New York is a good place to make art out of trash, donated 
materials, and abandoned equipment you can find on the streets.
Unlike in years past when computer artists were obliged to 
work in institutions with big budgets, it's now possible
to use machines other people throw out and to distribute 
art works around the world electronically for almost no money.

Manifestations of this art need not be precious objects for 
collectors, because the sense of the art can arise from a 
dynamic potential-- from interplay between the artist and 
remote visitors who change the work.

		http://artcontext.com/draw

Such interactive drawings stray outside the lineage of printing 
technologies, which serves as one possible organizing theme for 
computer art of the past several decades.  Hard-copy output may 
be only a reductive translation when it refers to elaborate programmatic
structures that reveal their natures through a series of observations
and manipulations.  Nevertheless the print may represent a process of 
collaboration, and it may afford a glimpse of an encoded formalism that 
embodies values (as do all technologies and languages).  

Perhaps when the drawing software crashes, as it tends to do 
eventually, that's when the image is most complete.  Take a 
photograph of the screen.  The picture will be a death mask of 
computer mediated events, encounters, ideas.   

Let's not make that sort of mask, however, that idealizes and
hides faults; rather, let's confront the industrial supports that 
continue to gird and entangle us.  This too will advance computer art.  
For this greater system of profiteering, control, and exploitation 
issues most of the trash that must be recuperated, recycled, and 
transformed.


Andy C. Deck