Network Affordances: Unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW

This paper examines the notion of network affordance within the context of network art. We expand on the notion of affordances, (Gibson, 1977; Gaver, 1996) to include ecological and computational parameters of unpredictability. We illustrate the notion of unpredictability by considering four specific works that were included in a network art exhibition, SPEED SHOW [2.0] Hong Kong (2013). The paper discusses how the artworks are contingent upon the parametric relations (Parisi, 2013) of the network. We introduce network affordance as a dynamic framework that could articulate the experience of tension arising from the (visible) symbolic representation of computational processes and its hidden occurrences.