#1 Please present and describe your activities

Since 2004 I am heading the Amsterdam Institute of Network Cultures. We organize decentralized research networks around emerging topics such as urban screens, search, online video, Wikipedia. By bringing together programmers, designers, artists and research we believe that we can narrow the time gap between innovative concepts developed by businesses and the critical response.

#2 How would you define digital art?

Digital art is not art made by computer or in digital form. What defines digital art is that it is reflective about its own materiality. Media/digital art informs us about the politics and aesthetics of the ‘media question’.

#3 What is your opinion of digital, its new applications and their implications ?

00001101000011101110011110. In short: the digital discriminates, between ones and zeros.

#4 Which three sites are, in your opinion, the sites that lead the way in terms of international digital creativity ?

‘Digital creativity’ still runs far behind in comparison to the tech business. If only it was otherwise. Imagine there was a digital avant-garde which developed the concepts for the IT industry and creates the aesthetic language for all the games, websites and dictates how the interfaces for the software should look like. Venture capitalists have always tried to prevent such a movement from occurring. It is not the fault of the engineers but of the particular way businesses are set up as ‘start-ups’. It also doesn’t help that the neo-liberal state is pulling its hands off arts and creative education and research, focusing on the applied sides of the ‘creative industries’ agenda. What we need instead is a right mix between critical and utopian work. But to answer your question, the sites that I look have been around for a while: Rhizome, Mute and We Make Money, Not Art.