Site: Net Art at turbulence.org

mew Turbulence.org, produced in New York and Boston, is one of the primary English-language sites to curate Internet art. They regularly commission net art from the US and abroad; they have their own ably administered servers; the site has been up since 1996; their archive is probably the largest body ofcommissioned net art on the web; and they get 150,000 to 250,000 visitors per month. Turbulence.org is produced by Helen Thorington, Jo-Anne Green, and Jesse Gilbert. Prior to Turbulence, Thorington and Régine Beyer produced the New American Radio series (http://www.somewhere.org), which also commissioned artists. It was aired on American public radio and, occasionally, abroad. Some of that work is notable in its treatment of radio/recorded sound as literary media. The works by Gregory Whitehead (http://www.gregorywhitehead.com) and Susan Stone, for instance, are thrilling in their development of "audio writing ," composed with voice, microphones, razorblades, multitrack tape decks, and mixing boards. The engagement with language is strong but, unlike radio drama, could not easily be rendered in print media. It treats radio and recorded sound as seriously as literary media. Turbulence is known for the intermedial nature of its curated work. Again, the intent is to fund artists serious about creating art that is realized in/for its particular medium. Turbulence.org is not a specifically literary site, nor is it specifically focused on visual or sonic arts (etc.); instead, Turbulence encourages the development of net art that requires the network and synthesizes different arts, media, and programming. This isn't always what appears on Turbulence, but it's at least hard to imagine most of their art appearing in traditional media. Once a decision is made, based on proposals and past work, to commission an artist,|, it's up to the artist as to what to produce. Turbulence funds the artist and then§§l hopes for the best. There is no proof, and probably never will be, that there are thought processes of which humans are capable and computers are not. To say as much is to emphasize the radical flexibility of computers as compared with non-programmable machines. This also suggests that computers are not simply computational or communications media, but are potentially as protean in their functionality as we have imagination and knowledge to make them. Computer art, then, is challenged to take this flexibility to its provisional limits. The producers of Turbulence, like some of their artists, seem well aware of this challenge. Not all of the art at Turbulence has been commissioned, and the work in the "Spotlight" section is a case in point (http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight). One of the strongest programmerly works in this section is Thinking Machine 4 (http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking) by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak. Thinking Machine 4 is a chess-playing program that shows you what it's "thinking" via the drawing of filamental lines on the virtual board. You get a sense of which moves it's considering and how seriously it's contemplating each move. The visual display is appealing. The machine is not so expert a chess player that you stand no chance. But neither is it inept. It's an entertaining game, and the cogitations of the AI are revealed with art. Wattenberg has a PhD in mathematics and Walczak is an architect. Turbulence also curates projects by other types of artists who are more traditional in thenorientation . David Crawford's Stop Motion Studies (http://www.turbulence.org/ studios/crawford)—photographic works manipulated in Macromedia Flash—have become well known since their appearance on the site. The photos are taken in and around subways in different cities around the world. We see people reacting to a stranger taking their picture repeatedly at close quarters. As Crawford says, "The body language ofthe subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage" (http://www.stopmotionstudies .net/smsl3). The subjects' attitudes toward Crawford's photographic intrusions are subtle in their emotional resonance and guarded vulnerability. Turbulence exhibits some unusual literary work too, such as exegesis (http:// www.turbulence.org/Works/exegesis) by Kushal Dave, who...