- The network as organic
- Interaction = community
- Implication of more than one reality

Roy Ascott - collaborative storytelling across continents

Excerpted from Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? Roy Ascott
“Telematics is a term used to designate computer-mediated communications networking involving telephone, cable, and satellite links between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions that are interfaced to data-processing systems, remote sensing devices, and capacious data storage banks... It involves the technology of interaction among human beings and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence and perception. The individual user of networks is always potentially involved in a global net, and the world is always potentially in a state of interaction with the individual. Thus, across the vast spread of telematics networks worldwide, the quantity of data processed and the density of information exchanged is incalculable… the question in human terms, from the point of view of culture and creativity, is: What is the content?"

Steve Dietz, commenting on the exhibition Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, on-line at Walker Art Center
“… artists use technology – and the Internet – to explore both the utopian desire for an expanded, global consciousness and the dystopian consequences of our collective embrace, willing or not, of computer-mediated human communications.”

“Telematic Connections is not fundamentally about technology. Nor is it an attempt to define a new genre of art practice. It is about what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos calls "the forces of the cave"—some of the eternal human traits that have never left us, including the desire to connect, even to merge with another.”

Art Works as Organic Communication Systems - Anna Couey
Published in Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications, a special issue of Leonardo (Vol. 24, No. 2)
edited by Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler, 1991

“The communities engendered via computer networks are organisms. Like physical communities they evolve and are influenced and defined through user participation. Like physical organisms, the extent of their impact on the ecosystem depends on their interaction with other organisms. Creative use of computer networks implies, from a user standpoint, experimentation with forms of communication and user interaction. From a systems standpoint, creative networking involves investigations into levels of user interaction in virtual space, community building and cross-pollination, or the creation of links between previously disparate communities. As organic communications systems, telematic art can initiate previously unknown behaviors and, over time, create operative new realities. Its meaning lies not in what it is (identity or objectification), but in what it effects."

MAKING ART ONLINE, compiled by Judy Malloy, was an ongoing database of artists' thoughts on data exchange, compiled as part of one of the first art web sites, CSIR's ANIMA, established in 1993. Following are artists' contributions:

Anna Couey
"Artists' use of networks to create art blurs boundaries between art, and social and political work. It establishes a potential for the preservation of distinct cultures and new hybrids. It offers the possibilities of public participation in the creation of new realities."

Robert Dunn
"The merger of collective imaginations in a collaborative endeavor is an entity perhaps beyond the comprehension of any single participating mind, which may yield societal organisms, communal thoughts, and consciousness of great potential and resonance. The power of converging minds amplifies in the open system contexts of networking."