Editorial Notes

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1998 has been an interesting year for network art. At the beginning of the year, the net.art lists were alive with the controversy surrounding the identity thefts of the likes of Mark Amerika, Peter Weibel, and Timothy Druckrey. That particular performance, still unclaimed by its author[s], conceptually underscored the weaknesses of treating liquid identity and becoming in cyberspace as the ontological foundations for dematerialized network art forms. Most authors, as it turns out, don't want to be unstable identities. Even Deleuze and Guattari put their own names on their books! Related to this problem of liquid identity as art form is the relative dearth of development in another of the often speculated foundations for computer art practice: virtual reality. Simulations of Cartesian space and virtual worlds wherein the artist is conjured as author/storyteller have not progressed significantly; except perhaps in the realm of industrial strength gaming. The ontology and identity of the author, still a contested space, continues to suffer from the received habits of narrative literature.

The lack of significant artistic accomplishements in VR or 3D worlds in 1998 comes in spite of some fascinating and far too little known experiments by Anne-Marie Schleiner and jodi. These experiments show that current art-conceptual work in virtual worlds is based on presenting a challenge to the current models. Among these contemporary models for 3D/VR are the same literary/narrative models that drive interactive fiction. Here the artist's role is to create new imaginary worlds, typically without raising questions about the nature of simulated Cartesian space as form. These strategies are based on the populist art-historical conceptions and myths concerning vision and creativity; the same strategies that have yielded the most popular living artist in the United States today: Thomas Kinkade. The challenge to this philosophy is expressed differently in the two projects: the exposure of the gendering structures of the first person shooter game in Schleiner's work, and as a challenge to the assumed purpose of 3D simulations through the introduction of abstraction and obfuscation of play in the new jodi work. Perhaps these provocations will serve as the much needed calls to reconsider 3D form in the art world context during 1999.

More importantly in '98, threads that evidenced themselves in 1997 began to condense into more stable phase spaces. Holger Friese, jodi and the others who first found openings into the art world for de-materialized network forms at Documenta in 1997, left a path which was followed in 1998 by the inclusion of net.art as a prix category at ARS Electronica. Other parts of the art institutional complex have begun to show an interest as well. The Walker Art Center launched a major curatorial and critical effort online, (the shock of the view), and added significantly to its own collection of net based forms while they are, as Olia Lialina says, "still as cheap as a floppy." Especially interesting is the Walker's acquisition of äda 'web; one of the earliest and finest projections of network art form. Other museums have acted interestingly on the emergence of network art form: the Guggenheim hosted the controversial Brandon Project, and places such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, the Getty, and many others have been probing the network terrain for grounds worthy of colonization. Some of these are turning toward the academic institutions (such as CADRE, California Institute of the Arts, UCSD) and other institutions ( Rhizome, Nettime, the Thing, Lubliana Digital Media Lab), who have played considerable roles in the stabilization of net.art conception, practice and criticism.

Nevertheless, many network art practitioners continue to cleave to their homemade terrains, or to build new ones, in hopes that they can develop systems of their own that exist outside of the museum and artworld context. Hell.com, the closed and secret society of net.artists, continue their provocations in a state of fire cleansed purity. Olia Lialina (and the usual suspects: Cosic, jodi, Bunting, Shulgin) perhaps follow a similar course, at least as it is presented at the membrane; one that begins to leach irony the more you poke at it. Finally, myself and my comrades in the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) have concentrated on the convergence of fine art and political action, promoting global attention toward another terrain altogether: Chiapas and its Zapatista rebels. It is from the example of the Zapatistas through which the networked world is being lessoned in media savvy, the responsibility to risk, the moral problems and possibilities of the network era, and the power to be derived from conflations of action and simulation as system.

Many of the issues raised by the development of net.art and the emergence of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) are treated in this issue of Switch. CADRE's director, Joel Slayton, opens a space for the analysis of network form as semiotic agency emerging from complexity in Re=purpose of Information: Art as Network. Ricardo Dominguez, one of the co-founders of the EDT, makes a case for dirt, art, performance and action in Diogenes On-line: Gestures against the Virtual Republic. Another EDT co-founder, Stefan Wray, who is also one of the leading historians and theorists of electronic civil disobedience, contributes Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hacktivism:. I present my own work on the aesthetic quality of time relative to concept in Aesthetic Conditions in Art on the Network. Jan Ekenberg performs his own aesthetic analysis in his review of Marxist - Leninist Web Sites of the World. Kristin Cully and Loretta Lange bring us somewhat back from the network with their reviews of the art exhibition at SIGGRAPH 98, and a report from Burning Man 98, respectively. Lisa Jevbratt's parasitic data mining and information mapping project for the Walker Art Center, a new and bigger version of the Stillman(tm) project, is featured in the projects area, along with other CADRE efforts. And as always, Switch presents a collection of contemporary network art in the Web Art Taxonomy. Enjoy. Comments are welcome at switch@cadre.sjsu.edu

Brett Stalbaum