Drawn by the potentially large audiences for their work, artists are starting to engage with the issues inherent to the medium. Can artists' efforts to engage with new technologies make an impact now that our perceptions of the web are largely moulded by two American software corporations?

Video is an important reference point, delivered through a similarly uniform filter. The theorising of video and television borrowed largely from film theory and sociological discourse, but the technological differences forced critics to consider issues such as the nature of simulation, access to the medium, the domestic viewing environment. The results were hybrid theories of video and media, not a new paradigm. This approach can also be applied in describing computer networks, which are not uniquely new.

Computer-specific aesthetics are dominated by conceptual legacies. As an example, a few common metaphors from the personal computer interface: window, browser, surf, mail, desktop, mouse. The conceptual frameworks for software are grounded in a particular view of the non-digital world. Most programming code is based on the English language and Western mathematical notation. This gives every piece of software written a specific historical and cultural background. An awareness of such issues is crucial for art which aims at a critical approach. A useful framework for thinking about the web can be built from examining the development of technologies in video, broadcasting, computers, telephony, audio and mechanical writing.

The specificity has changed, but the strategies employed by these artists are remarkably similar to those of an earlier generation of video artists. The aim is to disrupt the flow of information being consumed by the audience. David Hall's works for television achieved this by employing an alternative visual grammar, thereby making the audience aware of the constraints of television conventions, and their complicity in the process of constructing meaning on the glass screen. In the same way, jodi and Napier attempt to upset expectations of a seamless, easy web 'surfing' experience. The preoccupation of jodi with malfunction of language, the unravelling of codes, mirrors work by video artists in the 1980s such as Gary Hill and Stephen Partridge. Partridge's Sentences series for television deconstruct linguistic meanings, the contradictions of media semiotics. Constantly evolving syntactic forms resemble hypertext in their fluidity of meaning, and the reliance on the viewer to make links: conceptually rather than by clicking a mouse button. 

Certain artists have referenced the video art tradition in web work, notably the Technologies to the People project from irational.org 7 which purports to be a web based collection of video art classics from the past. On trying to view any of the works, a series of warnings ensue, advising that the latest technology is required. These are so highly specified and wide ranging that only the highest level technocrat could be so well equipped. An effective criticism of proprietary video and audio streaming standards on the web, and implicit is a view of video art as an elite practice restricted to a tiny audience.

At the moment, Net artists broadcast/publish their work across an open network; the audience does not pay to experience the work, and cannot meaningfully own it. But late capitalism has shown that value can be exchanged for the immaterial. Will artists adopt the televisual model of pay per view, siting work on secure servers and demanding credit card numbers for access? Perhaps no-one would pay to see Net art, but many museums charge entry fees. Money is already electronic: art tends to follow money.

When video arrived the utopian potential was seized upon by radicals, as a means for everyone to make television. Camcorders are now widespread, but the question of how to gain access to distribution networks is still central. Most artists on the Net operate in the equivalent of cable access channels: with the majority of the population watching the other (commercial) channels. Access to broadcast/publish via the Internet is low cost, but publicity in traditional media to attract audiences costs plenty; people won't use search engines to look for Net art if they don't know it exists...

As the web becomes more uniform, and integrates more closely with digital television, prior models from video art, as well as projects such as the Stalker and Digital Shredder demonstrate the challenge for artists: to restructure the dominant interface and create truly radical software.

Chris Byrne

2. Raindance Corporation, Editorial in Radical Software No.1, New York (1970)

3. Walter van der Cruijsen, interviewed by Johan Pijnappel, Art & Design 39

4. "How Many Online?", Nua Internet Surveys, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html

5. http://404.jodi.org/ or http://oss.jodi.org/

6. http://potatoland.org/

7. http://www.irational.org/

8. Jean Baudrillard, "The Orders of Simulacra" in Simulations, New York (1983)

10. http://www.irational.org/heath/

11. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought, New York (1985)

12. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

13. http://www.easynet.co.uk/simonbiggs/

14. http://potatoland.org/

15. i/o/d is a collective comprising Matthew Fuller, Colin Green, Matthew Fuller. For further details see Variant Vol.2, No. 6, Autumn 1998, or visit http://www.backspace.org/iod/