BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVITIES At the intersection of telecommunication software and art, Artcontext explores the aesthetics and politics of online experience. Through his work on Artcontext, Andy Deck deconstructs technocratic ideals and questions prevalent myths of progress. He contributes to the gift economy of global independent media as an artist, programmer, essayist, and teacher. Sifting through the hype and thinly veiled coercion of the media industry, Deck seeks to preserve accidental freedoms that have fallen within reach. In the dynamics of familiar software, he finds compelling opportunities that have been ignored. He rebuilds inexpressive codes to conform to his conceptual and imaginative protocols. The unfamiliar results may invite comparisons, reflection, criticism, and revision. Despite the diminishing expectations that surround Internet culture, Deck remains committed to developing contexts for art in the network. That means resisting technologies, licenses, and mentalities that would tend to undermine this important work. As a consequence, in some respects Artcontext is an act of resistance in progress. But it offers more than an aesthetics of negation. Spurred on by the evident shortcomings of relentlessly commercial, American-style mass media (as well as by the elite inconsequentiality of private commodity art), Deck has sought to demonstrate alternatives to the onsumerism and depoliticization that define most contemporary experiences with electronic media. Artcontext deviates from the passive and escapist norms of mass culture, mingling seriousness with play. Rather than using the Internet simply as a venue for distributing images, Deck has pioneered interactive systems that position telematic visitors as contributing artists. Within Artcontext people can behave creatively, cooperatively or destructively; communicating and, at the same time, substantially modifying and revising what will be the experience of the site for future visitors. Although this systematized creativity raises some skeptical eyebrows, works such as Open Studio, Icontext, and Glyphiti strike an intriguing balance between individual and collective authorship. Using collaborative image-making as a starting point, Deck's work calls attention to new roles that artists, viewers, institutions and software can now play in the creative process. ECONOMIC MODEL While dot bombs burst from sea to shining sea, Artcontext remains active. Rather than emulating business models that rely on advertising sponsorship, product marketing, or paid membership, Artcontext aspires to provide public art that is supported by the public. In a period of diminished public expenditure on the arts, Artcontext responds with a low-budget, low-bandwidth, cooperative model that leverages volunteer online labor as well as grants, commissions, and awards. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POLICY The diverse collaborative art projects available at Artcontext pose questions about authorship and intellectual property. Because most Artcontext artwork is completed by an anonymous public in the synthetic space of software, it remains ambiguous who made what, and where. Many people have contributed their labor to the site, which itself uses free software extensively. In the spirit of the GNU Public License, a kind of collective ownership is asserted. To promote the development of collaborative software, all major projects since 1996 have been distributed freely as source code to anyone affiliated with schools or non-profit organizations. PRIVACY POLICY Artcontext avoids invading the privacy of its visitors. The site does not solicit information from visitors for the purpose of marketing. Artcontext does not require user-authentication, it does not track visits with "cookies," and it does not send "spam" email.