Global participation enabled by increased Internet access also continues to inspire individual artists’ projects. What issues would they tell her are important? Participants are also asked to imagine meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Anyone can visit Opinion Space, where on a sliding scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” they register their responses to statements, such as “Climate change poses a threat to political stability around the world” and “The best way to empower a country's economic development is to empower its women.” How one’s personal responses to such statements correspond to those of other global participants is displayed in a visual “constellation” of viewpoints. This spring, working in collaboration with researchers at the US Department of State, students and faculty at the Berkeley Center for New Media (under the direction of Ken Goldberg) created Opinion Space: A Global Experiment in Open Dialogue, an experimental interactive website that uses data visualization models and statistical analysis to match and contrast participants’ opinions with the opinions of others around the world. Contingently, from Margaret Crane and Jon Winet’s America & The Globe, which focused on US presidential elections, to Nevada-based artist Joseph DeLappe’s use of the social networking environment Second Life to reenact Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March to Dandi, politics and viewpoint are an integral part of the dialogue, while at the same time, with a greater presence of new media in art schools and universities, younger artists are bringing new ideas and technologies to the field. Partially because communications-based media are frequently integral to the process, the history of communications art - which includes the Electronic Cafe International, the Send/Receive project, Roy Ascott’s La Plissure du Texte, and the work of Bill Bartlett, Liza Bear, Willoughby Sharp, Carl Loeffler, Do While Studio, Jean-Pierre Balpe, and Hank Bull, among many others - continues to inform new media art, as American digital artists work with colleagues in other countries.
And many of the artists who create in this field are bringing to maturity ideas and processes that they began working with more than twenty years ago. International cooperation, which has empowered a spirit of collaboration and the sharing of ideas among the artists in this field, continues to be an important component in the creation and exhibition of new media work. From computer-mediated poetry, read on a laptop computer while sitting in a wireless café in Paris, to touring works of performing arts, such as composer Pamela Z’s Baggage Allowance, an installation and performance based on her world travels, new media artworks are becoming an integral part of the global cultural environment.
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