Contemporary Australians are the best suited of all "western" or "developed" societies to intuitively understand and manipulate the virtual environment. This is not a patriotic or nationalistic jingoism, rather a realisation of two key fundaments of contemporary Australia that happen to also be two key fundaments of virtual networks.

First is the idea of culture at a distance, or "telematic culture" - Australia has always cast itself in relation to very distant cultures.
Second is the idea of nodes rather than centres. Within Australia's telematic culture, we have always encountered the "monumental cultural truths" of several northern hemisphere societies (England, America, Europe, Asia), all of which tend to have a single continuous historical truth that is mutually exclusive with other cultures, and thus prevents them from intrinsically understanding the potential of a virtual decentralised network.

Australians, on the other hand, have always encountered all of these cultures as equally influential and have mixed and matched to suit our dynamically shifting needs. This is exactly the nature of virtual networks, and so it makes sense that contemporary Australians are culturally intrinsically suited to creating work in virtual environments.

Witness the last Ars Electronica Prix Ars, where 3 of the prizes were given to Australians - a proportion that far outstrips the comparative size of our population.

On “post-convergent” art
Adam Nash coined the term "post-convergent" to describe a media space containing ALL previous media as a subset. Post-convergent, or Virtual art does not signal the "end" of anything, rather it is an innovation within which all prior knowledge still holds, but with an added X factor (or perhaps it's an iFactor) that is possible only within virtual environments, at the same time as being informed by all previous media.

Conventional contemporary art seems incapable of understanding the decentralised, shifting nature of virtual environments, or identifying within them. The art world struggles to commodotise it, much as the music industry finds itself in crisis over the same issue.

ACVA will be teasing apart many of these topics over the next few months via an online journal. If you’d like to comment or submit we welcome your ideas.