The contemporary begins at points dispersed across the calendar: 1912 -
R Mutt's urinal; 1953 - John Cage's 4'33"; 1976 - David Hall's "This is
a Television Receiver." Each moment of the contemporary's entrance
catches us in questions that are not exhausted by concepts of zen
nullity, medium specificity, the discursive construction of art. (as
Zappa says, art has a frame. If it hasn't got a frame, you say, What is
that shit on the wall? but if it has a frame, you can say, Ah, that's
art; and after that, its just a matter of opinion.)

Well, maybe: now, in the contemporary (the Post-contemporary?)
spatial/audio/video artists have to respond to the null point, with a
degree of seriousness. Is their art proof against this ridicule? Has it
appropriated and consumed ridicule to itself? Has it plumbed and been
plumbed into the banality and ubiquity of art, its eradication of form
and beauty, its rediscovery of the shopwindows and street noise of the
resolute Now? Has it abandoned art in order to find it.

Etcetera. I suppose for many of us Jodi is the nearest pass we have to a
net art that might be heading for degree zero: something harrowingly
close to endlessly inventive tedium, the claustrophobia of internet and
its fantastic vistas. But I doubt Jodi, as a project, is addressing the
Thing I am trying to frame, the zero point that defines the medium, its
end-point and the necessary imbecility from which any future
construction of the medium has to be a departure.

You will answer, quite correctly, that I am asking for a Master-work, of
a kind we shouldn't need any longer; and that in any case the internet
itself is that work, only a work without author and dimensionless, as
omnipresent as sound, as stupid as an upturned bicycle wheel, and that
TV is in any case the masterwork of postmodernism.

I cannot quite believe in these little paradoxes: these little
oxymorons are language games, not ontological interventions, as Paik's
TV Buddha and his Zen for Film interrogate and explode the ontological
standing of TV and film. Tristram Shandy had done the exquisite business
for the novel in the 18th century, Beckett's Breathe for theatre. Unless
we know what the null is, we cannot find out what stuff this stuff is
woven of. Two further possibilities: that there is no zero of
multimedia, but the fat plenum Steven Holzman was pursuing when he made
cataclysmic music from the MHz radiation of his CPU; or that there can
be no null point of hybrid media, condemned instead to hierarchies of
image, text and sound.

Is there, or do we need, to understand the reality of the new media, as
we needed to discover the old? Has internet abolished zero?