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MFRU

To explain how we exhibited net art, browser art, in the venues of that time – not only in Maribor – is quite a comical story. The viewer entered the space and saw beautiful museum cubes, intended for busts and modernist artifacts. These cubes displayed gorgeous, shiny, white, and gray monitors. Usually, there was a mouse next to them, and less frequently, a keyboard. It looked impressive, like a sculpture installation or a magazine of monitors. I'm kidding – it was extremely dull. There was a lot of plastic. We exhibitors were fortunate if we could display anything on a screen larger than 14 inches, but that would be a special occasion.

In addition to the exhibitions, presentations were also part of the events. I would sit on a stage with a monitor and a projection next to me, and the presentation would go like this: "Look, if I click here, I get there." Navigating the viewer through the work, which again is banal. The purpose of net art is for art to meet the user in the environment of their own home, where they can discover the work independently and be surprised and touched by it. With one's own mouse, one's own keyboard – that's how I believe net art should be experienced. However, at the aforementioned presentations, the viewers were put in a completely impotent position. I acted as their mouse, clicking at will, thus depriving them of the possibility of their own navigation. You could say that we were in a theater. But somehow, we couldn't avoid it. Of course, we made many attempts, but between 1995 and 1999, no particular alternative succeeded. We were left hoping that when the audience returned to their homes, they would adopt the technique for themselves.

Web-enabled monitors became a potential point of connection. The structure dedicated to the art exhibition was widely utilized for private purposes. When the gallery closed in the evening, there was a significant amount of new browser history that hadn't been there just that morning.

The mobility of technology was extremely limited, and we had no access to the internet in principle. There were creators traveling around the world, and they came to Maribor too, without access to the internet. In the gallery space, the monitors connected to the web, meant only for the operation of art projects, became a point of potential connection in an instant. The structure dedicated to the art exhibition was widely used for private purposes (laughs). When the gallery closed in the evening, there was a lot of new browser history that hadn't been there when it opened in the morning.

In 1994, Aleksandra Kostič and I attended the Ars Electronica festival and brought back much of what we had seen there to the MFRU format. We invited the first two, then three or even four artists from Linz, within our financial means. There was also an international group of net artists who were already world-famous at that time. They were considered not just artists but activists, working in relation to society and social issues. One of these aspects was computing; they were opposed to the big multinationals that were starting to push mass hardware and software.

In the third edition of the festival in 1997, we focused on the interactivity of computer artworks, which was relatively difficult to present – there was almost no equipment, and what was available was too expensive. The settings were very spectacular; there was a default promise that something would happen, taking you somewhere else and then returning you to the original place. The spectator was the creator of their own scenography, their own story. They were the director of their own interactive film. The latter was not to be exhibited in too complex a way, as the very principle of technology was something rather new and alien.

The period after that was marked by the expansion of computer use and the Arnes network, mainly dedicated to research, artistic, academic content, and non-profit activities, primarily in the academic sphere. The commercial side of the web began to emerge, along with various service providers. How did that manifest itself? People were surprised and delighted. Through the prism of usability and interactivity, art was seen as a kind of game - Homo Ludens, the playing man, in a new relationship, a new symbiosis - communicating with the machine.

The whole new media art presented at festivals became a way of marketing new products. Artists became a kind of promoters for big developers. When you use technology in an artistic medium, showcasing its interesting sides - how it looks, how it sounds, what it can do - there is widespread popularization at work. Today, there is no app, interface, or program that has not been used to create an art project. In this respect, it is worth pointing out that the multinationals have succeeded. Artists, and this is the worst aspect, have often done that marketing for free. The companies have supported this type of activity extremely poorly. I see Ars Electronica becoming a real technology fair, where art is often the promotional, decorative element.

The settings were spectacular: there was a default promise that something would happen, take you somewhere else, and then return you to your original place.

The reason why it became increasingly important to work in a humane, open-source, and egalitarian manner was to utilize software that is a shared repository of knowledge, behaviors, and formulations. However, everything was eventually commoditized, making it difficult to maintain this approach. At one point in history, Slovenia purchased Microsoft software as the country's central software tool. I would argue that the Slovenian software guild began to collapse at that very moment. The central tool of the state shifted away from the humane, humanistic, and accessible commodity. Not only Slovenia, but the entirety of Europe lost its independence in the field of information and communication technologies and the Internet. It relinquished its own programmers, its own quality, and its own free providers. We were promised security, but instead, we were given control.