Media art, in all its meanings, has always been considered an hard topic to exhibit on. On the one hand problems of taxonomy (what is media art?), on the other its digital, ephemeral, interactive nature, have made every traditional curatorial approach inadequate. Both the thematization and the chronology are limited perspectives from which looking at such a various landscape. NODE.London [Networked, Open, Distributed, Events. London] is the first media art festival which try to go off these limits with the help of an original curatorial approach. There aren’t either an all inclusive theme or a temporal limit. The aim is to building the infrastructure and raising the visibility of media art practices in London, organizing a series of connected events which will culminate in March 2006. March in fact has a busy calendar of media projects (performances, exhibitions, installations and panels) spread across the urban territory. Their nature is different, from computer generated art film to sonic environments, from online art to dorkbot. With such a context, where the events are interconnected and the information is open source, the keyword to understand the festival is ‘network’: the city becomes a urban metaphor of internet and every venue is a node of the net. Going back to taxonomy, the idea of the organizers is forward looking, because ‘network’ is the only undiscussed term in the definition of media art. However, as it always happen on the web, the vertigo of the infinite linking is one of the risks to face.

Valentina Culatti