Available online here: http://www.isea-web.org/inl/inl99.html#5

Google and Art: A commercial / cultural new media art economy? is a short article for Isea’s regular newsletter which discusses the influence Google has had on culture and how this has manifested itself in new media art, particularly net.art, in what have commonly become known as mashups. Use of content providers such as Google in this way contribute to a long running trend in contemporary art which questions the role of the artist and their relation to their audience.

So why is it important to know about the developments of Google and its influences on society? What bearing has this on new media art? To date new media art has been an information based art form, but not necessarily an informed one. Information has been used in various ways, background noise, continuously flowing content, as a trigger to indicate a change from one state to another yet rarely has the information been used successfully as simply the information it is due to the complexity of presentation within the tools that access it and the difficulty to separate content from presentation other than how intended.