10 good reasons for net.art

[Anna Balint]

>  This whole net.art thing is depressing me. Why should I bother? It's like
>  playing video games for five hours. You built a city or saved the princess
>  or whatever but at the end of the game you look outside and nothing's
>  changed.
>  
i guess you  were just testing whether anybody reads your messages.
let's see what did change in the last decade, just at the level of
the obvious

- people still debate whether prostitution or censorship is older,
whereas in the last decade censorship lost more ground than ever
in history. Once the text of  Faust was changed by the censors
after Goethe died, censors made the opera singers say in
Mozart's Don Juan  'hapiness' instead of 'freedom',
Goncharov was censor in Saint Petersburg for five years
while he wrote his Oblomov... and now we talk about censorship only in
certain countries, regions, or we talk about difficulties of access.

- sociology of reading showed that people read more since there is
internet, and also that compared to push media that generates consumers,
the internet is much more a participative medium, more people are producers
themselves, and everybody with an email changed his communication habits

- whenever the tools and materials of writing have been changed, the writing
changed as well. Starting from the Roman letters that we still use:
the different Roman capitals, the capitalis quadrata and capitalis rustica
apperead together with the inscriptions written with small peels, the Serif version of capitals was engraved in predrawed forms, the different roman cursives changed aspect according to the writing tool, stylus or calamus, the uncial and half-uncial writing appered on the payrus or pergamen of the codices, the first printed books used the gothic antique letters of the manuscripts, in the North of Europe, and the humanist antiqua letters, in the South of Europe, that were the source of inspiration of the Venetian typographs when they formed the different new kinds of letters used in printing  and replaced the mauscript letters- the letters of Nicolas Jenson that became famous under the name Venetian antiqua [the Morrisson and Goudy
letters of the 20th century are basically the same]. The renaissance antiqua, the letters of Francesco da Bologna and Claude Garamond, those fantastic beautiful letters, the first ones that had also cursive version [the Garamond was the first letter family], the letters of Luca Paciole and his letter drawing schemes in his work Divina proporzione, Leonardo da Vinci, Geoffroy Tory de Bourges, Albert Dürer, his Underwysung der Messung mit Zirkel und Richstheyd also became models for the next generations of engraved letters for
centuries. They inspired the baroque antiqua, the so called Dutch antiqua, the letters of Cristoph van Dyck, Anton Janson and I.M. Fleuscmann, and also the English letter types, the letters of John Baskerville, the classicist letters of Francios-Ambroise Didot and Firmin Didot and Giambatista Bodoni. The egyptian and grotesque letters of the XIXth century appearad together with the advertisment and poster culture, the letters of William Caslon, Robert Thorne, Jakob Erbar, and specially the grotesque of Eric Gill, and the Futura grotesque of Paul Renner, are very much used nowdays as well, also the
egyptienne mletters of Vincent Figgins used originally in the magazine and newspapers. Than the lynotyp and monotyp letters of the typograhy machine, brought new letters from the end of the XIXth  century and beginning of the XXth century, the Times New Roman engraved by Stanley Morrison, and all the
erenewd forms of Renaissance letters: the Italian Old Style and
the Century of Bruce Rogers, the letters of F. W. Goudy that were originally venetian Ranaissance antique letters, the Palatino of Hermann Zapf, the Trump- Medieval of Georg Trump, the Berling of K. E. Forsberg,  and  also new kind of typography machine letters, those of Konrad F. Bauer and Walter Baum known as Imprimateur or Horizon, Victor Hammer's uncial inspired from the medieval uncial writing, the Mosaik of Martin Kausche, the sans serif antique letters, the Sahl, the Midleton, the Pascal of Rudolf Koch and H. Kühne, the Optima of Hermann Zapf, the callyggraphic letters. All of these, also the Courier of the typing machines have trancend on the computer screen and web
pages.

But i hardly discover computer fonts, computer letters, also the
graphicians use use post-script design programs.
I miss very much the screen fonts - the Word Perfect program had it,
and I am still amazed that the Word Perfect and Microsoft Word competion of the publishing houses ended with the Word's triumph, specially that in multilingual environments Words caused physical pain, while the Word Perfect handled very well East European languages also, and it still manages presently languages and fonts better than the Word.

The switch of the paper based production print to the appearence on the screen did not result so far in anything new.  oops, there is now a Microsoft Sans Serif and a Reference Serif - reference? - that remind too much of the Tahoma
letters, and are not easier at all to read on the screen. But this is not so
suprising - since the Hungarian letter engraver Misztotfalusi Kis Miklos wrote in his diary that people carried with wheel-barrows the money to his atelier in Amsterdam in the 17th century, the rewards did not change in this matter.
Nor it is surprising the  Microsoft Windows layout invented on the image of the white business-man, with his briefcase and his calender that also a source of pain whenever i open the computer. What is surprising is thet Microsoft, even if Bill Gates preserves and hides content and copyrights, he is  still not a significant content provider. Gutenberg at his time divided and multiplied:
'a manuscript page costs xx amount of money, from this sum the paper costs xx, the binding xx, the fee of the scriptor xx, and finally the book costs xx. But now, if I replace the scriptor's work with the printed letters, if i print xx exemplaries, with xx pages, i will earn xx money.' he knew perfectly that he need many exemplaries of books with many pages. Now is there a book that could be sold in many exemplaries? The Bible! And something that is even more promising, the Missale- the ceremony book of the Roman Catholic Church that all priest have to buy. Gutenberg counted that with the money he was going to
earn with a thousand copies of the Bible, he could buy the whole city of
Mainz.

Nowadays i see new font and screen design only trough visual poetry -
it looks that changes will take a while, but they will certainly come. I look up every day what did change, a habit that i recommend to try for all change-sceptics.

[While the ways content-editing of the texts owe a lot to the hypertext, the typographic mirror is also a domain where i hardly notice any change.
I would say that till present the classic visual poetry, strating from the
lettrist movement, and  the artists books  in the 20th century than were much more innovative than the webpages are nowadays.
Not even the pragmatic deterioriations started in printed matters were
reveresed on the web. The new paragraph starting at the margin of the page was introduced by the adminstration in the US in the 60's in order to save paper (what an influential bureacracy!), i cannot understand why this style persist on the web pages, while it reduces considerably the legibility. I have less hope about the French versal letters with an accent, that could appeared since the economy reason does not have anymore to prevail.
Instead of new styles, new layouts on the web, one can state much more the deterioriation of the printed matter under the infleunec of the computer editing. Since the number of the designers increased in the computer era, the number of bottom quality prints has multiplied. I notice the face of the book designers paling almost each time when they open nowadays an expensive book, printed on quality paper, bind in expensive materials, but which present the various horrible typographic mirrors. Poor guys look to the sky and complain to Gutenberg.

But when I think also to the fantastic enthousiasm of the net.artist [who perhaps did not know much about mail art and underground art] who were freed from their national identity and could directly join, without the mediation of any institution the international scene, i could hardly say that nothing has changed. Also the representation of things and issues still slowly changes perhaps, also due to the radical change of communication. Probably this is about also the new upcoming exhibition at the ZKM, called temporarily the Crisis of Representation.

If i think back to the beginning of the nineties, where i had
to call an operator to speak with friends abroad and than wait days next to the phone, till due to some mystery the call could take place, or when i think that the secret police had also days off, so that i simply did not have a phone line in the week-ends, or if i rememeber what the phone operator told me when i was looking for my friend in the province "well, she has left already the shop, but she is not yet at home, you better call later", if i  look to my typewriter to which i owe the habit of hitting hard the keybord,  if i have to ponder the difference between carrying a laptop and a  heavy stencil machine, that we walked from one secret place to another, sometimes jumping through the windows with it, i believe, Eryk, that you simply had a bad day.

btw. syndicate moved two years ago, even this list has changed also a lot, isn't it? (into better)

greetings,
Anna