Digital Space as Public Space?

“In terms of the current discourse that’s surrounding web-based practice (and the ways in which the public is using the internet), I don’t think that you can really deny that the web and the internet are public spaces. They may be public spaces with limitations but, after all, very few regularly populated public spaces in the ‘real world’ are completely unregulated by laws, social mores, or physical barriers either.

“Online the format is basically the same for everybody in the sense that there’s a webpage that’s on a screen and the user has some kind of keyboard and some kind of mouse. But when you interact with cyberspace – a term I don’t really like – you as an individual make clear decisions. You can decide where you’re going to go (or where you’re not going to go) in much the same way as when you’re walking down the street you can make decisions about direction and behaviour. You can also of course encounter other people – some of whom will be jerks, and some of whom will be benevolent and nice. And in this sense the internet is absolutely a public space – because the public are in it, and they’re making decisions.

“One way in which the internet may still be exclusionary however is education: you still have to have enough technical know-how to be able to manipulate your browser. Maybe sounds ridiculous in this day and age, but there are still plenty of people who don’t have that knowledge. Like a lot of artists, I’m very interested in that process of learning. Some of the work I’m making at the moment is looking at how to develop machines that talk to other machines using the web, in an ongoing project called project2891.”