Note: The following are various recommendations to better understand the war in Iraq. Even though the links are not directly related to net art or new media, they are featured in order to push global awareness.

Originally published on 03/23/03
 Frontline recently aired an excellent in-depth report on key events leading to the current gulf war. For those who missed it on PBS, log on to The Long Road to War. It will leave you with much to think about, as the detailed report presents an objective account of important political events that have not been acknowledged in the past.

Originally published on 03/20/03
As a way to better understand the circumstances of the current war, here are a few links that briefly explain Iraq's history: a very brief (biased) breakdown of major events in chronological order can be found at scn.org; a more historically objective, in-depth synopsis (though still brief) can be read at achiles.net; and idf.il is a more developed site that offers statistics, as well as a historical survey.

Here are some great sites that provide alternative news coverage: alternet.org, idealist.org, and of course the internationally known indimedia.org.
:: Eduardo Navas::

Originally Published on 03/26/03
Software Art: A curatorial fiction or a new perspective is an international conference that took place on February 4th in Berlin, and it is now available online in transcript form. The conference looked at "software art and its legitimacy" with a panel of artists and critics from five different countries. Note that there is also a list of links to other sites concerned with these problems, artists working in software art / Algorithmic art, etc.
:: Garrett Lynch ::

Originally published on 03/21/03
Artists Union is an artists portal just getting underway with high aspirations. Since changes to Rhizome, several websites have popped up in the last year to fill in the gaps and alleviate the problems that discontented users had with the changes. There have been sites that have listed artists; other sites that have done reviews (even Net_Art_Review falls into this); and more sites that have aimed to provide various other services. In my opinion, the more the merrier, as this helps to disband the rapid institutionalization that is taking over net-art--in particular, with a certain set of artists, critics, etc. controlling every aspect.

The Artists' Union is a step towards helping artists find other artists: "the purpose of this is to provide a source of artists on the web; and rather than listing and archiving images of an artists' works under one homogenizing style (such as axis and other online databases), why not just link directly to the artists' URLs and let the artists have the control over how their work is perceived?"

The creator Rich White hopes "that Artists' Union will grow from what it is at the moment--not only by listing more and more artists but as a communication between artists, as a way of finding collaborators and creating projects." It's ambitious and it's just starting, but hopefully with many focused resources like these, a wider distributed system of information will start to emerge in the near future.
:: Garrett Lynch::