couey@well.com

Initially, I experimented with materials---first with fiber found in my immediate environment, such as branches and paper towels---then with industrial fibers, wire and wire mesh. I began to feel that object making was unnecessary, something that relegated art to the realm of commodification, and I became interested in art as process, at once ephemeral and active in the world. When I was introduced to computers, in particular computer-mediated communications, I began to think about weaving language from virtual conversations. Such a weaving would have a basic structure (metaphorically, warp and woof) in its connection of people from diverse geographic, cultural and social backgrounds and in the theme of the conversation. The actual conversation was the weaving itself, made by the participants.

On-line communication fascinated me because of its ability to connect people in new ways, to be a conduit for new social communications constructs. Words from John Cage and Bertolt Brecht influenced my approach to artmaking:

We are getting rid of ownership, 

substituting use. . . .

Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, 

but a hammer with which to shape it.

The telecommunications projects I have designed are attempts to construct social communication systems that can be used to make things happen. I hope that, in this way, art can cease to be a system of representation and instead become a useful and active force for people. A chronology of experiments towards these ends follows.

In 1990, I organized Virtual Cultures, a collaboratively produced on-line work that explores the idea of opening a communication loop. Virtual Cultures was designed for Cyberthon, a 24-hour conference on virtual reality, as an open participation panel using computer conferencing to connect self-selected panelists from cyberspace to self-selected panelists on site. The panel discussion was to focus on cultural applications of virtual reality, including computer networks. I used the structure of open participation to underscore its role as a virtual reality application. Virtual Cultures sites were located on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) in the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) conference and Usenet (alt.artcom), as well as a physical site at the Cyberthon conference. The ensuing discussion was shared with all sites. Participants included artists, futurists and scientists. Over time discussion topics included not only social and cultural aspects in cyberspace and speculations about the future culture of on-line communities as they grow, but how our brains work to engender new forums of perception.

For Virtual Country (1990), I invited users of ACEN conference on the WELL and the alt.artcom newsgroup on Usenet to collectively invent a country in cyberspace. User postings included laws and policies, myth and politics, and personal experiences and exploits inside the virtual country.

Cyber Encounters (1991) was an a/synchronous on-line event that took place on ACEN on the WELL and alt.artcom in conjunction with a live presentation at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (NYU). The theme was human interaction in computer-mediated space and/or machine/human interaction in computer-mediated space. Virtual participants were invited to design an encounter with which to greet an in-person audience at NYU. The resulting encounters included an exchange of business leads (Carl Eugene Loeffler), emailed sentences about people we loved (Judy Malloy), a question about greatness in art and science (Barry Shell), reconstituted news (The Normals), a virus (Fred Truck), a poem (Vernon Reed), the invocation of a cyber spirit (Artur Matuck).

I organized Communications Across Borders (1991) to initiate an international movement for reciprocal cultural communications via computer network. As a project of ReFlux, a network communications sculpture that Artur Matuck produced for the Sao Paulo Biennale, Communications Across Borders had nodes in several North and South American countries. The project encouraged participants to devise solutions to inequitable network distribution as electronic sculpture. Chuck Welch, a.k.a. Crackerjack Kid, contributed an essay about mail art as a low-tech communications system in use around the globe, linking developed and developing countries.

For Cultures in Cyberspace (1992), I connected members of five electronically and geographically diverse cultures to talk about the impact of cyberspace on distinct cultural groups and vice versa. Participating sites were Dakota BBS, a rural and Native American bulletin board service; ArtsNet, an on-line system for artists and arts organizations in Australia; the virtual communities conference on the WELL, a virtual community; the newsgroup alt.cyberspace; and Arts Wire, an on-line system for artists and arts organizations in the United States. In this work, the WELL and Arts Wire were dominant sites, due in part to the conversational nature of those on-line communities and to the variable state of social network protocols and Internet connectivity.

Imagining the Information Age (1993), was a project to broaden political discourse concerning the National Information Infrastructure to include lived experience, dreams, traditions, art and other modes of perception usually excluded from national policy making. Four nodes: Arts Wire, a class of at-risk high school students in San Diego, Women's Wire and ACM SIGGRAPH, were each charged with creating their ideal fictional Representative. Cyberspace served as the site for the fictional Representatives to meet to chart a course for the future. All sites except for SIGGRAPH created a woman Representative. Half the Representatives were absent for the duration of their meeting; the others bickered among themselves.

Imagining the Information Age: Stories/Visions (1994-- 1995) invited participants from two nodes to tell of experiences, histories and dreams to be woven into the digital fabric that forms the future. The work was intended to connect a lower income, predominantly Latino community and the multimedia community. I established a World Wide Web site that both nodes accessed to read and post contributions. In practice, participants from the two communities were often the same: artists.

Each of the above projects are experiments for a methodology of art that works. As I have increasingly reached into real- world cultures and communities for project participants, I have come to believe that systems of art-making are only part of the process for collaborative work that blurs the boundaries of art and real life. I find myself looking towards the work of community organizers for inspiration on ways to truly involve communities, to pass the work of art from an art-world concept to a force that matters to the people who build it.

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