SLAVE TO THE MACHINE: "Art and the front line"

Klaus-Dieter Michel has pulled down the shutters on his digital-art website, The Blinkface.  A notice announces, "Before NATO airstrikes and the horrible situation for the people in Kosovo, Serbia and neighbourhood don't stop remains this Net-Art site closed."  The sentence could have been mangled in some automatic translation software, but the message is clear.  While the bombings continue he is redirecting visitors to Virtual Heatwave 2: Anti.War.Art, one of several major online spaces where artists are responding to the Balkans war.  Its slogan: "Let creative energy speak against the manner of war."

Across history, war propaganda and art about war have collided.  But this is the quick-response version for the digital era, where artists can intervene in the public discourse almost immediately.  The pieces coming out of their digital foundries can be posted online within seconds, instead of waiting for the paint to dry or for the local gallery to have a window in its diary.

Michel's own piece, Pictures of a Bridge, transforms a tranquil, picture-postcard shot of a bridge in Novi Sad into its bombed wreckage and the word disconnected in bold red type.  Weak Blood has more anti-war art online, showcasing works by dozens of artists and poets around the world.  The shattered images flash by, slogans and anti-slogans stream across the screen, blood-red and black, the chaos of a war zone in hyperdrive.  The art is often primitive - strobing rectangles of frenetically animated GIFs and click-here commands - or touchingly simple.  One is a memento to a dead journalist, Slavko Curuvija, "born 9th of August 1949 in Zagreb, killed 11th of April 1999 in Belgrad."

These are passion-driven works, reflecting a wide range of political views.  Yet a striking feature of so many of them is, well, their sameness.  Many are text-heavy, crude propaganda, suffering from that recurrent problem of digital artists trying to balance the words and images.  Some pay no attention to the nature of the medium - they are flat poems or static images that would work equally well on the printed page.

Others seem in awe of the technology, with (let's get technical) 'blink' tags gone mad, fast-scrolling blipverts and amateur Javascripts.  Yet others are conscious satirical swipes at web-based technologies.  One piece is a clickable web-form of different Gray's Anatomy-type engravings (arms, legs etc), with the instruction: "Please mark the body parts you want to donate and press SEND - they will be submitted immediately to the crisis region…"

But We Are All Victims, by Milan-based artist Carlo Zanni, stands out because of its compelling narrative.  It opens with a doll-like figure, lying down, semi-surrounded by yellow plastic 'crime scene' tape.  The doll greets you with a text message - "Hi to everybody, my name is Valentina" - and invites viewers to press on her belly to find out why she is stretched out.  From this innocent beginning, Zanni's short tale in English and Italian has a macabre and disturbing twist, a violent modern fairytale for the global village...

Michael Cunningham

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