Artist Statement
Carmin Karasic, November 2002

I make webart to effect social change in hopes of bringing about better living through cyberspace. All of my artwork is computer based and typically mediated via screenal reality. Continued increase in internet access has made webart the most accessible and least elitist artform, because the original artwork is readily available. The web is my venue. So my webart can be seen in its original form for free, anytime, anywhere, by anyone with web access.

My artist ethics center on increasing awareness through art activism. Embracing a civil obligation to the global community, I believe it is a cyberartist's responsibility to provoke (re)evaluation of our systems through technology. I am concerned with perception from various perspectives. Reality is what we perceive it to be. Perception is subjective, so behavior and body language are interpreted through our personal filters. A true story can be very different as told from different perspectives. My art investigates alternative views, new connections, and interaction between edges. Gaps are the most interesting point of departure.

With the evolution of humans to bionic beings comes the fact that we have a data identity that exists in various databases. Just as my primary medium, pixels, represents image data, we too are digitized. Our personal information is used and abused in ways that are both known and unknown to us, whether we like it or not. We are always/already code. Who owns your data? Information and communication = the currencies and commodities of cyberspace. Information is power. How will the power of information impact cyber-economics, cyber-societies, cyber-evolution?

I would like to use innovative collaboration to increase social awareness via my art. I want to create dynamic artwork that is more personal and deeply interactive at multiple levels. This will require researching new technologies and working more often with immersive multispacial installations.

In this age of over stimulation and hyper-representation, today's artist, according to techno artist Roy Ascott, has a responsibility to create the art of becoming rather than art of existence; art that requires audience participation to complete the work. As an Ascott disciple I work with the esthetics of confusion, creating art that requires the audience to think about the work and come up with their own interpretation, which may be very different from someone else's interpretation, or even their own beliefs before seeing the particular artwork.

"In this technoetic culture, the art we produce is not simply a mirror of the world, nor is it an alibi for past events or present intensities. Engaging constructively with the technological environment, it sets creativity in motion, within the frame of indeterminacy, building new ideas, new forms, and new experience from the bottom up, with the artist relinquishing total control while fully immersed in the evolutive process. The viewer is complicit in this, interactively adding to the propositional force that the artwork carries."

“Turning on Technology” by Roy Ascott