There are two modes of network investigation that I see today, both equally valid. The first engages the specific conditions of net space -its hardware, its protocols, its modes of access, its layerings, its economies, its structuring of signification. The work of Jodi.org, for example, consists of a kind of 'network speech', indicating the new kinds of articulation that the Net makes possible. The second emphasizes the intersections and coordinations of on-and offline spaces -that is, the organisational protocols and imperatives through which these spaces are synchronized, cross-formatted, and brought 'in line' with one another. This concerns the ways in which network representations and built realities affect and constitute one another -how, on the one hand, the network image is urbanized, and on the other, the urban configures as a network of inhabitable images.

The work of architect/artist Keller Easterling is exemplary in this regard. She explores the various ways in which development for landscapes, buildings, and transport mechanisms are formatted by network protocols embedded within business and communications organizations. She pays attention to how invisible protocols have enormous physical and material consequences, no matter how 'virtual'. Her network topologies are heterogeneous assemblages of databases, protocols, urban structures, and communicative and behavioural patterns.

Each of these models -exploring the specificity of net space, on the one hand, and the interconnection of on-and offline urban reality, on the other- challenges one to articulate changes in the structure of representation and in the visual field. What is going on in the network image, how does one see it, how is one made adequate to see it? How is one adjusted to its frequencies? How does network representation operate, how does it signify, what identifications does it compel? This approach most productively begins with an awareness that the image, as we have known it, is virtually ceasing to exist. What arises to take its place?

Here there a two models. The first is the interface of the database, which seems to stretch over the whole of reality, subsuming the postmodern primacy of the depthless image. The database is in fact deep, subject to reordering protocols, calculations, and processing functions. Its metaphors are already everywhere. The second model involves the image acting as a ruse -a slick cover for the techniques which have found more powerful realms of engagement. The field of game designing, for example, understands the operative quality of rhythm: a cybernetics wherein viewer, machine, and software form a circuit of frequency-adjustment, barely registered by the perceptual scan. At a time when wearable computing, the 'embedded Internet', and 'smart home' applications are just around the corner, the field of bodily behaviour becomes a contested ground, an emerging theatre of operations. A recent spate of articles on 'the home of the future' shows rooms with no keyboards or monitors, only bodies gesturing strangely like mimes, submitting gleefully to a monitored space which 'sees' their every move and processes the information in the name of convenience, safety, and adequacy. Such intrusions into the home and formerly private space are viewed less and less frequently with alarm. The creator and subject of the popular Web project Jenny's Room: for example, sees the 24-hour monitoring Webcam installed in her apartment in 'friendly', intimate terms -even though it transforms her private bedroom into a strange kind of public space, accessible to Web visitors all over the world.

Better not to rely on the interface as it stands: it is breaking up, its processors distributed into the most unlikely places. Better to understand it as a complex of functions and procedures. With this comes the ability to disperse the point of view, and to see bi-directionally. While we tend to emphasize our privileged position on one side of the monitor, where we access, click away, and view data on the screen, we can then equally understand the ways in which we are viewed -the ways in which we are tracked and figured as participating agencies in the network. The patterns of your mouse- clicks signify, in a kind of Morse code, to other agents. To see this way is to understand what signifies in the network, what agencies register and compel such signification, and what moves within this space.

It is also to begin to understand the couplings of life -and information- processes within a new production regime, which involves complex relays and regiments across the interface. In this sense, it is helpful to think of a historically-specific body-machine-image complex, where representations, technologies, and bodily enactments are joined within regimes of productivity. These regimes include techniques of temporalisation, organization, and optimization -distributions and transfers of skills, applications, and capacities.

There are three pressing questions. The first is, again, the question of agency. What new kinds of agency does the network allow, what kinds of speech and action? The second is the question of presence. How does the network make us present to each other, often overriding spatial, national, and temporal distinctions? The third is the question of identity. We are faced with new identification processes, not primarily based on reflective models but in terms of complex interfoldings of interior and exterior, here and there, now and later. With such potent combinations of the local and the global, we have new forms of national, transnational, and cultural identities that no longer fit the moulds. Further, we have often violent assertions of essentialisms and regionalisms in response to that which the network seems to endanger.

The network erodes the borders of nations and uproots the archive, the database of historical memory. As critical artists, what new models can we provide for such allegiances -what new models of citizenship and historical engagement- without falling into the trap of simply purveying an ethical consciousness? In many ways, we must come to terms with the market and its imperatives.

Such are many of the issues at stake in network practice. These investigations require progressive critical and articulatory formats -particularly those that are-historically engaged and actively confronting issues of globalization. In every case, it is time to unleash oneself from the desktop and look around. The network is everywhere.

Jordan Crandall

Artist and critic, Director of the "X Art Foundation", New York, Founding Editor of "Blast" and Visiting Professor, Multimedia, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris