Telematic Manifesto!

Write a telematic manifesto proclaiming your belief or disbelief in the Net as a medium for artistic and therefore personal and social transformation. Whether you are a cynic, transcendentalist, lurker, or anarchist, you must state your position with commitment and passion. Where do you stand? Imagine you are a Futurist, Surrealist or member of the avant-garde, how do you arouse your fellow artists to follow your lead? Perhaps you think the Net will fulfill the aspirations of your highest ideals as an artist, or maybe you think it is the demise of art as we know it. Possibly you think you can use the net as an artistic medium to stage the revolution. You might even think the Net is irrelevant and useless to the artist. I don't care, but state your belief with great aplomb!

Like all manifestoes, the telematic manifesto must be without "artifice." You must use the simplest materials available to the web artist. No Flash, not even graphics! Here we are going to discipline ourselves in order to exploit the essential nature of the Web to its full potential. In this project, HTML rules! You can express yourselves fully with text, with tables, with the endless variety of typography. You can employ rules, frames, and layers. A rainbow of web colors can be used in backgrounds, layers, and tables. But no graphics! No jpegs, no gifs!

Construct your manifesto as a non-linear, hypermediated, live multimedia document. That mean's inviting the viewer to navigate your ideas and concepts, to explore the text. Use pop-windows, frames, or simple branching structure to create a more dynamic, personalized reading of your manifesto.

After we carry out this assignment, you will be working on a series of assignments that employ dynamic media: sound, animation, and video. But for now, we must state our telematic manifestoes with great emotional passion and with a strict economy of means. Complex and powerful ideas don't necessarily require fancy materials! Go for it.

Randall

See my Telematic Manifesto as part of ZKM's Net_Condition show.