There have been so many Internet and new media-related books delivered
to my door as of late that I've been able to cash-in on a few a week
thus enabling me to pay for my extra phone line, the one I use for
nonstop net-surfing. This is an advantage that I, as an American
novelist cum digital artist, have over my colleagues in Europe who,
forced to pay for every minute of every local call, find the costs of
navigating the electrosphere far from democratic. But despite the
expenditures required for entry into what many Europeans see as an
elitist economic zone, there are still many overseas comrades who feel
compelled to join the Virtual Class and the current state of phone
company monopolies won't stop them.

As Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, editors of CTHEORY (www.ctheory.com)
say in their contribution to Clicking In: Hot Links To A Digital Culture
[Lynn Hershman Leeson (Ed.), "Clicking In" (Bay Press, 1996)], "it is
not at all clear that the new technological class will win the day,"
especially when you consider that "the will to virtuality is riddled
with deep contradictions." In fact, there seem to be two kinds of
cult-crit dominating the digerati-waves these days, either the new-age
empowerment philosophy of the Whole Earth - M.I.T. - WIRED crowd (it's
moved beyond the so-called "California Ideology" straight into the heart
of mediated-America), or the hipper-than-thou post-Baudrillardian new
media theorists appearing in all of these ambitious anthologies I keep
getting handed to me by my snail-mailman. Reading down and in and around
these various discourses, one can get an immediate sense of what these
deep, occasionally dark, contradictions are.

With Clicking In, edited by media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, we're
given a series of sections with names like Terminal Treatise, Colonizing
Virtual Space and Digital Specific Art, that include contributions from
some of the top names in the rapidly evolving cyberguru biz: VR
idea-smith Jaron Lanier, cross-platform Sandy Stone, multi-culty
performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Mondo Vanilli pla(y)giarist
R.U. Sirius, Lacanian Cybersociologist Sherry Turkle, and Grateful Dead
Republican John Perry Barlow who has two(!) essays in this collection.

The reprint of Barlow's "Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of
Mind on The Global Net," which I first read in WIRED in early 1994, is
essential reading for anyone wishing to contextualize the issues of
copyright and intellectual property in the age of digital dissemination.
As he explains, "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg
notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book." Let alone distribute,
market, or get reviewed by the always already bought-and-sold mainstream
media concerns. In a time where "the consumers themselves are the
products," network transmission of art, information, cultural services,
you name it, is as simple as zapping a few packets of ones and zeroes
over the phone lines where, as Barlow says, "the stuff just leaks."

And the stuff that's leaking is oftentimes embedded in a narratological
discourse whose hype-generation machine is both invisible and
contagious. In Sheldon Renan's contribution, "The Net and the Future of
Being Fictive," we are told that "because the silicon technology has
become so influential in the way stories are told, it has made narrative
form and practice subject to what is called 'Moore's Law.'" That is,
similar to Moore's conception that the power and speed of computers
doubles every 18 months, "narrative space, reach, and reason now follow
that same scimitar curve upwards, opening the opportunity for greater
complexity and–inevitably–reach." But we all know this by now, don't
we? Even the neo-Luddites have given in, sounding their clarion call
lamenting the last gasp of a carrion-corpse called The Literary Book
whose dying breaths have less to do with The Net than the
corpo-info-entertaino-complex that drives the media-celeb biz called The
New York Publishing Industry.

Okay, okay, but we already know this too, right? What does all of this
recent red-hot clicking on all the right buttons mean for literary art,
besides selling a few more faddish books with all of the right
contributors? Soke Dinkla's essay, "From Participation to Interaction:
Toward the Origins of Interactive Art" has a lot to say on the subject
of art, particularly how "the mimetic strategies of interactive art do
not aim primarily at visual qualities; rather the dialogue between
program and user constitutes the artistic material." She rightfully
draws a lineage from Marinetti through Duchamp to EAT (Experiments in
Art & Technology) and gets us to thinking that maybe all of this
lackluster content we're seeing on the Net these days is part of a vast
experiment, one that is utterly failing in the most beautiful of ways,
and that if we're looking for deep structural changes in the art work of
today as opposed to even ten or twenty years ago, then we're more likely
to find these changes in the mediums through which contemporary art gets
distributed and how the emerging network culture radically transforms
the way in which we participate in the dual worlds of art-making and
art-appreciating.

Interactive art, as distributed via the Net, suggests the possibility of
a more interventionist narrative or performative strategy. Guillermo
Gomez-Pena's essay "The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier" eloquently
rants (as only Gomez-Pena can) on "the unpleasant but necessary role of
cultural invaders, techno-pirates, and coyotes (smugglers)" while R.U.
Sirius, in an interview with Leeson, puts it in surprisingly less
flamboyant terms:

"Cyberspace translated all of media space, all of the culture that
exists in a mass-mediated society. That's really what we're doing. Lots
of people are picking up on it; it's a trendy thing. It's a curiosity
more than anything else. It's something we can use."

One work of web art that's using many of the shortcomings of the new
media environment to its advantage is novelist-cum-hacker Jacques
Servin's BEAST (TM). Exhibited virtually from his web-site
(http://www.quake.net/~jacq/Beast/) at the SIGGRAPH 98 event in Orlando,
Florida, Servin circulates through the international electronic arts
scene with a skills-set not usually seen on the web. His sampling of
various texts from Benjamin to Benn to new voices he's invented, music
loops stolen from various programs including the Windows system, and
images from a wide range of popular magazines circa 1930, are integrated
into a monster Java applet that anyone with a Pentium 120 or higher will
want to explore (some of the faster Powermacs can be used as well). The
Java applet is quite memory-heavy so those who have slower machines will
have to wait through a longer initial download time–but this is one
instance where it's definitely worth the wait!

The DEATH screen I linked to immediately presented me with a quote from
Walter Benjamin's "One Way Street" but before I could finish reading the
sampled text, all sorts of wild and unruly things began happening as the
huge Java applet continued downloading its chaotic hit of hallucinatory
madness: specially-encoded error-boxes kept popping into view trying to
explain what my problem was (my problem, I soon realized, was coming to
the WWW with Great Expectations), while middle-eastern techno-music
(hacked from the Windows system?) tried to soothe me back into the
surfing groove. As the artist himself says in a recent statement, "while
[BEAST(TM)] highlights the ugliness of computer technology, it also
leads the user to see the harmony in it, since the profusion of images,
warnings, sounds and tyrannical acts on the part of the system have an
ultimately pleasing rhythm." By interacting with this sort
narratological behaviorism, "the user is inducted into understanding his
or her own complicity in this state of affairs."

By clicking within the skating images that continuously float by, more
readable text fragments are spilled into the screen only to be overtaken
by yet more amazing graphics that skate across the screen in ways
animated gifs can't even dream of. Clicking on the skating images led to
more music shifts and, yes, more programmed "warning" messages that
purposely filled up the screen in lightning-speed progression so that it
was (intentionally) difficult to understand what these intrusive screens
actually said. One message that kept popping up started with words
"Please. Please…"–as if testing our "user-friendly" patience. The
artist's attempt to load our experience with invisible "Frustration
Plug-Ins" and disorienting audio streams creates an unusual comedy of
errors, a kind of Shakespearean black humor that uses hypermedia
typography as its cast of characters.

Servin himself has said about his new work:

"The medium that has emerged on the Web, and that continues to dominate
commercial esthetics in general, is one that fosters, and subtly depends
on, utter transience of attention. Extending television's effects
through its much-vaunted interactivity, hypertext as it exists on the
Web has served to render writing into 'content'–something to squeeze
between flashy images and absorb any drops of attention that might
accidentally spill.

"Beast(TM) relies on a hypertext system which I designed as an
alternative to web-style links. Instead of jumping from text to text,
the reader can direct the progress of a single text by interaction with
the text itself and with illustrations which float by in seeming 3-D. By
this means the interactive possibilities of the medium are tapped
without compromising the meditative approach to text for which we are
trained, and which depends on the text appearing at once, allowing the
eye to be a hypertext engine far more sophisticated than any that could
be devised. I would not say that linked texts are inherently corrupt;
this comes down to a matter of personal preference, evolved from
bombardment by so much web 'content.'"

Whereas many seasoned web-surfers are becoming familiar with the
"bombardment" that Servin speaks of, very few are creating digital
objects that actually intervene in the web's ongoing creative process.
BEAST(TM) signals yet another crucial break with an outmoded,
over-aestheticized, art-for-art's-sake mentality that seems to be
festering on the web. By employing innovative forms of multi-media
language that have been excluded from most literary productions confined
to book media, Servin also presents us with a narrative construction
that exhibits to us once again the Apollinaire dictum that "reality will
never be discovered once and for all" and that truth, should such a
thing exist, is always on the edge of becoming something else entirely
different from what we thought it was.