched the “media Z lounge.” This new exhibition space is devoted to showing videos, Internet projects, and the exhibition of works created with the aid of a computer or other forms of new media. Above all it is intended to serve as a meeting place for curators, artists, and all those interested in cutting edge artistic developments. Despite the fact that the American museum has an obvious interest in the “new,” the site has not been carefully designed. The images of the works on display in each individual exhibition are small and, at times, not clear; the text (generally white on a black background) is the most prevalent feature of the layout, standing out more than the images onscreen. Finally, the area devoted to the new “media Z lounge” does no more than present the schedule, without involving the visitors in any way.

http://www.e-2.org


Founded in 1997, e-2 is an English organization dedicated to the development of innovative projects in the arena of new media. Thanks to the multitude of possibilities offered by the web and, naturally, to close collaboration with a number of international artists, e-2 has produced a series of interesting works. Among the artists taking part in this project are Anna Best with her piece Error 404, a title that makes direct reference to a error that is commonly encountered when navigating; Gill Ord with Pigs Tails; Brighid Lowe with now here/nowhere, the work with which she won a Paul Hamlyn Award in 1998; and more recently Tomoko Takahashi, the Japanese artist who was a candidate at the last Turner Prize, with the project Word Perhec. This last piece was commissioned by e-2 and the Chisenhale Gallery, and realized with the technical collaboration of Jon Pollard, is a parody of the word processor. The artist reconstructs, in a creative and original way, a typical window of the program for writing, and puts a series of tools at the reader’s disposition, which they can use to interact with the program. The visitor can choose to write, for example, on a small used receipt or on a simple London underground ticket.