From the point-of-view of this net.art practitioner-plus-reviewer, it seems evident that various web/net/code artists are more likely to be accepted into an academic reification circuit/traditional art market if they produce works that reflect a traditional craft-worker positioning. This "craft" orientation [producing skilled/practically inclined output, rather than placing adequate emphasis on the conceptual or ephemeral aspects of a networked, or code/software-based, medium] is embraced and replicated by artists who create finished, marketable, tangible objects; read: work that slots nicely into a capitalistic framework where products/objects are commodified and hence equated with substantiated worth.
An example of this can be found when examining the exhibition and concentrated display-format changes of a projected net.wurk entitled _RE_WORKINPR_. In 2000, a group of netizens including Tom Bell, Brian Lennon, data]h![bleeder [myself], Everdeen Tree, Kevin Magee, akenaton_docks, Talan Memmott, Free The Radical, Diane Ludin and Jim Andrews - all active subscribers to various mailing lists such as Webartery, Rhizome, 7-11, Wryting, Syndicate, & various trAce forums - created a net.wurk [i.e. a series of fe][e][dback-&-forth content-altered emails] without any reference or overt acknowledgment of a primary author or a definitive substantiation/acknowledgement of the project progressing towards an established endpoint.
The resulting _RE_WORKINPR_ project is not easily definition-pigeonholed according to any traditional craft-oriented parameter, and is collaborative in the sense of a deliberate, cogent act whereby each contributor was aware of the process and contributed in light of this. The resultant art/net.wurk resides in nodal/fragment-states, and is accessible through mailing list archives and several hard-drives. However, a decision was made by certain contributors that _RE_WORKINPR_ should be published in the Beehive Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary Journal. In order to display the work, Talan Memmott and Ted Warnell (editors) proceded to reduce _RE_WORKINPR_ to a concrete, visually-loaded object/wurk that could be displayed in a Web browser and proceeded to attribute its primary authorship to Brian Lennon, despite his expressed desire that no one collaborator - or alternatively every collaborator - be identified in terms of authorship, as no primary author/agent acted to engineer the underlying rhizomatic structure of the work itself.
The reductionism employed during the [re]formatting of _RE_WORKINPR_ as an acceptable, concretely-definable artwork highlights problems surrounding the documentation and exhibition of projects that are essentially [via their implicit ephemeral natures] un-documentable in terms of traditional craft/object-display. The reductive approach used when seeking to [re]present _RE_WORKINPR_ also encapsulates what I find problematic when encountering Talan Memmott's work Translucidity. In this work, Memmott professes to examine issues revolving around identity, apparatus and networked realities, but seeks to do so through the utilisation of an object/package that emulates this via a confusing craft-production orientation, rather than employing a more reflexive - and ultimately - balanced format.
In relation to Translucidity functioning in terms of/as an apparatus/application, the dominant visuality of the work overloads [and overcodes] the weighting of the actual content. The work is conceptually rigid in its closed-ended approach to viewer comprehension, whereas a more holistic application representation could produce an eventual/imagined output which is lacking here & especially if the output is considered to be the user/viewers' learning/meaning curve. Memmott attempts an overall integration in terms of text as opposed to writing, but the intended shifting-dynamic aspect of the content seemed stilted by the heavy, almost excessive design format, with the resultant theory-faction mix diluted to an eventual incomprehensibility-point. Its design does display the now regulation sumptuous-Memmott trademark feel. This, however, can also be perceived as a deficit, in that the manifest content [i.e. the totality of the elements that seek to carry the comprehension loadings, both textually and graphically] does not convey a consistency necessary to merge these blocks into a package that conveys both the obvious software/application aesthetic and the complexities of experimental/objectified code/network language. My corresponding Webbing Suspension of Disbelief filter [which is employed when viewing a web/net/code work in order to establish whether the piece is consistent in terms of intention and delivery] unfortunately didn't stay active when absorbing Translucidity.
Memmott, T. (2001) "Translucidity". In frAme Journal of Culture &
Technology, Nottingham Trent University, UK
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/frame6/