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the Net as a space for re-invention…. The ‹WebStalker› establishes that there are other potential cultures of use for the Web.» [31]

Such as other cultures of use than those designed for us by industry, cultures that give us the opportunity to create, exchange and interact freely with the machine, with other people and with other cultures online. In other words, cultures that would like to see the Internet be more of a public space. Fuller has continued his experiments with software cultures in other collaborations. He has, among other things, worked as a writer and theorist for Mongrel, and his work has been very influential in the development and recognition of software art. He is also involved as a critic and juror in «ReadMe» and «RunMe.»

RunMe.org

While I/O/D was relatively alone in its experimental software practice in 1997, one cannot say that anymore today. The ReadMe-Software-Kunstfestival software art festival and its online database of downloadable software RunMe (initiated in 2002) are both initiatives of the

 

artist Alexei Shulgin and researcher/writer Olga Goriunova, who have taken software art to a new level. The ReadMe-Software-Kunstfestival Web site states why software art can be seen as art in the public domain: «Software art on the one hand brings software culture into the art field, but on the other hand it extends art beyond institutions (44)» Moreover the ReadMe and RunMe projects also function as intermediaries between the fields of art and open source software production. In the introduction to the ReadMe reader Shulgin and Goriunova write: «Art festivals … are often compromised by a lack of transparency in submission and evaluation processes…. Open source communities are much more democratic, but have their own drawbacks: they focus on functionality and pragmatic usefulness, thus sometimes leaving out interesting projects seen as unnecessary in these contexts.» [32] A funny extra to this project is that it seems as if the organizers and the jury (much in the tradition of the early work of Alexei Shulgin as a net.artist [33] ), could not help themselves from subverting software art as a clear-cut discipline. By installing the possibility of a sheer endless number of software art categories,

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