Recently I was able to obtain some e-terview fragments from Arthur and
Marilouise Kroker. The Krokers edit the online theory journal CTHEORY
(www.ctheory.com) and have recently published _Digital Delirium_ (New
York: St. Martin's, 1997), an anthology of contemporary art/cultural
theory.

+ + +

* tell me about what you are working on these days. i know there's
ctheory and the book. What about ctheory's collaboration with documenta
X…?

After finishing editing Digital Delirium, we've begun a cyber/street
novel. One more mutation down the road. In addition, we've just returned
from a keynote address at 6Cyberconf, and we've been working in Sweden
with the electronic composer, Steve Gibson, on some new music texts:
Slow Suicide and Cyberboy. Both will be incorporated into a documentary
on our work being done by Montreal video-maker, Lewis Cohen, for Channel
4(UK) Rough Cuts (CBC, Canada). We'll be working with Lewis on the
documentary over the next four months. Recently, Lewis finished a
video–"99 Year Phone Call'–based on our event-scene, the Remake
Millennium.

We're pleased that Documenta X (www.documenta.de) has associated itself
with CTHEORY, although we didn't know anything about it until their Web
site appeared. Such is the Net. Now, we're trying to get Doc. to update
the link: it's about 6 months out of date.

* Your new book "Digital Delirium" contains material from contemporary
artists - i'm thinking specifically of Ricardo Dominguez, Sawad Brooks,
Stelarc, Knowbotics Research, Critical Art Ensemble. Do you see a
through-line in this work, something you might term 'new media art'?

Digital Delirium certainly deals directly with new media art, as has
CTHEORY. For us, electronic artists like Stelarc and Knowbotic Research
are Galileo's of the digital age: tracing the vector path of the
disappearance of flesh into its recombinant (electronic) other.

* give me the five best reasons to be online.

The usual suspects: data, delirium, spasm, trash, hacking–hey, aren't
those the titles of our books?

Five reasons (not) to be on-line

data, delirium, spasm, trash, hacking

* 'interact' seems to have eclipsed 'virtual' as the most common
descriptive keyword for new media art. what do you think this says about
peoples' relationship to technology?

Interact? Sounds like a bank machine. Maybe the Net is already following
a descending spiral into sociology. This is definitely not good, perhaps
it's nostalgia for the loss of virtuality on our part.

* can online art be authorless?

Electronic art is always collectively authored, not only by artists but
also by viewers and, of course, by the Web itself. Electronic art is
intensive, participatory, and aleatory; in short, recombinant art for an
age of mutating body fragments.

* what do you think about the computer virus? can the virus (and thus a
sort of 'data death') be aestheticized in a way that offline violence
cannot?

The computer virus as data death? Maybe, except computer viruses are
like electronic parasites that disturb the field momentarily only to
reenergize it. The virus is the spectre of catastrophe that haunts the
Net, and on behalf of which it continues to function. As the Net slows
down into the web of normality, the computer virus is the crash that is
always on the data horizon, no less feared for its absence of real data
death. After all, to the computer, _we_ are the viruses that infect the
blank spaces of data.