An alternative position is one adopted by Simon Yuill. In the catalogue for " Strut," an Elevator event in 1997, he celebrates the broken-ness of connectivity.

" For those of us born after the moon landing, it’s a fantastic piece of video footage which has that edge of verité, someplace between a home movie and a surveillance camera…technology for us is always old, always aging and slipping into the non-now of revivalism…The most exciting thing about my first experience of CU-SeeMe was not the live link across the planet but the broken-up audio and jerky pixellated images, like we were talking from the moon. Let the technology fray at the edges, let it bleed, let us see what it is made of."

Yet as cybernetic theory tells us, an increase in noise leads to a decline in intelligible signal. Absorbing noise and random flux into work is in itself nothing new.This approach, of taking unexpected gains from the margins and free spaces of a network originally not-for-us, appealed to me, and I wanted to see what communication I would get involved in by putting work about place and identity onto the web.My aim was twofold; firstly to engage more rigorously with digital imaging techniques, and secondly to achieve a zone of stability to see how I could best use these new possibilities., I saw the task as developing links between land art, urbanist, and body centred art production.

I was making Quicktime VR environments for the web. I realised that the potential for surround imagery drew on a tradition older than photography, and which engaged its audience in a radically different way. Louis Daguerre is now known entirely for the invention of photography, but in the early 1830s he was a showman with Dioramas in London and Paris. These were indoor sound and light extravaganzas using light, painted panoramic backdrops, and actors to create what was probably the first machine-age multimedia environment…

An initial version of the piece, which contained work made at Hospitalfield House and in Australia, had recently gone online with New Media Scotland. I had taken metaphors of interconnectedness and made them specific. Further work joined more places, and became a higher resolution CD version of the piece, which now included video work.

At this point my view of the project and of the notion of interactivity changed drastically.Now that the piece was capable of being seen as a projected series, the architectural qualities of the work became more prominent. Less like a desktop game, more like a series of questions. On the web, I had received several emails asking if the piece was in fact working: on checking I found that the animations I had made were functioning as intended. The question of attention span was at issue: it seemed that a crossfade taking 15 seconds was simply too slow to be registered, and some audience switched off. At that time I shrugged my shoulders and didn’t worry about it; now I’m unconvinced that internet art can carry attention through image. Flow of image has to work quickly and decisively, whether under the control of the viewer or not. Is this condition of production conducive to reflective work?

Interestingly, computer software imposes its own self-estimation on documents produced on the subject. My spell-checker suggests that I spell "internet" with a capital I. Previously held inviolate for concepts of the self (I) and for God, is this self-estimation a harbinger of our subject relationship to new media?