W12: Steve Dietz – Ten Dreams of Technology

This week’s reading was Steve Dietz on the Ten Dreams of Technology.

Dietz describes ten ideals shared amongst authors/curators when using technology as it intersects with artistic practice. These are: symbiosis, emergence, immersion, world peace, transparency, flows, open work, other, new art and hacking.

As we near the end of the semester and thus the end of the Networked Media course, it seems as good a time as any to reflect on how we may have tried to achieve some of these ideals, and how close we’ve gotten.

I feel that through the niki we’ve tried to achieve flow and a sense of openness. The setup of the niki as an assessment task certainly invites both of these, and I feel that through my collaborations in creating the Geocities page we’ve achieved both. However, as a collective, we are still entrenched in the habit of holding onto our work until we feel it is completely polished.

This may be a force of habit, after years of only ever submitting our best drafts of essays and projects. However, it may also be due to the nature of the internet and how it arguably fosters or enables a culture of hostility and aggression towards people’s work and opinion. Although this usually relates to forums, it does instill a fear of being judged when publishing rough or unfinished work online.

But, at the end of the day, even the most polished work can, does and should provoke a response from it’s audience (flow) – which is usually a sign of thoughtful, progressive or innovative thinking and/or practice.

The thing we probably haven’t quite yet achieved or even started to achieve is new art, as I’m yet to see a student in the NM course produce something truly new and innovative. Though it’s early days.