THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN.

Metaphor, and obviously so. Yet this is the central difference between digital technology and all preceding creative modes. A situation has arisen where the deep understanding of the tool has been ceded to another, with at best a few particularly driven individuals taking on the concepts of programming in order to chip away at the governing metaphors of windows, pointers, and a simulation of interactivity. Yet it’s good news in the sense of an increase in propagation speeds, and less barrier between thought and transmission of that thought. It also produces a superficial democratisation of image production and distribution, with the proviso that over half the worlds’ population have never made a phone call, let alone gained access to the internet.

A classic division of labour, and a new position for the artist. The creation of the physical tool is not the issue: it’s been quite some time since an artist was able to make a highly finished optical mechanism, or to make their own paint in the wide range of types available. The issue of artists using proprietary software has led to a position where structures and symbolisms are taken as given, and become in turn the subject matter... in an interesting inversion of Walter Benjamin’s musings on the history of photography, for many artists the task of web art is solely to work with web structures and expectations, excavating the metaphors. While Benjamin pointed out (rightly) that a photograph of the Krupps factory told us nothing of the social relations and of the conditions of production within, the focus of web art has become nothing but those social relations and conditions. The subject of web art is the web itself… true, but limiting in the same way that Clement Greenberg’s strictures on the proper subject for painting produced a generation of conformist individualists. " Radical" or socially engaged art has painted itself into a corner where it has to provide the correct sort of answer to questions not generated under its own will.

M uch to my surprise, many of my ambivalences are moral/ethical rather than aesthetic. This however does not disqualify them.