Essays

THE WEB - text for online conference 2 Dec 98 / iniva/entransit

The web traces an invisible line from the individual station to "other" individual stations, themselves receiver transmittors, we enter a realm of instant space in as much time as it takes to make a cup of coffee, the individual is able to encircle the globe in a matter of minutes, only mystics have laid claim to this accessibility to a virtual universal data bank, of pure information, transformed into a digital encoding.
The poetry of this virtual mathematics is in its infancy, the web is only recently spread as like a world wide electronic virus, mutating at each digital station, seducing whole environments down to the micro size of a megabyte, or some other digital enfraction, technology itself is the art of science, its formal equivalent, I have subscribed to a belief that the business of art in the plastic manifestation is a similar investigation into the state of this virtual space, that an image or a thing of art is an encoding and refinement of composited and compressed impression and skill, art is the result from mind configuring idea into some "thing" imbued with its contemporary relavances ; the web is a zone where new planetary relavances will coagulate and mutate opportunity and language, it is the place where world order will make itself known and challenged, human consciousness is undergoing a paradigm shift as the presence of virtuality blends with the micro measurements of  real human space.

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McLuhan is history, now it's the politics of Jung, cosmic message about human tribe and trivulation, we all will be inhabiting the same space, part of cosmic order and the laws of men, in this time the microexamination of myths and magickal mathematics to fly faster than light, it is as if mankind has discovered another gift from the gods, and now we are in a process of examining it to the absurd degree, knowledge propagating itself in and out of the trusted confgigurations of our present technological wizardry, things always being improved, the planet in a state of utter amazement.
Artistic space within the community simultaneously becomes the public property on screen, everybody, anywhere, anytime, can press a few buttons and find out about you, the "I" of the personality is now public, a whole world has access to you.
How do you define using this cyberspace artistically, what does such a statement mean exactly, when millions of "other" normal people are getting logged on and into these realms, where the individual is forced to design and communicate presence and relavance, as would an artist expressing some idea or the other in a particular way - artists are using this hyperspace for all sorts of reasons and personal choices, but mostly to exhibit in a personal gallery and to attract interest and sales, it is a personal stage. Most artists I know are in the business of defining and designing their own spaces, the computer terminal is not the domain of a few, it is a world wide phenomena.
In the not too distant future, the computer terminal will be a hand held device, even a credit card fully interactive to plug into any terminal worldwide - all of this wonderful wizardry does not dolve the problem of what to do with twenty four hours in a day. The problems of creaturely daily references are always with us, the skein of everyday forever before and simultaneously engulfing every known and unknown action, we, in spite of computers cannot get beyond the "itnes" of our lives, names reduced to numbers in a vast and inclusive methodology of encoding, the philosophical questions of relavance are with us in the bush and in the concrete jungle wired up to the max.
Every philosophy tries to deny the necessity of this creaturely and natural state of embodiement, the attempt to find the rational god and the god of faith ultimately brings the questioner to the point of death, the death of thought and the thousands of deaths to our conscious mindscapes, philosophies to understand the meanings of this death, in an effort to transcend, who is to say that transcendence is impossible through the processes of digitization, beam me up !
Is a cyborg a work of art, is it a walking puppet, an automaton or a design to be improved upon until it is in the image and likeness of man, are we at a time when art may meet science or are we at a time of polarization and acute specializations in a world web of specializations.