CARLO ZANNI: A kind of aesthetical choice, I don't like Flash movies very much. I prefer the visualization's instability of an html page instead off the affidability given to you by a .swf. In the past, some people stressed the fact that Flash movies aren't open source, so we can say they aren't in the net mood, which is more related to sharing and open source than to copyrights. But in my opinion this is just a really partial point of view. I prefer a w3 where you can find more different approaches than just one big flux of shared data streaming. In the end I'm not against Flash, it is just a tool and after all it has a beautiful logo I could not resist to paint in oil on canvas. But also Flash has a record: Flash is the greatest tool allowing you to hide empty-brain ideas with alluring fashion-oriented animations.

There's a friend of mine who uses Flash to export his vectorial drawings (see www.rgbproject.com). These are static images, but so fresh and beautiful, without straight lines but with all those imperfections due to a handmade drawing (he uses a tablet and a graphic pen). In this way he can visualize them in the size he prefers. So, I mean, I like that way to use Flash. I feel bad with hyper-interactive menus. So my remark above was just a superficial and a little bit provocative description. Usually in their home pages people like to show all their entire tech skills. I just say: if you are looking for blinking linkable bytes…I'm sorry but you are losing your time.

AMB: And what are your tools (hardware + software) of choice as an web artist?

CZ: I like to use html, perl, visual basic, on line databases, and strong concepts. I just use my laptop, but the most important hardware I use are brains, lot of patience and love for all my assistants. I want to thank all of them.

AMB: Do you think it is important - in other words, do you think the tools are a big part of the work, both at the level of conception and also in the result?

CZ: No, it depends on what you need. It's not important to use Flash or html, to share Wi-Fi waves or paint with huile sur lin. The medium is neutral. The most important thing is the result, the concept and how the chosen medium fits that concept. I think this period is for net art what the end of 90s represented for the start-ups and the "new economy".
They said: "BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME": in this particular art field it seems pretty much the same.
I think a lot of net artists are running after the media instead of using it as a piece of paper or a piece of marble (or a part of a concept).

Also, people like to theorize about new art categories using tech paradigms. We had the same in the past with video and photography. Now we have Generation Flash, NetArt or the Fabulous Next Art Movement.

I don't care about these things. This approach is the same one you can find in the surveys (relatives percentages). Art Movements and Manifestos are something from 1900, not 2000. Art Movements are forerunners of Brands. I'm bored about them.

I would like to stress that networking processes or interactions don't add any kind of value to a thought or to a work. They are just simple tools, just like a paintbrush and I can use them as a paintbrush if I need their specs to build my project. Speaking in absolute terms, it's wrong to confuse or identify the quality and the importance of a work with its tech content. Also: Technology is an ongoing process; art is the end of a process. So they are opposites, and often they attract each other. There isn't any kind of relationship between tech content and quality.

AMB: Can you tell us a bit more about your other web works?

CZ: Usually I program portraits, I mean, all my web projects are linked to that particular subject (not only people's portraits but also portraits of our times, of our society). I think today the only possible form of portrait is a w3 project where the person is not important. The important thing is the personal mental identity: e-mail; avatar; DTP icons; ftp login; nicknames, emoticons etc., which could describe better "now-people" than a representation of their physical aspect. I'm obsessed by the idea of recording, mirroring changes. I wanna be and I try to be as much as possible contemporary. My daily job is working as an employee. I wake up in the morning and I press REC. You play the game. I read the scores.

www.Newnewportrait.com is a website hosting my net works having to do with people's portraits. I made Icons portraits - recently shown at Bitforms gallery in New York and at Analix Forever in Geneva - and Cookies portraits. The first ones are more related to the traditional history of the commissioned portrait. In fact, I do them just by commission, although some of them were done just for my own interest (friends of mine, tech people…) These portraits are formatted as 32 x 32 pixel icons for desktop. My Icons portraits are a kind of links. You can click on them to link your page to your favorite web addresses or documents. You can change the link as you can change opinion. Your face is linked to a web address or to a sentence or to an image, as in the "real?" life where, perhaps, your face is already linked to something because of your public presence (and are you free to change it?). But these portraits are also icons, icons for a desktop. In the last decade object forms became elements of the best-known landscape in the world: the desktop.

I don't sell anything physical, as it is usually done, I mean, I sell the file itself instead of a visualization of it. I like the idea to leave the temporary visualization choice to the buyer. When you buy the file, you are free to use it as you prefer. For example, you can load my Icon portraits on your desktop, and drag and drop them as other classic icons. But you can also project them as a video image over your fireplace if you like it, obtaining something similar to the family portraits of the old rich families: those paintings were witness of a birth. But you can also "visualize" these file-based art works in more traditional ways: printing them on canvas or on glossy paper without caring about dimension or paper's cut. They will still remain "temporary physical objects" unsigned and without any kind of "traditional" value.

Cookies portraits are numbered portraits I send you for free every time you visit this address: www.zanni.org/betaCOOKIES. These works are based on the same cookie technology that is usually used by huge commercial websites such as amazon.com to monitor the choices made by users on their websites (a kind of marketing practice). With the help of this technology, my portraits make a "photograph" of the workstation environment of the connected user, sending him a very slim .txt file containing all the data: info about his operative system (ports, browser …); a sentence with the explication of the process and a number. At the time I'm writing this, 586 users already received a numbered cookie portrait.

I also did theChurchOfSoftware.org, as a way to demonstrate the central and strategic role of the software in our culture. This allowed me among other things to produce the P2P$ conference.

AMB: This conference, entitled P2P_$: Peer to Peer $elling Processes for net_things, was a chat based dialogue that lasted three days. How this project came about, and how did it go?

CZ: I was invited to give a lecture, but instead of speaking by myself I chose to invite forty speakers worldwide, and ask them to give their opinion and share their experience about selling net things. One of my favorite was the idea launched by John Klima: he sells his data works with the support of a costumed hardware, so data + cpu. In the end it is the same thing, as I suggested in May 2002 when I posted a message in the rhizome mailing list proposing a practical way to sell net works. To be honest, I must say I now find a similitude with some theories formulated in the past by Olia Lialina, but at the time I wrote my thing I didn't know them and in the end they aren't the same thing.

I called it the protocol, and a big part of the rhizome community attacked me because they were scared about the possibility that I've written the new tables of the law, forcing all people to follow them. My 3-point protocol was just an easy way to try to begin a kind of relationship with galleries and with the market, without pushing any process but by just being active instead of living just hoping for the next grant and praying not to lose the second job. I think we cannot press or accelerate any "cultural?" process, but artists have the duty to think about these topics, making proposals and experiments. Artists must think about the economic side of their work because it is an important part of the process. They are on the front line with their life. You can find the txt with the protocol at this address: www.zanni.org/church/The_Protocol_v1.

Those days were a big adventure: three days, ten hours chatting every day. The logs of the chat are posted at the following address: www.zanni.org/church/workshop/invitations, with all the participants and their "social" role. I think the best thing is to read them; any kind of resume would be partial.

AMB: You were born in Italy, and you now split your time between Milan and New York. How does the two places compare in terms of web art creation?

CZ: New York tells you: mix the dice and throw them.
Milan tells you: pick up the dice and hold on to them.

AMB: Can you tell us about Italy's web art scene?

CZ: I find art in galleries and museums; I'm not so interested in considering art the work of people who build net pieces just for fun. I'm interested in discovering new talents who want to join the art field with all its beautiful and bad sides. I think net artists need galleries as any other "normal" artist. I know that the 99% of the community is against this point of view but it's what I believe in. Anyway I didn't see any "web artist" in any gallery in Italy but I suppose there is a kind of net production as in any other part of the world.

AMB: Besides web-based projects you also do painting. You described a series of your paintings as "desktop paintings". Can you tell us more about the creative process at work here? And how is your work as a painter relating to your work as a web artist? There seems to be some relation, if only in the subject matter of your paintings (sofware logos, portraits of famous programmers, etc)…

CZ: I try to exchange experiences between the two fields, bringing experiences from web art to painting and vice versa. I can say also that I paint the software I use to build my web projects and I paint what I saw after having been on Internet, i.e. Internet as a place, not as a medium. My paintings of Icons and software logos are elements of our daily landscape. They are our daily landscape. They are elements of the most well-known landscape of the world. A lot of people spend their time in front of it, interacting and overlapping between personal digital relationships and human ones. Desktop icons (alias to a document or alias to a software) are the user's digital map and as such they write a type of social genome.

AMB: Can you tell us about your future projects?

CZ: These days a project is coming out, curated by Claude Closky for the magazine of the Mudam Museum. Claude asked Sara Tucker, the director of the Web Department at Dia Center New York, to do an interview with artists and curators working with the net.

I'm also developing two net projects: two screenshots of our time. One is called Softaid.biz (you can find a first draft of it at the following address: www.zanni.org/church/softaid/softaid_diagram_betaV.GIF); and the second one is called BaliLasVegas (working title).

Finally, I'm doing paintings for Netizens, an upcoming group show curated by Valentina Tanni in Rome at SalaUno in collaboration with MACRO (Museum Contemporary Art Rome) and scheduled for December. As soon as I receive all the details I'll post all the info about it on my main website: www.zanni.org.

Anne-Marie Boisvert