As part of a recent thread on the status of net.art and its critics,
G.H. Hovagimyan referred to Michael Gibbs as an "impartial media type"
(query http://www.rhizome.org/query for "Hovagimyan"). Here is the
continuation of that thread, beginning with Michael Gibbs:

I'm not quite sure what an "impartial media type" is, but as an active
artist AND critic I have looked at a great deal of work on the web,
though admittedly I have not seen all 5000 artists' work (I wonder if
anyone has!). As with every other traditional or non-traditional art
form, the majority of the work being made and disseminated is mediocre.
Just because it's on the web doesn't mean it's interesting. The ease and
low cost with which art can be distributed on the web often leads to a
sort of vanity-press publishing, or what Dick Higgins has referred to as
a "me-too" attitude. If "net.art" is to have any significance, then I
feel it is important to look at the work of artists who ARE doing
innovative work and who DO situate their work within a discourse that
extends beyond the incestuous, self-confined realm of "cyberspace." This
discourse already exists within the art world and it is fatuous to
dismiss it as "established" or "reinforcing the status quo." The artists
I mentioned–Weiner, Lawler and Mullican–DO know the internet, but they
don't reify it, or claim it as a privileged domain in the way that
Hovagimyan appears to do. Why does he accuse successful artists of only
being interested in the Internet as "another marketing ploy"? Sounds
like jealousy to me.

I'm well aware that there are many artists who may claim to have
"pioneered" cyberspace, but this does not necessarily grant their work
legitimacy since many were unable to consolidate their claims. I, for
one, am glad that there's now more to net.art than the self-indulgent
collaborative collages, "world's longest sentences" and "virtual
galleries" that gave early net.art such a bad name.

G.H. Hovagimyan replied:

Rather than getting into a pissing match with Michael Gibbs I will
endeavor to address some of what in my opinion are the aesthetic
foundations of net.art. The issues which Gibbs so deftly avoids. Most
netizens will agree there are notable distinctions which can be drawn at
this time that delineate net.art from art of the recent past.

Take for instance John Simon Jr.'s work. Much of its teleology comes
from the minimal/conceptual milieu of the 1960's. Simon is able to
reveal via the computational power of the computer, the endless series
of permutations that could only be hinted at in the earlier works of
people such as Sol Lewitt. Earlier conceptual artists questioned the
necessity of an art object, following along this discursive path
documentation of non-object event/art via text or photo became the
proffered method of presentation. The next generation of artists to come
along, to which Louise Lawler and Matt Mullican belong, approached the
issues of photo/text and its more common use as a communication tool in
mass media, this along with the idea of a language of signs has defined
Post Modernism for the past 20 years or so. Obviously I am
oversimplifying for the sake of brevity.

Simon's work IMHO, along with my work and that of people as diverse as
say jodi.org deal with what I call *Machine Mimesis*. This positions
net.art in a discourse with real world art making practices and
completes the teleology in a certain way. *Machine Mimesis* sets up a
discourse between human thinking, symbol language, mass media
communications and machine capabilities.

A telling example would be to compare Peter Halley's recent museum
installations with that of the infinitely more advanced and interesting
work of the artist team jodi.org. Both come out of late modernist
painting practices but jodi.org is able to go beyond the restrictive
environment of paintings in the museum, even as the art world occupies
itself with the latest incarnation of the end of art/death of painting
discourse.

Another aesthetic position of net.art involves social space. I don't
have a snappy term for this but it comes out of the praxis of
performance and situational art. The art world calls this *Contact Art*
its position is to move the artist outside the hermetic confines of the
gallery/museum. Obviously the internet does this quite well without the
help of art world curatorial mechanisms. The discourse of net.art ups
the ante for contact and situational art. It deals with a world society
forming on the web. Within this sphere are hybrid art sites such as The
Thing (http://www.thing.net), artnetweb (http://artnetweb.com) and
Pseudo (http://pseudo.com) as well as the online/offline social lens
created by Jordon Crandall's *X-art Foundation* or Ebon Fisher's *Alulla
Dimension*. Net.art provides a much larger arena for contact art while
actualizing the pratice that can only be alluded to in the more
traditional installation/ events of such inspired curators as Mary Jane
Jacobs. Within this arena are practioners of *Information War*
including Paul Garrin's name.space, Ricardo Dominguez's work with the
Zapatistas, Mark Amerika (http://altx.com) and other *Copy Leftists*.
Also included in this are the various iterations of such things as *The
Barbie Wars*. This moves into the area of a mediasphere and information
logos of which both Paul Virilio and Regis Debray have begun to
articulate in their writings.

Finally there is the *Medialogos*. Such artists as Sandra Fauconnier,
Robbin Murphy, Alexi Shulgin and such sites/listservs as 7-11 address
the information soup of the internet, the endless circulation of
image/ideas/information bits within the internet. The very issues which
Peter Halley and Matt Mullican can only statically allude to within the
strictures of an enclosed object/system whether it be real or virtual.
The examples of artist's work I use are only those with whom I am most
familiar. I do not in any way claim them to be the main progenitors of
the aesthetic currents presented.