yes I was aware of the two shows and their common name/ artists. However I think they were probably quite different. The ICA show was very low key, just a few old monitors in the media room, where as the show in Oslo sounds like it was on a much grander scale.

I’ve exhibited in number of traditional galleries but all my work to date has really been designed to be viewed in the familiar surroundings of people’s own homes or offices and to best function in those intimate, lean-forward contexts, sat at a desk, with mouse and keyboard at hand.

I get the impression that the transition from being an exclusively web based artist to one that regularly exhibits in traditional galleries is viewed as a kind of graduation. The institutional framework of the traditional gallery still seems to be seen as necessary to legitimize artists and their work even if their work is not particularly suited to the gallery context.

Rather than the web space / real space dialectic I am currently more interested, as I have outlined on my blog, in focusing on ways to address the shortfall in substance and content in my own work and code based art in general.

ps. Generative-x (curated by Daniel Brown and shown at Onedotzero9) and Generator.x are two different shows, the name coincidence can is unfortunate, think of it as simultaneous co-invention. Of course, the fact that a lot of the same people were involved makes it more confusing still.

It is a key problem for interactive and generative screen based artists, how to successfully make the transition from the intimate, small scale, lean-forward, desktop origin to the larger scale, stand back, public space of the gallery.

With a traditional painting or a drawing the artist will in general take frequent steps back to attempt to view their work in progress as their eventual audience might, imagining it on a wall somewhere or in a gallery. This means that all the way through the process of creation the traditional artist is able to check how well the piece will function once completed and transferred to the gallery wall. It is a much larger and less direct leap of imagination for the creator of a generative / interactive screen based artwork. The artists that I know who create generative screen based artworks, invariably do so sat at a desk inches from a screen, a mouse or touch pad in one hand and a keyboard at their finger tips. The work they create is a response to this context and may work well within it, but the gallery context is very different. One can’t help but wonder if the traditional gallery is really the right place for this kind of work, and further that if it were not for the money and prestige that is still sadly only available to these artists through exhibiting in traditional galleries, whether they would bother to do it at all?

I also believe that generative / interactive screen based art is on the whole still yet to find it’s true voice. The main proponents Reas, Fry, Levin et al, have all produced work of note but I still feel that the majority of work produced in the field to date can best be viewed as early explorations, of a new medium, a new language. The past few years have been more about establishing a grammar than constructing meaningful sentences.

I believe that the real content/ substance will come, but perhaps not until code based art loses it’s novelty factor and it’s more formal preoccupations and instead is treated as just another medium for talking about more everyday human struggles and triumphs.