In the land of digital art big is small and small is big, near is far and far is near, and funding lies in the discretionary domain of the mischievous elves. This July saw a gathering of some of net art's most important European participants for two days at London's Art Servers Unlimited conference at which a unifying strategy was sought to make the elves see reason.

True to the topsy-turvy rational of the subject under discussion, the first day's private session took place under a railway arch near London Bridge, and the second day's public presentation took place in the imposing grandeur of the ICA's Nash Rooms. In contrast to the formality of the presentations to the ICA's 'public', the first day yielded more explorative discussion as participants, most of whom already knew each other, got straight down to business. The outcome of last year's P2P discussions in Amsterdam - the only template that exists for seeking a pan-European funding strategy for net art sites and independent media organisations Ü was resoundingly condemned at the outset. In seeking to convince funding-crats of the significance of digital art and media it had sold artists short, presenting them as partners of industry and road-testers of software and saddling them with preposterous claims like, "art is critical by nature".

In contrast, ASU kept the idiosyncrasies of the wide range of institutions high on its list. Funding models were sought to benefit such disparate entities as the rural German artists' community site, Kunstserver, and the Soros funded C3 Centre in Budapest. Numerous possibilities were discussed: Rasa Smite (from E-Lab) suggested setting up the 'Interfund' - an EU funded resource which would pay artists and institutions realistically small sums of money at short notice and without the usual baroque baggage of eligibility criteria; Armin Medosch (co-organiser of the event and editor of Telepolis) suggested pooling resources in a kind of swap shop model; Jeremy Quinn (from the Hypermedia Research Centre) promoted the power of association by suggesting a links structure which would tie a number of servers into a ring; Balazs Beûthy (from C3) suggested the arduous but potentially lucrative path of the EU's Kaleidoscope funding programme. On the afternoon of the second day, Vuk Cosic Ü net artist and Ljubljana Digital Media Lab delegate Ü voiced what most had began to suspect; that an Art Servers' Trade Union was less than a remote possibility.

But it would be wrong to conclude that this event was only successful in demonstrating 'the tyranny of chaos'. Beyond showing the inadequacy of the term 'Art Server' to define these far-ranging institutional and ideological structures, it also conjured up an equally varied and contradictory spread of funding strategies. In contrast to the negligible results of the slick, homogenised paper resulting from the P2P event, the cacophony of ASU offers the hope of much more flexible and fertile possibilities in the future. If the funding elves are to be overwhelmed we need to stop using the military tactics of the Roman Legion.
Armendsen Walter

ASU was organised by Manu Luksch and Armin Medosch
[www.yourserver.co.uk/asu]

backspace [http://www.backspace.org]
C3 Center [http://www.c3.hu]
Channel/Artec [http://www.channel.org.uk]
Dbonanzah [http://www.dbonanzah.org]
e-lab [http://re-lab.net]
Ellipsis.Net [http://www.ellipsis.net]
Head-Space [http://www.head-space.org]
HyperMedia Research Centre [http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk]
ICA [http://www.newmediacentre.com]
irational.org [http//www.irational.org]
yourserver [http://www.yourserver.co.uk]
Kirklees Media Centre [http://www.test.org.uk/]
Kulturserver NRW [http://www.kulturserver.de]
Ljubljana Digital Media Lab [http://www.ljudmila.org]
Lovebytes [http://www.lovebytes.org.uk]
Media Research Foundation [http://www.mrf.hu]
ministry:of:x-periment [http://www.radiostudent.si/mzx]
Pararadio [http://www.c3.hu/para]
Pleine Peau [http://www.pleine-peau.com]
Redundant Technology Initiative [http://www.lowtech.org]
Silverserver [http://www.silverserver.co.at]
t0 Public Netbase [http://www.t0.or.at]
yourserver [http://www.yourserver.co.uk]

Armendsen Walter