You expect middle-aged and elderly people to reminisce, to remember the
good old days when they were young and crazy, or when they used to work
for peanuts (and a candy bar used to cost a nickel). But in a culture
driven by computers, today's engines of obsolescence, people find
themselves over the hill before they even begin to make their mark.
Machines and systems turn over so fast today, and this churn apparently
overwhelms the artists and designers operating these machines to the
extent that they appear to be aging prematurely (the old days are now
way back in 1995!).

Despite the fact that machines and systems are at the heart of today's
digital transformation, computer culture isn't driven by equipment or
software manufacturers. It is pushed along by computer operators.
Cultural scenes have always been generated and manipulated by operators.
Such operators were traditionally hustlers, self promoters and adept
exploiters of critical resources (the means of production and
distribution). The digital art domain is run by a new breed of
operators. Machine operators. Actually, because the machines are
naturally networked, the new operators are really cooperators.
Stand-alone operators are history. Computer culture is the domain of
cooperators.

One of the most amazing things about the digital transformation of
culture is the way the tools of production and distribution are
proliferating and saturating the environment. Non-linear video editing
software is arriving in our mailboxes in the form of advertising
supplements. The means of production and distribution, once limited and
controlled and exploited by traditional operators, are now practically
everywhere. Artists and designers in unprecedented numbers are
assembling digital studios, making work and distributing this work
without institutional sanction, bypassing the gatekeepers, commercial or
non-profit, the governing corporate institutions of material,
intellectual or spiritual exchange.

With all this traffic running circles around traditional institutions,
it makes you wonder what the middle-men and -women (the middle-people)
are doing these days. Institutionalized people function in part as a
resistance to change, a moderating force like a social or cultural field
of gravity, inertial in a positive or negative way, depending on your
point of view. Institutions are also memory devices. Middle-people
permit and encourage audiences to take a second look.

The cost of this end-run around traditional corporate institutions is
really minimal, although disturbing to some. In the short-term, direct
access to audiences has definitive advantages. But in the longer-term,
early adapters to the WWW are beginning to realize their contemporary
history is evaporating before their eyes. Platforms and formats are
fading from memory and network art (cooperative information design) is
disappearing before the audience really takes a second look (or a first
look through the documentation). Actually network art is being buried
by the debris of mundane commercial activity.

Network artists, having taken their work directly to audiences, now
(oddly enough) court the middle-people, the producers, curators,
publishers, bureaucrats, teachers, librarians and archivists, in
corporate institutions, to acknowledge, classify, grade, maintain and
preserve this rather recent, momentary history. Network artists now
seem to crave recognition and support from the authorities they have
spurned. This quest for recognition and certification is bizarre, a
kind of appropriation of status by reverse engineering, but then artists
have always wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

The glory days and classic works artists reminisce about today will be
remembered only if the time and work is recorded, archived and
historicized. It must be preserved and organized for future audiences
or it will vanish. Contemporary art history is always written first and
best by the practitioners themselves. History is a compilation and
interpretation of evidence, in the case of network art, a vanishing
trail of relationships between cooperators. Fortunately there is a
material base to this history (if consumer behaviour can be tracked in
great detail by corporate data-mining operations today, then digital
historians and archaeologists can certainly piece together events and
'things' created cooperatively through networks in the late 20th
century). The relationships between cooperators were fixed in digital
memory, way back in 1995, and many years before that…