The Internet has opened up diverse possibilities of collaboratively making artistic products and presenting them to a global audience. The unrestricted access to free software on the net encourages process-oriented production and challenges users to conduct their own artistic experiments on their home computers. Growing individual skills in handling new media are a direct consequence of this development. At the same time, however, ever more powerful computers, faster transmission rates and new data-compression techniques are increasingly transforming the net into an entertainment medium that, aside from the active procedures of searching for and downloading files, allows its users to be passive listeners and viewers. While the peer-to-peer swapping of digital data seems ideal from the viewpoint of the home computer, the ‘old’ distribution industry denounces the practice as one it would like to see criminalized. Autonomous Internet marketplaces and formats that might be able to replace the classical forms of trading are proving slow to emerge. Just as the e-book has so far failed to succeed, micropayment on the net remains a rarity.
For artists, the ability to distribute a piece of work - whether music, video or a flash animation - over Internet platforms primarily means direct, fast access to a target group. To date, however, there is a lack of instruments and models that would enable artists to operate independently of the traditional value chains.
The panel is made up of artists and net distributors who present their work and discuss the following questions:
What does current Internet-based art production look like? What new artistic formats have emerged and which of these are appropriate for net distribution? Do niches or functioning models exist that make the production of artistic content profitable? Who are the actual ‘users' or, more accurately, ‘benificiaries’ of such models - i.e. who earns money through the content produced by the creative workers? How significant are notions like ‘author’ and ‘copyright’ in the digital age? Do new distribution channels automatically stimulate cultural diversity?