BLAST
http://artnetweb.com/artnetweb/projects/blast/home.html
[main site: http://interport.net/~xaf]

In _Crash_, the novel (now film) in which J. G. Ballard prophecies the
"coming autogeddon" or the "nightmare marriage of sex and technology,"
the "mirror smeared with vomit" becomes a mirror of art. The narrator,
James Ballard, recounts a minor car crash which caused his wife to vomit
on the seat: "This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid
rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine,
still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the
car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as
refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of
liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses. In this
magic pool, lifting from her throat like a rare discharge of fluid from
the mouth of a remote and mysterious shrine, I saw my own reflection, a
mirror of blood, semen and vomit, distilled from a mouth whose contours
only a few minutes before had drawn steadily against my penis."
Catherine's body as seen in the car's cracked rear-view mirror becomes
the stimulus which produces the "magic pool" of art in which Ballard
sees his own reflection.

And such it is also inside the BLAST site, but here it is the
distinction between the art object and its reflection which breaks down.
This BLAST mirror though does not reproduce the image of a complete
subject - or, as Julia Kristeva says, "a clean and proper body." It is,
as in Crash, instead the effect of an abject doubling, as the first five
years of Blast are presented in the form of a conversional archive which
attempts to document the content and forms of Blast, while crashing it.
It attempts this not through a fixed delimitation but through a
desystematization, and as such it presents an alternate view of the
Internet's archival strengths. Here archiving becomes a process of
capturing that which always eludes finitude. The archive is unable to
contain - it can only institute a continual process of conversion.

In the Blast site, a productive tension is developed between the
delimitation of this archive and its subversion through the
incorporation of excess – between the fixed coherence of the Blast
publication and its variable editorial formations. This dynamic is
played out in the space of the site within the hypertextual environment
of the World Wide Web and the user "virtual community" of the MOO. In
the site a dynamic matrix appears, within which Blast formations are
located, as systematized and partially contained by the conversional
archive. Formations are produced when inscriptions, interfaces, and
incorporations align in various ways to produce elements, and when those
elements are linked in a process of articulation, partially fixing
meaning in a system of differences, links, and flows. When these
articulations–the various components are related together –are grouped
within the confines of Blast, they become Blast content.

[…]

While art sites traditionally serve to hegemonize certain demands and
generate normative fields of art, as in the typical fixed creator-viewer
relations of the invariability bogus "interactive" clicks, Blast
attempts to generate alternate interactive formations that disrupt and
outflank these practices. It questions the separation between art and
digital media. Questioned too are ideologies of interactivity, and
"network" metaphors, generating alternate experimental models by simply
opening up the site to multiple positions within its archival space.