Nino Rodriguez sent the following query to the Rhizome list:

Curious to hear your thoughts on the significance of net.art riffing off
of corporate culture and anonymity – etoy, RTMark, AirWorld, etc.

Why the prominence of this "genre" at this point in time?

Mark River added the following points:

inverse to the stance of net.artist as corporations is net institutions
/corporations (thing.net, rhizome.org, or hell.com) as artist

MTAA began not only as a "rif" on corporate culture but as a need to
build our own context. Etoy.com, set our eyes aglow but so did
collectives like soundlab, artnetweb, fpu/fakeshop.

RTMark seems closest to hitting the corporate stance, but is nice to see
when the artainers in them slip out (enjoyed the santa outfits… very
nice).

Robbin Murphy replied:

Maybe it has to do with what McLuhan said about art taking up obsolete
technologies. The managerial corporate technology we grew up with that
made things or provided services has turned into something like
information-based bioedutainment. The corporation itself has little
value except as a trademark and a stock. Artists pick up the scraps of
corporate technology and fashion them into art works, nostalgic mementos
of a bygone era.

Nino Rodriguez replied to Murphy:

My sense is exactly the opposite – the appeal of the "corporate" to
net.artists lies in its power to legitimate – the corporation is
valuable because it creates a voice of currency and authority. (Even if
that authority is then undermined through the usual irony,
appropriations, etc.)

Mark River referred to this "as a need to build our own context". What
other viable contexts do net.artists have for their work? Perhaps it's a
symptom of the corporate/technology infrastructure we rely on to even
create net.art in the first place.

Is it possible for art to effectively critique something (in this case,
corporate culture) when the form of the artwork and the persona of the
artist is effectively another expression of that very thing? This is the
catch-22 that etoy has found themselves in – the more they critique the
corporate (in a courtroom, for example), the more they have to actually
*be* corporate.

Jennifer and Kevin Mccoy replied:

we are asked [these types of questions] all the time about airworld
[http://www.airworld.net]. the argument goes something like "by
questioning the language of the corporate world by using that language,
don't you become part of the problem?" (josephine bosma asked us
something to that effect in the <a href="/cgi/to.cgi?t=1562">interview</a> on the site). our response is
two-fold. first, airworld just holds a mirror up to the corporate
internet, it is a readymade, and no more. second, if we were so into
the corporate world, we wouldn't do art, we would take our computer
skills and get corporate jobs. it is more a question of responding to
the world that is around you.

one discussion that has come up about airworld is that it is a very
american project – i guess the very idea of considering the corporate
space as a potential art space. this has come up when presenting the
project in europe. that may be a fair statement, but etoy is an obvious
counterexample.

Robbin Murphy wrote:

I think etoy is still foreign enough to be incomprehensible to the
American corporate culture and judicial system. rTMark or some of the
irational.org projects would be more recognizable, would share similar
basic "code".

Somewhat like jodi.org, etoy is sincerely making fun of their target in
a public space. As people like Andrew Ross have been pointing out, the
U.S. is losing that public space to corporate private space. Making fun
of corporate culture is an assault on private property here and
increasingly the courts are treating corporations as private entities in
need of legal protection against attack from enemy corporations. It's
almost like we're slipping back into a feudal state.

Replying to Mark River's comment that "the net allows one to slip in and
out of other contexts," Nino Rodriguez wrote:

There's an element of traditional "intervention" or "happening" in the
net context then. The idea that the unsuspecting public might stumble
across some art – this seems like a central idea behind etoy, airworld,
and