It was only about three months ago that the new media afficionados were
all a flutter concerning the new BIOTECH initiatives in net art. Which
was all fine and good if one lived in London.

For us who believe in a more global scale; the recent trend has been the
politics of subversion, for better or for ill. Vuk Cosic's Documenta
heist is well documented and there is enough commentary on the action to
almost kill its grandeur to begin with. Its fascinating how long it took
many to follow suit.

The excellent RTMARK, who I dare say are quite on schedule for a massive
backlash, will kick off this week's net.art goodybag with
http://www.gwbush.com. The satirical site is one of the best satires
I've seen of American politics, aside from the Perot campaign.

It should help to mention, in the Cinema isle, the film "Bob Roberts,"
written and directed by Tim Robbins, which I watched twice this week, a
brilliant mock documentary of the right wing folksingers run for senate.

Similarly, GWBUSH.com's site is sickeningly accurate parody of the
Presidential Son's campaign trail. Even better, the quotes, such as
"There ought to be limits to freedom," are direct quotations.

The macro politics of gwbush.com, however, are just as interesting.
Domain names are now as close as one can get to libel or copyright
violations while still maintaining legal protection of the contents.
It's an activist's wet dream! The new politics of subversion are equal
in opportunity to those of the technology, offering a new toolbox for
anyone willing to use it.

Another site following the domain name suit is located at
http://www.smak.org. SMAK (STEDELIJK MUSEUM VOOR ACTUELE KUNST GENT) is
a Belgian art museumdedicated to contemporary art. Their web site
features the work of various internet artists, initiatives and
designers, but in fact, SMAK is not responsible for the sites innovative
and appropriate content. Rather, a small group of students and activists
banded together to purchase the domain name, then contacted interesting
digital initiatives. The material is worth a look, to be certain, and it
seems to still be in the process of collecting work for its online
collection.

Lastly, there is the http://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG site; which, in the
face of a somewhat interesting act of art sabotage, proceeded to do
absolutely nothing interesting with it. Hell.com's online event,
SURFACE, was opened to the RHIZOME audience several weeks ago. The
0100101110101101ers downloaded all the material and posted it, to the
public, no passwords, resulting in the threat of legal action from
hell.com. Since then, they have gone on to, for some reason, download
and make available other publically available sites, such as
teleportacia.org, triggering the very appropriate response from Alexei
Shulgin: "Great. Subversion again."

All of this is of course evident of a new move for net related art
initiatives towards the more political aspects of the net. The
communication issues and identity issues it triggers are by no means
new, but still particularly relevant. In the wake of a war, in which
propaganda questions were raised for every new fact reported by either
side of the media, it is interesting to note that it is no longer safe
to assume that when you enter a Sears Roebucks, you are not actually
entering a JC Penney, or an animal rights orginization. This is the
nature of subversion, of course, the issue of raising questions via
agitation.

It's unfortunate, then, to see a slide from the intelligent subversion
to that of subversion for subversion's sake. It would be sufficient to
define appropriate subversion as that which affects a "real world"
institution via "virtual" means, or one that creates a question towards
the corporate face of the internet, or even the entire methodolgy behind
internet identity.