nettime

One of the people who frequented The Thing discussion forum in the early nineties was Pit Schultz. Schultz is an artist from Berlin who was involved in media art and media activism. He is currently part of bootlab in Berlin and is involved in the on air and online radio project Reboot.FM.Together with media theorist Geert Lovink he founded the mailing list nettime in 1995 at a meeting of artists, theorists and media activists at the Venice Biennale. [23] nettime can in some ways be compared to The Well in that its digital community was also very much based on a physical network. There was a strong emphasis on live nettime meetings in its early years, which have now been replaced by new initiatives (festivals, conferences) of veteran and new nettime members. This community is connected through a common interest in media activism and information politics, which might not seem the most likely crowd for artists to dwell among, but the accessibility and development of physical i.e. technical components of media and media access are of course of the greatest importance to media artists as well, whether they are socially or politically engaged or not. nettime can also be called

the theoretical backbone of the media labs from the mid-1990s. For a while it was the platform on which people who worked on similar projects locally could discuss various issues internationally (it still is, but the focus today is much more on activism and much less on art than in the first few years). Online exchanges could extend and enhance offline meetings or projects. nettime offered great possibilities for representation and many now wellknown artists published or presented their work there, where it had impact for the first time. The best known ‹nettime artists› are those commonly associated with ‹net.art›, but also artists like Jordan Crandall, Cornelia Solfrank, Ricardo Dominguez, Paul Garrin or Margarete Jahrmann took part in it and used it in various ways. Crandall, for instance, published beautiful, lyrical texts. [24] Jahrmann would post male versions of the then popular ASCII porn images as part of her «SuperFem» project. [25] Garrin, initiator of the «namespace» project which was supposed to break the monopoly on Internet domain name prefixes, hijacked the entire nettime mailing list population after moderation was installed, and called his version of the