After a brief hiatus and catch-up returning from my trip abroad, I'm back at it and am launching into a new set of projects.  Following the Ars Electronica experience I'm putting together a presentation of the events and exhibits as a tool to discuss New Media and Digital Art with students as an introduction to the topics and current state of the field.   

Code :: Online Exhibit of Open-Source Net-Based ©ode Art
On to the topic at hand...  I just noticed this Call for Submissions from the Rhizome website. Web and performance artist David Jhave Johnson is curating a presentation of net-based art and writing as part of the online, artist-run Year01.  Year01 operates as a network for the dissemination of digital culture and new media through web based exhibitions, site-specific public art projects, an extensive media arts directory, and the Year01 Forum - an electronic art journal.

This request focuses strongly on a requirement of web programming rather than merely the web as a presentation medium.  More interestingly this show will present the actual programmatic code, the nuts and bolts of these pieces, as a downloadable document.  Bringing art code into the Open Source arena offers some fascinating opportunities in allowing artists to build on eachother's work.  Like commercial code, open source is a challenge to individual credit for work.  Programmer artists lose the ability to maintain a uniqueness through a distinct bit of code that they wrote to which no one else has access.  Some questions arise as to how to license such documents.  They are technology in that they perform a specific act which may have value to others, but they are also art objects which may have no practical application.  Is it plagiarism if an artist downloads another artist's code and presents a derivative work based on the same underlying technology?