Anja Rau tangles with Floran Cramer on whether digital art should be "Code Werk". Cramer (at poesis in Erfurt) distrusts multimedia because it's tied to commerce:

Much digital art and literature became testbed applications for new commercial browser features and multimedia plugins like QuickTime, ShockWave and Flash, but by this locked itself into industry-controlled closed code formats, thereby assuming an uncritical, after all affirmative role in the proprietary reformatting of the Internet.

Cramer's work is very interesting, but this line of argument is problematic. The recent capture of the internet by Microsoft was effected by different means entirely.

Rau, in turn, distrusts "this general condemnation of all that is not text-only, made by and for the pale and lonely graduate student... that I have seen so often in the German scene."

Misplaced concern with the trappings of open source was the strangest aspect of poesis. Only the wealthy can practice their art (or write tools for artists to use) while pretending to exist outside the economy.