Digital technology offers a means of expanded communication, sustaining larger groups and communities through a common technological platform that can occupy and connect different geographical areas. The Internet is a relatively new technology being available in 19911; consequently, net art has only recently become a legitimised contemporary art practice post this time frame. For many new media artists, net art serves to function as a site of renewed interactivity occupying space/time or spatial flux, immersing viewers into new experiences that other mediums could not support.

In addressing digital art, I will consider the work of Jason Nelson, a contemporary artist who creates multiple layers of meaning building and conflating one another2 through online media. While his pieces are often defined as "digital poetics", they go far beyond simply combining words and poetry with digital technology.

How does one become a "new media poet"?3 Nelson began making his digital poetic creations because he felt traditional methods of publishing and producing written work were confining and limiting. The artist writes what "most likely married my poetics and digital creations was my frustration with the linear and one-dimensional notion of the page."4 Digital interfaces allow words that seem to "gravitate towards bouncing, towards pressing into paragraphs and out of images, to ride crackling pitches or swim in three-dimensions"5 the ability to do all that and much more.

With a Bachelors and Masters degree in cultural geography,6 Nelson's understanding is a literal translation of his thoughts about social landscape to the extent that the artist all sensory elements can be read as texts with a histories and places in time. Though his "non-linear and off written creations"7, digital interfaces, Nelson "alleviates [his] frustration and the limitations of paper."8 Furthermore, his background in geography gives Nelson the ability to see a strong connection "between studying landscape as a text, or creating and recreating places, and net art and new media poetics"9 as a place where it may reside. Thus by creating net works, Nelson has the ability to "uniquely combine text with images and sounds."10 The Internet platform and its display enables the text to become "something beyond written language, it becomes a conversation between sensual elements, the place of words jostling with the façade of images all coaxed into existence by a malleable interface."11 As a new media poet, Nelson focuses on audience participation and interaction; his work encourages the viewer to explore, place, investigate and experience.

One of Nelson's most recent works, Promiscuous Design demonstrates Nelson's ability to create multiple layer of meaning in combination with his stylized concept of how user interfaces should function and interact. Promiscuous Design is a website where viewers interact with a mélange of appropriated everyday sources or channels of information from radio broadcasts, television, newspapers, articles to magazines. All are reference here and the image place is dominated by hand-drawn images of food, agricultural equipment as well as drawings of ethnographic studies. However, web users are given a limited about of information by which to interpret the works. Enigmatic phrases such as "pandemic affairs, marketing gods and trees, felonious colours, some past ravels fall, analogous stuttering, if broadcasts were boats" serve as a list of thoughts and concepts from which the viewer may position themselves.12 The images and relating text sections (eg. "Channels", "Frequencies") remain decontextualised throughout the web site; Nelson asks viewers to infer their own meaning from the ambiguous text and by the superimposition of images.

Footnotes:
1 http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/histry.html
2 Nelson is currently a professor of Cyberstudies at Griffith University in Australia (interview via email March 15, 2005)
3 Nelson defines himself as a "new media poet". ibid
4 Interview Tuesday, March 15, 2005 via email
5 ibid
6 ibid
7 ibid
8 ibid
9 ibid
10 ibid
11 ibid
11 The "Channels" are in reference to television, bandwisth channels.