NTNTNT is four and one quarter inches wide, five and a half inches tall and one inch thick. It is a book.
<net.net.net> was a series of lectures initiated and curated by Natalie Bookchin at the California Institute of the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This conference took place under the <net.net.net> rubric from the Fall of 1999 until the Spring of 2000. A visiting artist or artistic collective working with the internet or via media technology appeared every few weeks. Participants included Vuk Cosic, the Critical Arts Ensemble, Fiambrera, Irational, I/O/D, Cornelia Sollfrank, Alexei Shulgin, @rtmark and others.
Before the project began, Bookchin nursed a desire to publish the proceedings of the interviews and speeches. As the project unfolded, CalArts students disappeared into graduates, transcripts decomposed, the stock bubble burst, and hype about the internet and its art metamorphosized into an often unchallenged proliferation of gripes. Enthusiasm from two of the students involved in Bookchin’s original class lingered. Ultimately, Zoe Crosher became the managing editor of NTNTNT and Jason Brown became its editor.
NTNTNT, © 2003, sprang from <net.net.net> the way leftovers spring from a meal: by remaining when all else is gone. Three teams of CalArts students assembled and dissolved over the course of the book’s production, dividing responsibilities, finding/ misplacing/ transcribing the recordings and brainstorming what to do with what remained. What we hold in our hands when we pick up NTNTNT is a montage of the <net.net.net> proceedings, relevant journalism from the time period in question, print reproductions of net.art from the artists featured, and historical texts - Benjamin, Borges, Burroughs, Gibson, etc. - which provide philosophical and cultural context for the ideas discussed during the conference and presented in the book. NTNTNT is less a document of the <net.net.net> project than it is a trove of cogent fragments. None of the original interviews are presented in full; rather, they are cut up into significant bits, scattered across the book’s six main sections (there are twenty-seven subsections) and placed within the area of investigation most akin to their respective focus of attention. Excluding the introductory texts - essays by Crosher and Brown, and an interview with Bookchin -, no sample from the book is over 500 words long.
Brown’s editing determines how we read the book, while the book, in turn, forcefully demonstrates that a collection of framed fragments is more useful and more representative to our time than documentations of “what happens.” With the history of texts, images and urls at his fingertips, Brown compiled a book of evocative ideas which read much like Henri Michaux’s Tent Posts or Franz Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, except that here we have a lot of people who work with computers talking poetically - in a way that incites thought - about technology and culture, and these dialogues are embedded within a selection of resonant historical and commercial reproductions. For example, Geert Lovink, in a 9 February 2000 interview with Dee Dee Halleck and Sarah Diamond at MOCA, says “Europe is in immediate danger of being turned into a sort of reality park where you can go and experience history…Amsterdam runs on the Rembrandt and Van Gogh industry…Culture in Europe is in immediate danger of being reduced to a description of national heritage. (p. 25, 26)” This brief passage from Lovink is included in the MELANCHOLY subsection of the book, which includes four other items: a reproduction of Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus;’ an email from Aureia Harvey to praystation.com regarding the blues of writing code, impermanence and “the point of it all;” an excerpt from Walter Benjamin’s diaries interpreting the ‘Angel of History;’ three sentences from a 2002 Los Angeles Times article about the statute of limitations for insider trading as it would effect Silicon Valley inhabitants in the wake of the dot.com boom-bust. By using the power of conjunction as a diagnostic tracking of modern cultural trajectories, NTNTNT identifies the constellation of issues at stake for concerned citizens and agents of the mediated class. Without depending on the accumulative effect of exhaustive analysis for the production of intellectual potency, NTNTNT’s fragments burst on a subject and reveal i!
t from a
fresh perspective, self-consciously divulging the underpinnings of NTNTNT’s own methodology while illuminating how these processes are at work on larger scales. As the Giorgio Agamben quotation on p. 297 demonstrates: “Alienating by force a fragment of the past from its historical context, the quotation at once makes it lose its character of authentic testimony and invests it with an alienating power that constitutes its unmistakable aggressive force…[T]he authority invoked by the quotation is founded precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by its situation in the history of culture.”
Readers inclined to turn to the book for answers to questions like “what is net.art?” are sure to be disappointed. The 10 page NET.ART subsection is probably the most boring one in the book, as it contains expected repudiations of the term by various conference luminaries and banal digressions on other problematic self-referential semantics. Few of the excerpts are explicitly about net.art, thankfully, but the subject is well-explored when it remains under the surface and in the background of the discussions taking place about more specific topics. Focusing on how software - Microsoft Word in particular – programs its users, Matt Fuller’s May 2000 interview with the <net.net.net> collective penetrates into the heart of the most basic and profound issues regarding human relationships with technology. Picking up the baton from Marx, Fuller begins: “We (I/O/D) believe that every form of technical innovation affects social composition (p. 193.)” As we use computer technology to express ourselves and construct our society, we become inextricably coupled with this medium. Fuller tracks this process by examining the edifice of Microsoft Word:

Word has solidified, in a sense, what word processing ‘is.’ It has become our model of interacting with all kinds of text from love letters to literary texts to resumes… These [templates] lock certain types of language into place. If you look at the grammar checker, it constantly tells you that your grammar is incorrect because you have what they call ‘passive sentences,’ sentences which are not straight sequences of well-formed grammatical objects. You get caught up in it, and this is a negative because people begin to write like computer manuals in order not to be judged as ‘passive.’ (p. 194)

Fuller is careful to point out that there is no overarching conspiracy behind the manufacturing of such software; instead, the unfortunate and uncontrollable menace is that the software successfully propagates a standardization of language, especially among uncertain and non-native authors. There is no ghost in the machine, in other words, but the development of language is haunted by programming code.
The excerpt from the Unabomber’s essay “Industrial Society and its Future” is a crucial inclusion in the context of the internet’s boom and bust years so serendipitously charted by <net.net.net> and NTNTNT. Kaczynski’s primary grievance is against the injustices that gush from the fact that “technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. (p. 108)” This is obvious, especially in hindsight, throughout history. The 9/11 hijackers didn’t want freedom; they wanted to be sheltered from our technology and the affects it has on people and social arrangements. A sentimental resonance between the people that are the most negatively affected by technology and the people that are its most eminent critics and artists subliminally recurs throughout the book.
The dissolution of the internet bubble is summarily addressed in two pages - one white, the other black (pages 19-20). On the left (white) page is a report from internetnews.com documenting the purchase of Flyswat Inc. by NBC Internet Inc. (NBCi) for “about $100 million in stock.” The bottom of the page features a graph representing the NASDAQ monthly averages from 1994 till late 1999. The right (black) page continues the graph until 2002, while the top of the page includes one sentence from a searchenginewatch.com report documenting the closing of NBCi by NBC. This kind of critical montage expresses the story more accurately and more swiftly than any kind of analysis could, while it also serves the function of balancing the content of the interviews with the immediate history we’re all familiar with now. Another image containing emotional and practical polysignificance is The Skeletal Remains of Utopia (p. 32), a one-page map of the internet circa 1998 created by the Lumeta Corporation. I can’t look at this image without feeling nostalgia for my own ignorance and naivete.
All of the interviewees were asked about their conceptions of themselves as artists or as activists. They unanimously agree that the distinction is beside the point, but several articulate vital positions while answering the question. “The highest level of return that we could obtain as cultural profit is by furthering activism against corporate rights and making that activism known (p. 211)” says ‘Raoul’ of @rtmark. ‘Frank’ goes on to describe how @rtmark’s activities negotiate and challenge the relations between culture and capital, “We fund sabotage. We attempt to do the worst taboo with money, which is to give it away and not expect a financial return. (p, 212)” ‘Raoul’ elaborates:

Our job is publicity and propaganda. Five thousand dollars isn’t going to change anyone’s life, but the idea of it can. The fact that there’s five thousand dollars going to somebody to do something politically active, or one thousand dollars, or even five hundred dollars - suddenly it makes it seem serious. (p. 212)”

Not only does it make political action and critical sabotage serious, it stimulates neophytes and amateurs to get into the fray. Brown soberly notes in his introduction that the “notion of activism [is] radically different from post-Seattle 1999 to post-New York 2001, (p. xlviii)” an understatement to which Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) co-founder Steve Kurtz’ recent arrest can attest. Intelligent, rigorous subversion as practiced by @rtmark and CAE seems even more necessary and treacherous after the intervening W years. The 2 November 1999 interview with CAE dissects the popular but fundamentally flawed “Trojan Horse approach to subversion.” CAE pinpoint the inherent paradox at work when artists or activists try to subvert the system from within without becoming who they pretend to be:

When I have students who talk about going into business administration because once they rise up through the ranks they will screw the system up, I am [suspicious]. That notion is a complete fantasy, absolute insanity, because the only way you can rise up is when you have been socialized to get into that position, and that is an assurance that you won’t screw anything up. And to think that you can maintain radical subjectivity while going through that kind of socializing process of grooming for the elite is absolutely naive. (p. 53)

Readers will be grateful that a book filled so precisely with only the most coherent and incisive portions of interviews and paragraphs of sampled text also leaves ample room available for humor. One of my favorite lighthearted, but still appropriate, entries are the Bizhaq Field Data reports from Starbucks #5308; one report publishes the transcript of an overheard cell phone conversation, including the dress, mannerisms, and technical possessions of the subject, and another documents an overheard conversation regarding trade show freebies. Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting, as members of Irational, crop up in five out of the six main sections, but the publication of this April 2000 interview bomb speaks to what makes the book so pleasurable: its only pretensions are toward readability and evocativity.

Bunting> Rachel, what are you doing?
Baker> I’ve got sore feet.
Bunting> Do you have to pick them into the dinner?
Collective> You’re lovers. You eat her feet. My feet itch too, Rachel.
Baker> Do you guys have a bathtub here?
Collective> No, there’s no bathtub. There’s a sink…
Baker> There’s no bathtub here?
Collective> There’s a shower and a sink.
Baker> Oh, that sucks. In a big apartment like this? That’s crazy.
Collective> Pretty weird with all this space you guys have.
Collective> Okay, yeah, we’re going to delete that part.

Without a playful spirit to accompany all the scissoring and juxtaposing, NTNTNT would read like a sepulcher of good ideas from vanished times.
As a collection and demonstration of ideas and their kernels, NTNTNT is a success. It is not a successful explication or elaboration of these ideas, nor is it a strict documentation of the <net.net.net> conference. It just so happens that the ideas originated in a single project while Brown created their lineage: his editing makes the ideas come alive to share interhistorical force. If the interviews were simply collated and presented, the reader would be left with a hodge-podge of idle talk and enlightened perspicacity, but the fast-snipping editing bestows coherency and impact when there isn’t any immediately apparent. Brown begins his introduction with the famous anecdote about the first internet transmission from UCLA to the Stanford Research Center in 1969: due to a bug, the system crashed after three letters were typed. But, on second try, it was fine. He then points us to the 9 September 1947 discovery of an actual moth in the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator; the moth was saved and taped to a report sheet, now on view in the Smithsonian. “First actual case of bug being found” was written on the report sheet. NTNTNT ends with a translation of the last line of Guy-Ernest Debord’s film Hurlements en faveur de Sade: “We live like lost children, our adventures incomplete.” How we relate to technology - whether we try to become the bug in the system or we try to extract it - will always be an incomplete adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. NTNTNT retains and manufactures the childlike sensitivity essential to keeping the adventure inspired.
- Andrew Choate