jim buckhouse wrote off-list:

This morning, on the way to work, I thought I'd write to you regarding
an attempt to make the distinction between story and discourse in new
media art as [christian] metz attempted it for cinema. In new media work
the distinction gets interesting as the structure of "story" seems to
resemble the "discourse" of cinema (think apparatus).

[…]

Like the tennis match at the end of Blow-up, this gap between meaning
and method shows itself (as Duchamp's bride's cinematic blossoming…)
as the space of the browser. How is the filter different than constructs
of traditional cinematic discourse? Does the spatial collapse of no-lens
mise-en-scene come into play here? Is it a panaramic view with a
telephoto lens?

alex galloway replied:

my first thought is that there is no mise-en-scene for net.art. like,
there's no way for the artist to definitively determine the world of the
narrative. there are just too many variables with the web–linking,
browser window size, fonts/colors, IE or navigator, platform, whether or
not the user has the correct plug-in, etc. the net.artist can't
determine, without going to a lot of trouble, the exact window through
which the user will view the piece. so it seems to me that the most
effective net.art is the stuff that deals directly with the mix of all
these things, not with trying to construct some sort of story or image.

also, to address your question about the difference between the
"no-lens" browser and the movie camera, the main difference is the way
objects enter the field of vision within the two mediums. on film,
objects are captured in a fairly qualitative way. they are largely
objects interacting in the world and are recorded in what we could now
call an analog media, the photo. on the web it's a completely different
story, as these *digital* objects (images, text, etc.) are pulled
together from desparate sources and arranged all at once, each time the
user makes a request. there is no object really in net.art, or rather,
the object is simply a boring list of instructions: the html file.
that's why i consider the browser a more advanced kind of
filter–something that uses a set of instructions to include, exclude
and organize content–rather than a lens. maybe we should find a better
word than "filter."

Kevin McCoy suggested:

a useful word that came out of the Blast suspension Documenta discussion
is "valve," something that constricts and orients flow. I think this
word does what you want the word filter to do. a word like "valve"
preserves a dynamic quality that i think is important.

Mark Napier added:

The word "assembler" came to mind. I was thinking that a web browser
"assembles" a web page from components at the time of the request. Each
assemblage may be different based on that users desktop configuration,
and also by the choice of the designer (dynamic html, cookies, etc.). I
agree this is nothing like a lens.