"Last exit: painting"
Thomas Lawson, 1981.

"No exit"
Joseph Kosuth, 1988.

In their introduction to "Some of My Favourite Websites Are Art"
(www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart) Rachel Greene and Alex Galloway
described 1998 as "the year net.art exploded." The attention bestowed by
the Art institution (some museums, some major exhibitions) and the
development of several autonomous critical devices seemingly qualified
to present and publicly discuss artistic practice on and for the net
(e-shows, debate lists, public analysis forums), fully justified this
description.

If the latter consolidate what Derrida would have called the "parergon"
of net.art (the series of devices that allow its social setting) I
believe it was Andreas Broeckmann who best defined the specific nature
of the new practice in terms of "presence and participation."
Notwithstanding the fact that net.art succeeded in analytically
elucidating the formal rules of its own language–perhaps the first
self-designated "electronic artisans" worked hard on this–the
foundations for moving on to public recognition were in place.

As for me, I am convinced that an "art form" is not born out of the mere
appearance of a technological novelty and not even out of the added
discovery of a formal vocabulary associated to it, but only when the use
of inherent self-criticism is granted to a symbolic production practice.
In my opinion, this is precisely what has started to happen in the field
of net.art and what, I believe, will now begin to allow us to speak
about it as a genuine art form. The fact is that now, it is actually a
practice that not only has developed its own language and social
framework devices, but it has also begun to critically question itself:
to explore, establish and infringe its own formal and linguistic limits,
the standards of its own particular field, and even its own form of
effective socialization.

Several debates have shaken the net.art community in the past few months
and two of these are especially relevant. The first one has been on the
issue of activism on the net and the second on the commercialization of
net.art. Both debates, of course, have produced mutual forwarding for
example, at the beginning of a net.art commercialization process, a
"hacktivist" answer –"artivist", if you prefer–is specifically given.
At the same time, I think it is inevitable to contextualize both debates
in the more general process of global internet transformation, in what
could be described as its flashing mutation into the general form of
commodity, of merchandise. This global process has, no doubt, induced an
enormous centripetal force that has inevitably put weight on the
transformations of incipient net.art itself, now forced to endure the
growing tension of its assimilation by the art world as well as by the
market. If we think about the violent transformation that has reshaped
the net from its initial situation as a "temporarily autonomous zone"–a
scattered archipelago of independent and cellular enterprises linked
together only through a rhizoid structure, lacking defined centers and
stable hierarchies–to its brutal present conversion into a territory of
multi-million dollar investments by major international
telecommunication and information technology corporations, we will
understand that the pressure is not only inevitable, but of an almost
irresistible quality.

The first debate, activism on the net, has made it very clear that any
dealings with spectacle and the shaping of false consciousness which
spectacle protects, is self-defeating from the standpoint of civil
disobedience and pacifist resistance in the interest of defined
political intervention. The abstract fantasy of a generic threat against
"the system" in the guise of the hacker–the computer activist who
endangers and questions information and information security system
ownership–reverts, transformed, in "the system's" own benefit. On the
one hand, as evidence for increasing control devices and on the other
(as all potential influence on public opinion depends on media
repercussion) thus hacker's imaginery fosters based construction of
reality as a spectacle. It is not surprising, then, that mainly, the
first actual promoters of electronic resistance tactics, the Critical
Art Ensemble, later attracted attention as to how media assimilation of
mock activism policies (geared towards implementing the media effect of
subversive action) deactivates its tactical potential. As a consequence,
this taking sides is exclusively redirected towards clandestine and
direct action, that neither fosters media illusions of subversion void
of real content nor legitimizes the "contrasubversive" adoption of
control and security measures that rebound limiting the conditions of
liberty in the use of the net that all citizens enjoy.

The second debate on the commercialization of net.art has only begun.
Unfortunately, up to now, it has not reached the analytical rigor of the
first. If in the first debate, the critical explanation of the hacker
fantasy as a radical activist has been propelled from within by its own
protagonists (mainly the CAE and the Electronic Disturbance Theater) in
a game of exemplar self-critical dismantling; in the second, the
interested fantasy of the net.artist as a character who is completely
alien to the mechanisms of social production, allows the spreading of a
false consciousness smoke screen that blurs the real arguments up for
discussion and prevents the critical reconceptualization of symbolic
production practices on the net, in the context of the set of real
processes of social production. It seems to me that the heated debates
that surrounded the public presentations of hell.com as a reserved
access site, and of art.telelportacia as a virtual gallery dealing with
net.art; and the sabotage action promoted against both events by the
group 0100101110101101.ORG, have up to now, contributed very little to
critically elucidate the real conditions of the social production of
artistic practice on the net, reinstating it in terms of work on
symbolic production in the midst of the economic-production fabric that
bonds social relationships.

It is from this perspective that I find that Knowbotic Research's most
recent project, IO_lavoro_immateriale, particularly interesting. The way
I see it, this project analytically takes part providing the necessary
conceptual and theoretical instruments to address the immanent
self-criticism point of this set of contemporary "sense_production"
practices. We believe that pointing out a main objective for critical
action production of public sphere in the context of postmedia
societies–societies in which the circulation of information is not
fully joined according to the concentration processes of the knowledge
and opinion distributing devices, and thus, not oriented towards
consensus production–and, at the same time pointing out personal object
"immaterial work," symbolic production practice understood and
elucidated as real public communication practice within a concrete
social and historical context, builds the necessary foundations for this
immanent self-criticism process to actually begin.

We can then be sure that the present time is crucial for net.art. In the
first place, this positioning allows its critical register within the
set of social activities on one hand, and on the other, in the midst of
the contemporary art tradition. This is no other than the avant-garde,
the tradition of immanent self-criticism–finally fading out as the
"last exit" fantasy, to then critically recover as "last (no)exit." The
latter, a field that has been subjected to self-critical tension
determined to be recorded in terms of a logic of limits, living in a
liminal realm over which to uphold the double vinculum in a relationship
that is, at the same time, of ownership and excess, of inclusion and
overflow.

If, in the case of a synchronic analysis, this logic fixes the limits of
a structural contradiction that makes practices oscillate between their
self-affirmation as art forms (and as merchandise by extension) and the
implicit denial of that condition, in as much as institutionalized and
fetishized, in the diachrony of a historical analysis, that paradoxical
relationship is solved by the efficiency of a sequential economy of
"field expansion." One of the moments of this economy is determined by
the accumulation of findings–of novelties–that overflow what is known
and rupture the present norms, and the other by the process of
"re-absortion" of that anomaly to become part of the new norm, the new
linguistic convention and the new aesthetics: to become a drift line and
turn into a code line. Net.art is now part of this history and happens
according to this "cultural logic"–a certain negative dialectic, let's
say, as seen through the light of the cultural contradictions of
advanced capitalism. This is the first fact that I feel must be stated.
In the second place, and thus I will conclude my analysis, I think that
net.art's strongest potential lies precisely in its critical interaction
possibilities with the present expanded field of artistic and cultural
practices, and never in isolation within the limits of its own
autonomous definition. If we analyze the great challenges, the great
problematic constellations that shape our time's inquiry into artistic
practices and the transformation of its course in present day societies,
we will see that, at least potentially, net.art has much to say and to
contribute.

+ + +

The "pieces" I put forward in this selection–of very different formats
and intentions in almost every case–show that all steps have been taken
for the outset of the immanent self critical processes well as for the
elucidation of their relationship to the critical tradition of artistic
practices, and also in relation to what I have called the "great
challenges" of these visual communication practices in the context of
the global transformation of the image in our times, in our era.

Selected pieces:

Natural Selection
Mongrel
http://www.mongrel.org.uk

Freud-Lissitzky Navigator
Lev Manovich & Norman Klein
http://www-apparitions.ucsd.edu/~manovich/FLN/

Will & Testament
Olia Lialina
http://will.teleportacia.org/

ascii history of moving images
Vuk Cosic
http://www.vuk.org/ascii/film/

A World Wide Watch - Closed Circuit Television (CCTV)
Heath Bunting
http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/cctv/cctv.cgi?action=main_page

Critical Art Ensemble
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~sbarnes/

Genetic Response System: An Investigation
Diane Ludin - Ricardo Dominguez - Fakeshop
http://www2.sva.edu/~dianel/genrep/intro.html

non site (Lsa 43)
La Soci