Humans are an animal species that is particularly good at communication, and some have argued that radical changes in communication have brought about radical changes in societal organizations (Goody, Ong, McLuhan).

One of the most recent of those developments is the arrival of mass discussion through the Internet. While the first issue in modern communication technology is that there wasn't so much of a response (actually, this was a criticism that Socrates and Plato had regarding writing), now the issue is that we have perhaps too much of a response, and that it could get lost in noise.

Still, everyone has something to say, and should be afforded a way to say it.

This quote by Bertolt Brech touches on the limitation of communication media, predating the internet:

Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.

Mail art was almost more of a social phenomenon than an actual artistic object: it was about a different kind of expression (than face-to-face) and a different kind of relationship. Such a relationship proved to be more intimate, more personal, than something that would be in the open, and visible to all.

This kind of current evolved mostly into creating networks of people, with meetups and fan clubs popping up somewhat spontaneously.

If such a focus is going to be on the process, then it is necessary to ensure active discussions rather than passive discussions. Such activity could be encouraged by the users themselves, and perhaps also by the medium through which they interact. Mail art disappeared when postal rates went up, and concurrently when individuals moved to the internet to create new, or pursue existing, communities.

The web kickstarted net.art, a practice in which the encounters, the developments and the relationships built by humans become more important than the final product. Those final products, the physical manifestations, act as a proxy for the unspoken, the unspeakable.

The image here is taken from skinonskinoskin, an artistic website which chronicles the development of a romantic relationship between the two artists.

For more traditional net.art, you can check out the Net Art Anthology hosted by Rhizome.

The first image is from Reddit, the r/Place experiment, which took place over 72 hours in 2017. Each user could only put one pixel every hour on a large canvas. The emerging patterns were fascinating.

The second image comes from Journey (thatgamecompany, 2008), which is a somewhat of a multiplayer game: two players find each other in the desert, and can only communicate through a very limited glyph system, and must solve puzzles in order to get to the top of a mountain.

The last image is from EVE Online (CCP Games, 2003), a complex enough system which can support the creation of complex socio-economic structures, such as corporations, banks and organized mafia.

"the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.". This has a profound implication in terms of collective meaning-making, and collective practice-making.

Because some would argue that the most important reality is the shared reality.

The question raised by Ascott in his essay Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? is whether or not we can find emotions (whether existing sorts or new sorts) within massively connected systems.

Pros are community building, new modes of interaction and collaboration (especially for 3D designers).

Cons are censorship due to corporate control, technological limitation and negative impact of fine emotional cues.

This image is from Addie Wagenknecht's Data & Dragons piece, aiming at highlighting the physicality of IP packets.

ANT is a theory developed by Bruno Latour, highlighting that we are all more or less acting in the world. He chooses the word "actant" rather than "human" in order to diminish the human/non-human distinctions.