<nettime> Last (no)exit: net

[Jose Luis Brea <jlbrea@aleph-arts.org>]

(the following text was written as an intro to a selection of net.art pieces
curated for Vid@rte & Ciber@rt)
http://www.ciberart99.ua.es/m_g_prog.htm

--------------------------------


Last (no)exit: net

    "Last exit: painting"
    Thomas Lawson, 1981.

    "No exit"
    Joseph Kosuth, 1988.


In their introduction to Some of My Favorite Websites Are Art, Rachel Greene
and Alex Galloway described 1998 as "the year net.art exploded." The
attention bestowed by the Art-institution (some museums, some major
exhibitions) and the development of several autonomous critical devices
seemingly qualified to present and publicly discuss artistic practice on and
for the net (e-shows, debate lists, public analysis forums), fully justified
this description.

If the latter consolidate what Derrida would have called the <parergon> of
net.art, the series of devices that allow its social setting, I believe it
was Andreas Broeckmann who best defined the specific nature of the new
practice in terms of "presence and participation." Notwithstanding the fact
that net.art succeeded in analytically elucidating the formal rules of its
own language --perhaps the first self-designated "electronic artisans"
worked hard on this-- the foundations for moving on to public recognition
were in place.

As for me, I am convinced that an "art form" is not born out of the mere
appearance of a technological novelty and not even out of the added
discovery of a formal vocabulary associated to it, but only when the use of
inherent self criticism is granted to a symbolic production practice. In my
opinion, this is precisely what has started to happen in the field of
net.art and what, I believe, will now begin to allow us to speak about it as
a genuine art form. The fact is that now, it is actually a practice that not
only has developed its own language and social framework devices, but it has
also begun to critically question itself: to explore, establish and infringe
its own formal and linguistic limits, the standards of its own particular
field, and even its own form of effective socialization.

Several debates have shaken the net.art community in the past few months and
two of these are especially relevant. The first one has been on the issue of
activism on the net and the second on the commercialization of net.art. Both
debates, of course, have produced mutual forwarding  for example, at the
beginning of a net.art commercialization process, a "hacktivist"
answer --"artivist", if you prefer-- is specifically given. At the same
time, I think it is inevitable to contextualize both debates in the more
general process of global internet transformation, in what could be
described as its flashing mutation into the general form of commodity, of
merchandises. This global process has, no doubt, induced an enormous
centripetal force that has inevitably put weight on the transformations of
incipient net.art itself, now forced to endure the growing tension of its
assimilation by Art-institution as well as by the market. If we think about
the violent transformation that has reshaped the net from its initial
situation as a "Temporarily Autonomous Zone" --scattered archipelago of
independent and cellular enterprises linked together only through a rhizoid
structure, lacking defined centers and stable hierarchies-- to its brutal
present conversion into a territory of multi-million dollar investments by
major international telecommunication and information technology
corporations, we will understand that the pressure is not only inevitable,
but of an almost irresistible quality.

The first debate --activism on the net-- has made it very clear that any
dealings with spectacle and the shaping of false consciousness which
spectacle protects, is self-defeating from the standpoint of civil
disobedience and pacifist resistance in the interest of defined political
intervention. The abstract fantasy of a generic threat against "the system"
in the guise of the hacker --the computer activist who endangers and
questions information and information security system ownership-- reverts,
transformed, in "the system's" own benefit. On the one hand, as evidence for
increasing control devices and on the other -as all potential influence on
public opinion depends on media repercussion-- thus hacker's imaginery
fosters based construction of reality as a spectacle. It is not surprising,
then, that mainly, the first actual promoters of electronic resistance
tactics, the Critical Art Ensemble, later attracted attention as to how
media assimilation of mock activism policies (geared towards implementing
the media effect of subversive action) deactivates its tactical potential.
As a consequence, this taking sides is exclusively redirected towards
clandestine and direct action, that neither fosters media illusions of
subversion void of real content nor legitimizes the "contrasubversive"
adoption of control and security measures that rebound limiting the
conditions of liberty in the use of the net that all citizens enjoy.

The second debate has accomplished little more than setting off, and
unfortunately, up to now, it has not reached the analytical rigor of the
first --I am referring to the debate about the commercialization of net.art.
If in the first debate, the critical explanation of the hacker fantasy as a
radical activist has been propelled from within by its own protagonists
(mainly the CAE and the Electronic Resistance Theater) in a game of exemplar
self-critical dismantling; in the second, the interested fantasy of the
net.artist as a character who is completely alien to the mechanisms of
social production, allows the spreading of a false consciousness smoke
screen that blurs the real arguments up for discussion and prevents the
critical reconceptualization of symbolic production practices on the net, in
the context of the set of real processes of social production. It seems to
me that the heated debates that surrounded the public presentations of
hell.com as a reserved access site, and of art.telelportacia as a virtual
gallery dealing with net.art; and the sabotage action promoted against both
events by the group 0100101110101101.ORG, have up to now, contributed very
little to critically elucidate the real conditions of the social production
of artistic practice on the net, reinstating it  in terms of work on
symbolic production  in the midst of the economic-production fabric that
bonds social relationships.

It is from this perspective that I find that Knowbotic Research's most
recent project, I0_il lavoro inmateriale, particularly interesting. The way
I see it, this project analytically takes part providing the necessary
conceptual and theoretical instruments to address the immanent self
criticism point of this set of contemporary "sense_production" practices. We
believe that pointing out a main objective for critical action  production
of public sphere in the context of postmedia societies, --societies in which
the circulation of information is not fully joined according to the
concentration processes of the knowledge and opinion distributing devices,
and thus, not oriented towards consensus production-- and, at the same time
pointing out personal object  "immaterial work," symbolic production
practice understood and elucidated as real public communication practice
within a concrete social and historical context, builds the necessary
foundations for this immanent self-criticism process to actually begin.

We can then be sure that the present time is crucial for net.art. In the
first place, this positioning allows its critical register within the set of
social activities on one hand, and on the other, in the midst of the
contemporary art tradition. This is no other than the avant-garde, the
tradition of immanent self-criticism --finally fading out as the "last exit"
fantasy, to then critically recover as "last (no)exit." The latter, a field
that has been subjected to self-critical tension determined to be recorded
in terms of a logic of limits, living in a liminal realm over which to
uphold the double vinculum in a relationship that is, at the same time, of
ownership and excess, of inclusion and overflow.

If, in the case of a synchronic analysis, this logic fixes the limits of a
structural contradiction that makes practices oscillate between their
self-affirmation as art forms (and as merchandise by extension) and the
implicit denial of that condition, in as much as institutionalized and
fetishized, in the diachrony of a historical analysis, that paradoxical
relationship is solved by the efficiency of a sequential economy of "field
expansion." One of the moments of this economy is determined by the
accumulation of findings --of novelties-- that overflow what is known and
rupture the present norms, and the other by the process of "re-absortion" of
that anomaly to become part of the new norm, the new linguistic convention
and the new aesthetics: to become a drift line and turn into a code line.
Net.art is now part of this history and happens according to this "cultural
logic" --a certain negative dialectic, lets say, as seen through the light
of the cultural contradictions of advanced capitalism--; this is the first
fact that I feel must be stated. In the second place, and thus I will
conclude my analysis, I think that net.art's strongest potential lies
precisely in its critical interaction possibilities with the present
expanded field of artistic and cultural practices, and never in isolation
within the limits of its own autonomous definition. If we analyze the great
challenges, the great problematic constellations that shape our time's
inquiry into artistic practices and the transformation of its course in
present day societies, we will see that, at least potentially, net.art has
much to say and to contribute.

Without much hesitation, I would say that these two great challenges are
related to a pair of important issues. The first is the recent appearance
(and actual consolidation in industries of collective imagination, mainly
film and television) of the moving_image, an "image-mouvement", along with
everything this implies in terms of the global redefinition of
representation logics (redefinition of its cognitive and ontological scope
as well, in as much as these logics were structured based on the arcane
assumption of the still image, of the representation, of inertia of its
identity to itself not subjected to the passage of time.) Since for
centuries, image has been presented with a sole and motionless rendering of
time, and this irruption of a time-image infers a fundamental historical
novelty that confronts the rearrangement of the actual space of contemporary
representation  --and Deleuze's analysis on the subject can off course be
considered essential.

The second of the important issues I refer to is related to the emergence
and growing proliferation of non-spatial devices (museums and galleries are
spatial devices) for exhibition and public presentation of artistic
production, making Walter Benjamin's announcement of a radical
transformation of the course and form of the aesthetic experience in the era
of reproducibility --now telematic reproductibility-- more accurate by the
minute. A new form of experience that will never again be considered
reserved for the spatialized exhibition and object-conditioned by the piece
as "unique" and linked to an origin --to an "original," as well-- and thus
limited by time and space.

Certainly, the most interesting developments in the new artistic
practices --just to give a couple examples: the appearance of a new
narrative art in the postphotographic field, or the transgression of film
conventions in the new "exhibition cinema"-- are related to this type of
issues.

Undoubtedly, net.art possesses more than enough qualities to contribute with
its own findings regarding them. As to the development of the new forms of
narrative art, for example, we can't forget that hypertext appears as a
device that is able to thoroughly upset conventional narrative structures
(i'm thinking on grammaton or agatha appears, v.g). Regarding the emergence
of a moving image, it is evident that the net discloses a most suitable
territory for the flow of all technical image production practices, in whose
orbit postphotography as well as postcinema can find the ideal habitat.
Finally, and in relation to the development of new ways of distribution,
presentation an exhibition of artistic knowledge, the work on the net has
undoubtedly much to say, all the more so, it being the first technical
device --at least since television appeared--  that not only offers a new
kind of "support" for the work, but at the same time it is --and here is
where its more attractive specificity lies--  an efficient instrument for
its distribution, an autonomous "medium" that pronounces itself capable of
articulating its own presentation, distribution and reception strategies,
with an enormous potential for reorganizing audiences, and even the actual
structuring of the public sphere.

We have yet to find out if this potential will be taken to its fullest, if
those answers will be given and those findings realized. The "pieces" I put
forward in this selection  --of very different formats and intentions in
almost every case--  show that all steps have been taken for the outset of
the immanent self critical processes well as for the elucidation of their
relationship to the critical tradition of artistic practices, and also in
relation to what I have called the "great challenges" of these visual
communication practices in the context of the global transformation of the
image in our times, in our era.

To know if, after and beyond these first but already firm steps --also
considering the unstoppable, ongoing transformation of the actual internet,
and the qualitative leap that the upcoming bandwidth increase will
represent--  other and more definite findings will follow, would actually
constitute the practice of futurology, and our responsibility is only to
define territories, point out problems, and perhaps perceive in what ways
certain practices are better suited to solve these than others. My personal
conviction is that, not taking into account the simplistic fantasy of a
definitive solution, in this point in the history of artistic practices, the
one we have agreed to call net.art, is signaled to contribute amply. Time
will say if this is accomplished --and, in any case it is the cultural
producers and creators who will be entitled to the credit of making it
happen.

Jose Luis Brea.
http://w3art.es/jlbrea


Translated from Spanish: Ana Maria Garcia

...................................................
Selected pieces:


Natural Selection
Mongrel
http://www.mongrel.org.uk

Freud-Lissitzky Navigator
Lev Manovich & Norman Klein
http://www-apparitions.ucsd.edu/~manovich/FLN/

Will & Testament
Olia Lialina
http://will.teleportacia.org/

ascii history of moving images
Vuk Cosic
http://www.vuk.org/ascii/film/

A World Wide Watch - Closed Circuit Television (CCTV)
Heath Bunting
http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/cctv/cctv.cgi?action=main_page

Critical Art Ensemble
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~sbarnes/

Genetic Response System: An Investigation
Diane Ludin - Ricardo Dominguez - Fakeshop
http://www2.sva.edu/~dianel/genrep/intro.html

non site (Lsa 43)
La Soci�t� Anonyme
http://aleph-arts.org/lsa/lsa43/

�1995-1999 HELL.COM�
hell.com
http://www.hell.com/

ANTI�1999 0100101110101101.ORG
0100101110101101.ORG
http://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/hell.com

PHONE:E:ME
Mark Amerika
http://phoneme.walkerart.org/

IO_lavoro inmateriale
Knowbotic Research
http://io.khm.de/lavoro/


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