Linium had brought up online collaboration and how to find "the way to produce interesting results for humans with all this computer power." The esteemable Philip Greenspun recently made some interesting comments on the nature of online art and the role of the Internet artist:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tZp&topic_id=22&topic=Ask%20Philip He states the challenge of online art thusly: "can N people working together on the Internet produce something that couldn't be produced by 1 person working alone or N people working in a room?" I'd have to readily agree with Greenspun's assement of collaborative online art as it has been attempted so far -- a good deal of it seems more like a game than vital art, or a whimsy with its own little "trick" to it. And how much is collaboration in art _ever_ desirable, or even possible? Yet there are probably ways to collaborate online, sharing data or producing toward some shared vision ... There is a kind of collaboration in sharing code under licensing that could also happen in online art, the same kind of collaboration that has long occurred in music, writing and design, and probably other forms too. Where once a work is finished and released it is quoted or sampled from, remixed or adapted. But online you can take a perfect copy of the whole thing home with you and that seems to be the difference: it's distributable. So you can have a giant gallery with a thousand works of art and all of them can be taken home to your own computer ... who knows what environments they would find themselves existing in. They could live out there on the net and you might run into them on the street. A second kind of artist collaboration the net makes easy is discussion. We need not be physically present to share ideas. While the physical rendezvous is still desirable for other reasons, this online discussion can also arrange more of them where they might otherwise not happen (eg. dorkbot). An earlier PhilG piece on the subject, published Dec99, is also worth reading: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,246419,00.html
