hello all,

It is quite nice to see a list again that starts with lots of
introductions...
My work has developed from making radio programs (1991 to 1998) to
writing (1996 to now). I am a critic and writer, living and working in
Amsterdam. I have focussed on art in new media, specifically the
internet, since 1993. In my work I was already investigating the
relationship between the arts and human interaction, psychology and
the body (especially neurology) when I did a lot of work at V2 (an
institution for the electronic arts, now based in Rotterdam, NL) which
in that year focussed on the body and the electronic arts. I
interviewed David Blair, Robert Adrian, Gerfried Stocker, Karl Dudecek
& Ponton Media Lab, Nick Baginski and others that year. Their
explorations of the developing media space of computer networks
connected to and also seperate from older media networks made me
decide to explore art created with and on the internet. The
'traditional' art world of dominant art objects (paintings and
sculptures) had made no sense to me for a long time already. It did
not seem to connect to how I experienced the world and also art at
all. I think art in and around electronic media open up and change the
art world drastically, even if one of its central problems (the very
conservative art market) is still mostly untouched.
After getting online myself only in 1995 I soon started to get in
touch with artists working mainly with the internet, via the
communities that were developing via media labs and mailing lists, of
which nettime was the most important one back then. I wrote a text
about this which you can find here:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/bosma.htm
After being occupied by exploring the 'scene' of net.art for a while I
have been getting more interested in getting a grip (understanding) of
the development of art and culture at large through the various
medialandscapes. The online communities have changed tremendously in
the short time I have been online, which has also forced me (like many
others I think) to change my way of working. More people online meant
basically an enforcement of offline situations online, and
this caused for instance a bigger distance between people of different
professions or occupations. It has become very hard to have a
conversation between artists and critics that does not escalate or
which escapes prejudicial and cliche exchanges. For this reason I
decided to start a very small and intimate list for critics and others
that have proven to engage in a critical debate around network art in
an interesting way. This closed collaborative network produces a very
irregular newsletter called CREAM (collaborative research into
electronic art memes).
http://cream.artcriticism.org
We have been having ideas of changing the cream site for more then a
year now, but since it is created by volunteers (I hate that word, but
of course it means we are not paid to do it and therefore have other
work that comes first) this turned out to be a slower process then
we'ld like it to be. We'ld basically like to have a space for texts
and comments from non cream contributors and also more focus on
'context' (art critical texts, other sites, other initiatives), next
to our own work.
I am curious for the conference Trebor and Geert want to set up, and I
would like to see in which ways we can still explore the creation and
inner workings of mediated social networks and communities as a basis
for research and development in the arts. What does still work and
what doesn't? Of course we cannot seperate the answer to those
questions from what it is we want to achieve. I often find a sense
of goal, of direction, missing in many debates and presentations
around these issues.

warmest greetings,Josephine