Tatiana Bazzichelli 

Networking 2.0

An aesthetic, technological and social critique of collective art

This Ph.D. research proposes to analyze the roots of artistic practices and social intervention based on both analog and digital networked art, showing that the current artistic challenge of the Web 2.0 platforms lies in the invention of new courses of action and new contents developed by grassroots communities. I aim to advance upon earlier studies on networking using a cross-national design, refusing the idea that networked art is mainly technologically determined.

Objective: To investigate how networking practices in grassroots communities are able to change the model of production of Internet contents and artistic creations, connecting the development of hacker ethics with the creation of Web 2.0 social networking platforms.

Background: In the last half of the twentieth century Avant-garde art practices from Fluxus to mail art and hacker art have promised the creation of collaborative art and the production of new models of sharing knowledge. Today, these narrow practices have inspired the structure of the Web 2.0 platforms, reaching for the first time a huge mass of Internet users.Social networking platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and Second Life have established themselves among Internet users, representing a successful model of connecting people. But these platforms have their roots in a series of experimental activities in the field of art and technology started in the last half of the twentieth century which has transformed the conception of art as object into art as a network of relationships, possibilities of collectively intervening in the creation of an artistic product. For example, pranks and multiple singularity actions have direct references on the Luther Blissett Project and the Neoist network-web conspiracy; the figure of the artist as a creator of sharing platforms and of contexts for exchanging is part of a background of artistic and technological experimentation from Fluxus and mail art to hacktivism and net.art (Bazzichelli, 2006). The networking projects considered in this research act within the social and cultural fractures which constitute an important territory for the re-invention and rewriting of symbolic and expressive codes. Pranks and actions of culture jamming focus on continual poetic renewal (Vale and Juno, 1987), creating artistic, cultural and political new experiences, using the unexpected, and a deep level of irony and social criticism.

Hypothesis : Hacker ethics and techniques of networking developed in grassroots communities are being used as a model to increase the market of users in the Web 2.0. The principal success of a Web 2.0 company comes from the ability of creating communities and user generated content, referring to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies which have their main roots in networking art practices. I intend to showhow to create successful critical and creative routesthat involve "alternative" channels, compared to those dominated by the economy of the market and by commercial information. With a conscious use of technology, it is possible to activate an open process of creation, producing new models of technological and cultural intervention. A thread that connects networked art such as mail art, culture jamming  and hacker art with Web 2.0 social practices.

Themes: (a) Situationist, multiple singularity experiments in the Web 2.0; (b) Communities of artists and activists that use technology as channels for sharing knowledge; (c) Development of hacker ethics and networked art in the Silicon Valley and in the underground scene in San Francisco, California.

Main Supervisor: Søren Pold, Associate Professor, Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University.

Co-supervisor: Fred Turner, Assistant Professor, Communication Department, Stanford University, California.

Visiting Scholarship: From August to December 2009, this research is host by the Stanford Humanities Lab, Stanford University, California (as part of the H-STAR program in partnership with the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation).