You would never guess from Roger Malina's day job as an astronomer that he is also Executive Editor of the Leonardo publications (http://www.leonardo.info)

You were involved with fineArt forum (fAf) almost from the start and have seen some changes in leadership, can you tell us about them?
I have been involved with fineArt forum (fAf) since 1987 (yes 1987) when I had a drunken brawl with Ray Lauzzana in his kitchen in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Lauzzana had started fAf and had been distributing it on ARPANET, before the Internet was invented). I agreed to have Leonardo take over distribution of fAf in 1988, and Judy Malloy and Nancy Nelson in the San Francisco Bay area ran and developed it for several years.

Our idea was that fAf would migrate around the planet and that it was a resource that belonged to the community.

We even set up the art/science/technology network – ASTN (Art, Science and Technology Network) a virtual, unfunded organization, led by Annick Bureaud, to do this. After a few years when Paul Brown proposed to take it over, we accepted and he expanded it, grew it into the web environment. And now it's been taken over by Nisar Keshvani who shuttles between Australia & Singapore.

Having passed the torch on, what are your hopes for the fAf in future?
Each editor of fAf needs to rethink fAf, given the new situation. When Lauzzana started fAf it was the *ONLY* online arts newsletter. Now there are hundreds if not thousands, so many places that distribute news/opportunity items in the new media/science/tech field (LEA, YLEM, ASCII, ISEA, ANAT, EMF-LEONARDO Guide to the World, Rhizome etc etc). So I hope that the new team will look at the needs of our art/science/technology community and evolve fAf to respond to needs that are not being met today.

Do you have any thoughts on how this can be done?
I think part of the solution has been to think of the Internet as being a new barrier to communication. It creates new electronic monasteries - where people outside the wall and inside the wall are in worse communication than before there was the Internet.

Tell us more about these walls.
For example there's the Portuguese to English barrier, or Chinese to Swahili barrier. Or the barrier between the 60% of the world's population who either cannot read text, or are functionally illiterate (even in so called developed countries. Or the wall between the environmentalists and the wired world. That is many people view technology as part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Or the wall between the kinetic aristocracy (those who go to Ars Elecronica and ZKM and Siggraph every year- yeah you know who you are) and those who don't have the resources to move out of their neighborhood in Marseille, or Sao Paolo.

If fAf could figure out how to "burrow" through these internet walls, it would really respond to a need that that has no sufficient responses today. Artists are natural burrowers and already have many projects that could be highlighted (eg Rejane Spitz and her project on illiteracy and the Internet, or Marko Peljham and his Makrolab projects). So I am delighted to see that fAf has migrated again to a new editorial team. You have 3-5 years to try and grow it and then find another friendly host team - why not above the Artic Circle next time?

So do you have a wishlist for fAf?
As I noted above, fAf is now one of hundreds of electronic newsletters in the arts, if not thousands. Leonardo has recently been contracted by UNESCO to help set up the Virtual Library section of the UNESCO DIGIARTS portal. It is hoped that this will provide a centralised clearinghouse for all information related to the Digital Arts. As part of this, we hope to develop a thematic search engine that truly goes deep into the digital arts world to locate all related activity. This is one possible response to the information overload, but I think that fAf needs to start thinking about new innovations that will sift through all the material in fAf. I just don't have the time to scan it most of the time.

It would be great, for instance, to have a search engine on fAf that I could use and enter my current physical location (eg Marseille) and have fAf give me a calendar of all events within 200km, or any other radius, of my current location.

Or I could put in a certain person's name, and find all events where this person is scheduled to appear. I think fAf, as it grows, is going to have to innovate and create new mechanisms to access all the content. There are probably good examples of the systems I have just described in other websites.

Biography
Roger F. Malina is an astronomer and space scientist. He is Director of the NASA EUVE Observatory at the University of California, Berkeley, California, and Director of the Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale CNRS, Marseille, France. He is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and co-chair of their Committee on Space Activities and Society. Since 1982 he has served as Executive Editor of the Journal Leonardo and as chairman of the Board of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. He writes on the relationship between the arts, sciences and technology.