Some conclusions on my relation to the digital: much to my surprise, many of my ambivalences are moral/ethical rather than aesthetic. This however does not disqualify them.

1 I may continue putting art on the web, but any future web art projects will refer specifically to real-time real-place events. More like the Gagarin website than the Utopias site, to be specific.

2 Projection expands: webcasting reduces. Less is sometimes really less.

3 Net art is not necessarily any more about communication than any other context.

4 There is some good web art around: it just isn’t obligatory.

5 I don’t want to go to Ars Electronica. Facing the future, far from being a manifesto of new creativity evolving over a series of gatherings, is a series of corporate PR statements on behalf of the computer graphics industry.

6 The concept of the "screenload" is limiting- people see a screen and expect a specific process. A couple of things to click at, an animation or two: this can be a limiting interaction with any concept of surprise relating to a few possible outcomes.

Play and new forms of vision:-\ good web@outthere somewhere.net

Partial identity-e.g. Craig of flipflopflyin.com. This website is funny and thoughtful. Minimalism as play is something the internet can do well. There’s a wilful refusal of hi-tech within the medium- a parody and detournement of the attempt to re-insert a flattened version of the body into digital environments in the form of the avatar etc.

Flip flop is a wilful engagement with the quotidian; hoogerbrugge.com is an engagement with the unheimlich. A Dutch site, its miniature adventurer struggles in a Becket space. These sites are a quick example of creative web play: others might include Mumbleboy and of course ablab.org run by Dan Norton. The link: playfulness, surrealism, and a sense of a different kind of space. In the case of ablab, the experience is fundamentally different when projected than on a screen, with the club environment and direct interaction with a public.

THE MINIATURISING EFFECT-
The creation of a toy world in explicit distinction from a live-world engaged system. Tiny things to be manipulated: control and fate iconised.How can we escape from this?

" Among the various Situationist methods is the derive [literally:’drifting’], a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The derive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.

In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less than one might think: from the derive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

Chance plays an important role in derives precisely because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to an alteration between a limited number of variants, and to habit. Progress is nothing other than breaking through a field where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favourable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of the derive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered run the risk of fixating the deriving individual or group around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back […]"

Debord…