Nora York, "Fox Fire,"
netcast presented live on
May 1, 1998.

On the receiving end, a netcast is slightly disynchronous, as sound and image signals are sent out separately; depending upon the congestion on phone lines, images and sounds may link, then go out of phase. Some artists view this as a unique feature of netcasting that may be expoloited, as Irina Danilova and Steven Ausbury did in their performance Mir is Here, a meditation on inner and outer space, private and public space, which looked very much like images beamed to Earth from NASA's Apollo missions. Others view animation as a new visual tool, as Nora York's employment of Nancy Spero's images to augment the impact of her songs attests. Mark Fox created little bodies (puppets) especially for the scale of netcasting so that the figures would fill the small netcasting screen. Most profoundly, netcasting differs from presenting in other media because it may be viewed at the audience member's discretion; after the live netcast had been aired, it was stored on Pseudo Program's server to be viewed later from any point on the globe.

During Franklin Furnace's second netcasting season, I was struck by how artists (often dancers) were unwilling (perhaps because they view their bodies as their instruments) to make the leap from the human body to the body of the net, with its parallel circulatory system and interactivity. The netcasting experience was sometimes viewed as a means of broadcasting existing work, rather than a new art medium to be explored. (Granted, artists were still given only six hours of production time with Pseudo equipment and staff, so the artists who really wished to exploit the Internet as an art medium often did so on their own time, and at their own expense.) For THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT 2000, Franklin Furnace's current season, we have reconceived this program as a series of month-long residencies in collaboration with Parsons School of Design, Digital Design Department, so that artists have access to the entire range of digital vocabulary (i.e. not just netcasting) and sufficient time to create "live art on the Internet" - whatever that may be.

Someone asked me what I would have done if I had had all the money in the world, and I had to admit I would probably be the director of a downtown art emporium today. I miss live performance, the smell of the beansprouts, the roar of the crowd. Going virtual has not been easy, but it has been challenging and important. Perhaps this contemporary moment bears comparison with the "golden age" of American avant-garde practice in the 70s, when artists were encouraged to experiment wildly; the Internet is still a wide open frontier with very few fences (read: censorship) in place. Giving artists access to a "team" of programmers, engineers, designers may change not only the art and the definition of artist as a lonely dude in a garret, but the potential of art to affect broad social concerns-to change the world. This is the time for artists to get their underground ideas to the broadest possible audience through the convergent art medium I believe the 20th century spent itself looking for.