Excerpts from:

POSTMODERN CURRENTS:

ART AND ARTISTS IN THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA

fully revised second edition, 1997, Prentice Hall, availability: http://www.amazon.com or http://www.prenhall.com

...."The internet is a new kind of public space. Communication technologies, in development since the seventies for interactively distributing information have expanded, creating a new moment when widespread access and use of the Internet is allowing major cultural communication to take place alongside the commercial marketplace with its quickening development of on-line information services. This is not a computer revolution, but rather a communications revolution. Without a direction for it, we are moving into uncharted territory which has great promise, yet great unknown challenges.

...Now computerized communication technologies make possible the transmission of images, text, and sound to be accessed privately by the viewer interactively, at home. Its interactivity makes it very different from satellite TV transmission. While it is a medium that is like TV, because it involves audiences sharing from great distances experiences real or imagined, the interactive aspect of the Internet makes it completely different from TV. The viewer can now type in text, scan in visuals, and access the Net, placing messages on-line (either through e-mail or through special HTML programming code), which can globally be seen on the World Wide Web and downloaded by others.

...This convergence of television and telecommunication technologies with those of interactive computer driven ones is creating a new aspect of representation which inhabits a kind of virtual space opening out to unexpected territory of expression and communication. It subsumes and includes the vocabularies of all earlier art forms as well as the new modalities of completely simulated images.

... Artists have been pioneering work on-line from the beginning. How their work is seen and how it is produced is being utterly redefined by the development of the Internet and of the World Wide Web (itself a major subset of the Internet) The premise of display and of representation as we know it has been deeply challenged. This new medium of art as communication matters because it defines the arena of consciousness and feeling. It is deepening the challenge to artists struggling to connect visible to invisible, to create works of independent witness, and to articulate meaningful responses to contemporary life.

... By now, a suitable metaphor has evolved for the infrasructure of the internet as that of a web - the paths, interconnections, and points of intersection where telematic communication takes place. A network is a phenomenon which links together a wide range of disparate entities. It has no sides, no top or bottom. Rather, it is many connections that increase interaction between all its components. It is open-ended and non-confining with no beginning and no end.

... Interactive systems such as the Internet replace conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy and linearity. The metaphor of a web replaces them with those of nodes, links, paths, networks. Roland Barthes speaks about the interactive nature of networks and their lack of hierarchy as a metaphor for the postmodern. Access is through several entrances without any one being more important than another (much like television). It has no beginning. It is conceived of as a series of networks and links. It is never closed, and is based "in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences. It is a node within a network....(a) network of references." Barthes' description of intertextuality in "From Work to Text" articulates the concept that a text is like a woven fabric. It is not only a co-existence of meanings but also a passage, an overcrossing. Thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination of meaning "in which every text is held, it itself being the text between another text." Knowledge no longer exists in fixed canons or texts with epistemological boundaries between disciplines but rather it exists as paths of inquiry seeking integration and meaning by passing through them without any precise limit or location.

... Art on the Internet has little history and no cultural baggage. Its aesthetics are as yet undefined. It is like delving into a strange new world. Without a known direction, over the years, especially from 1977 onwards, artists with a utopian concept of a global culture pioneered it by collaborating between North American and European cities to create interactive telecommunications activity in the arts.

... Roy Ascott, one of the earliest pioneers of "telematics" speaks of global interactive communities as "a set of behaviors, ideas, media, values and objectives that is significantly unlike those that have shaped society since the Enlightenment. Whole new cultural configurations will bring about change in art practice, forcing new strategies and theories for art; creating new forms of display and accessibility; and developing new networks where exchange and learning can take place." His point is that "meaning is created out of interaction between people rather than being 'something' that is sent from one to another." Communication depends not on what is transmitted but "what happens to the person who receives it. And this is a very different matter from 'transmitting' information." There is a difference between information and experience. He calls attention to what seems to him a now obsolete distinction between artist and viewer and calls for a composite construction where viewers are participants in an inclusive system for creating meaning. For him, Art = Communication.

....Artists are vital to the development of the Web- probing, exploring, and investigating new directions for the changing technologies to reveal their potential for creating meaningful experiences. As part of the process, new art forms are invented. Artists can be important in heightening awareness of social values.. They can challenge the establishment of an all commercial model of the Internet and preserve a certain sense of critical aesthetic use. Because interactive technologies call for the creation of works which require viewers to act as co-creators, audience's choices help to shape and democratize the flow of events, in a work which is incomplete without their participation. Representation is always strongly influenced by contemporary vision and consciousness and by the nature of the tools available to artists."