Network Art In A Lockdown Time
Ernest Edmonds

Summary

Ernest Edmonds, a Computer Arts Society member since the late 1960s, surveys five decades of network art and argues for its particular relevance during lockdown. He distinguishes art merely displayed on screens from art conceived for networked participation, pointing out that transmitted and reflected light produce fundamentally different perceptual experiences. Beginning with his 1971 'Communications Game' booths at Leicester Polytechnic, he traces a lineage of works in which participants affect one another's environments through switches, cameras, and generative code, influenced by Roy Ascott's early cybernetic writings. Later projects include 'Shaping Form', which learns from viewers over long periods, and 'Cities Tango', linking Belfast and Sydney through paired interactive screens. Edmonds describes current augmented-reality experiments with Microsoft HoloLens and Android phones connecting remote locations in England, Australia, and South Korea, and recent collaborations with Sean Clark. He concludes that network art can sustain communication and connection when galleries and theatres are closed, but only if artists engage critically with delivery across diverse devices, orientations, and platforms, treating variability not as a compromise but as a creative condition for genuinely cross-cultural, cross-continental art.

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