ZACH PEARL

Briding Realities:
The Exhibition of Net Art as Activism

Written April, 2011
Published May 2012 by Art & Education:
http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/bridging-realities-the-exhibition-of-net-art-as-activism/

Q: Where does net art exist? [1]I am using the term 'net art' knowing that it technically refers solely to networked artworks and is distinct from 'web art' which refers to artworks made for the World Wide Web. However, because the World Wide Web exists as a subsidiary of the Internet, I am here similarly employing the term net art to include web art as a facet of a larger art form.

A: The answer is: everywhere and nowhere.

Net art, which can be loosely defined as any digital artwork that uses a network as its means of dissemination, is by nature immaterial and distributed. As a 'gaseous' form of art, it has infinite points of access and is reproducible at any scale. There are no spatial coordinates for net art—no markers, no physical geographies or fixed positions. Net art abnegates distance and, to some extent, it can be experienced simultaneously by an unlimited number of users for an indefinite period. In this way, net art has great presence, a type of omnipresence, or perhaps only the imminent potential thereof. It has the ability to publicize and visualize social commentary on an unprecedented scale. The role of net art then to catalyze counter-hegemonic subcultures would seem an inevitable byproduct of its value as a possible Fourth-Estate[2]Originally coined by the English politician Edward Burke in 1787, The Fourth Estate is a concept that describes a socio-political force or institution whose influence is not officially recognized or mediated by current power structures. It has been historically used to refer to the news media; especially print journalism. However, since the advent of new media and the World Wide Web, the Fourth Estate has become synonymous with the potential for grass-roots political activism and unmediated content via networked technologies.. So why haven't we seen this come to pass?

A possible explanation may be that there are problems inherent in the reception of net art, and more specifically in its aesthetic—a 'net aesthetic'. Pure net art (as opposed to art-on-the-net [3]'Art-on-the-Net' refers to the use of the Internet as a virtual gallery space where reproductions of artworks in the physical world are displayed on a webpage.)consists of an entirely graphic, designed environment. It exists outside reality in that its visual language has no referent in the physical world—a simulated reality and a semiotics of abstraction. Even net artworks that include photographs or illustrations do not truly reference the physical world; they present simulations of imagery in which there is no material difference between their constructions. All of the net is a single 'material': a sequence of numbers, a code giving the illusion of form. The whole space of the digital behaves in this way, as what Baudrillard would describe as a cellular space, employing an aesthetic of infinite reproductivity. As such, it comprises the most "considerable dimension" (98) of simulation, and must be interrogated according to new (and largely undefined) parameters when used as both 'material' and 'space' for artistic production.

Confined to this aesthetic—made of elements that exist only in relationship to themselves—net art would also seem detached from causality. There are actions in this 'space', but are there consequences? What measurable effects can a practice of creating simulated or virtual environments have on the Real?

Initially, these questions may seem basic and warrant a somewhat cynical response: That which is simulated cannot alter that which is real. However, the inherent interactivity of net art complicates this inquiry. Net artworks require human beings to engage with them, and, more importantly, in a way that goes beyond the average protocol of Internet usage. Net artworks require their viewers/users to conceptually navigate and ultimately enact them as art. (Coleman, 2005: 20) Thus, the simulated 'spaces' of net art become temporarily reified or bridged to the Real through their users.

What then, is implied by this bridging when net art is given a fixed position? For example, in a gallery or a museum? The institution can't contain it; it can't truly control its access or its translocality when it is not (and never will be) physically present in the institution. What does this liminality suggest? Does this constitute the physical exhibition of net art as a turning point that both dissimulates the art institution and escapes Baudrillard's rules of simulation? (Baudrillard, 1983: 12) A hybrid space of the Real and the Hyperreal in which the gallery is not a gallery in the conventional sense, but a threshold? The visible scape of a Fourth Estate? [4]I am loosely referencing the larger term "mediascape". In particular, I am referencing Arjun Appadurai's conception of this term, which is used to describe the dynamic 'flow' of images and information across networked communities and mass media.

Before attempting to answer these questions, it is germane to examine the history of Web Biennial and its evolution into a simultaneous physical/virtual exhibition platform with its most recent installment in January 2011. An initiative of the Turkish contemporary artist and director of Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Genco Gulan, Web Biennial began in 2003.

It existed/exhibited solely online as a way to escape issues of national representation and commodification in the biennial format. (Gulan, 2005) Along with providing a placeless alternative to the touristic enterprise of its contemporaries, Web Biennial also adopted a non-curated, non-thematic exhibition model in which the artists worked collaboratively and disregarded the goal of a visual or conceptual unity. In Refresh, his 2005 quasi-manifesto that tracks the develop of the Web Biennial project, Gulan cheekily asserts that, "the collaborative model not only helps a different technical structure to function but also to prove that nonmonetary artistic cooperation can still exist in the 21st Century."

In its first three iterations, Web Biennial achieved its ideals by manifesting solely on the Internet. It did not align or oblige itself to a geographic locale, avoiding becoming a spectacle of nationalist rhetoric while offering continuous and unbiased access on a global scale. Its artists continued to host their works on their own servers, and the biennial's programmers even built a custom search engine through which viewers/users could access the works, providing a means to circumvent even the institutions of widely-used search engines that serve as a capitalist 'containers' for the art. ("Net.Art & Real-Time Revolt", 2010)

However, for its 2010 edition Web Biennial deviated from this formula in one crucial aspect: it employed the theme that all artworks embody a political message. More specifically, many of the participating artists focused on themes of protest and anti-war sentiments. Although the 2010 biennial maintained a non-national framework by continuing to only exhibit virtually, its focus on political net art—that, by nature of its medium, questions the notions of borders and identity—resulted in the visual and conceptual problematizing of nationalism. The biennial, formerly unhinged from the principles of space, quickly became a kind of political 'space' that implied the dominance of certain physical territories and identities.

This phenomenon, albeit complex, precarious and perhaps dangerous, is far from counterproductive. It reflects the continuously shifting institutional discourse that spawned the Internet in the first place—an illustration of Gramsciian hegemony [5]Here I am referring to the aspect of Antonio Gramsci's definition of hegemony in which there is no truly dominant ideology, but a continuous flux of ideologies that allude to a power structure.. Essentially, the technologies and infrastructure that produced the Internet as we know it were, "the product[s] of the most organizational of institutions – the Military. It was then passed to another – the education system. Now, perhaps it is handing the reins to another – the corporation. The point is, the Internet is the technological child of these organizational constructs."(Castle, 2000) The question then becomes: How can one utilize the net as a medium and yet manipulate the terms of the institutions that keep it in place so to move outside their systems? This is a rhetorical question, of course. Any net artist would be daft to assume that his/her work can truly move outside institutional discourse through absolute distribution or immateriality—just by means of being on the Net. Rather, it is more productive to think of net art as tactical media, a term coined in the mid 1990s by theorists David Garcia and Geert Lovink for the use of media against the institution of itself, or media infecting media. Tactical media works within the present code of signs and conventions only to subvert those conventions and disrupt the mainstream.

A remarkable example of this was the 1999 "Battle of Seattle", in which a transnational demonstration against the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference was organized months ahead of time by a coalition, or 'network', of activist groups. Approximately forty thousand protesters (certainly not all, but many, organized via tactical media) swarmed the streets of downtown Seattle, blocking intersections and forming a ring of bodies around the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Concurrently, the Internet activist group Electrohippies Collective (Ehippies), based out of Oxforshshire, England launched an online campaign against the conference by using a denial of service (DOS) action to "jam" the network servicing the WTO. This computer protocol continually sent thousands of download requests to the WTO's server, overloading it and periodically disrupting activities of the conference over a five-day period. (Radcliff, 2000)

This redeployment of conventional media not only transcends geographies but also links the interests and resources of activist groups for whom it might otherwise be impossible to assemble and connect. The lasting effect of these events then is the realization (or the reinforcement) that the parameters of Democracy and Community have radically expanded in the last twenty years with the development of networked communication. Tactical media fulfills the role of a digital underground that runs in opposition to globalization (or, at least the commercially driven aspects of globalization), making users reflexive and raising awareness of the System as a medium.

Many of these ideas can be applied to net art, because it also behaves in a transgressive manner [6]Net artworks are often visually indistinguishable from 'regular' content, enabling them act as conceptual Trojan Horses that 'persuade' viewer/users to engage with them through a familiar aesthetic and means of navigation (cursor, window, hypertext, etc.). This implies a rhetorical dimension of net art that connects it to activist techniques like tactical media, whether or not its message is itself political.. However, there is a key difference between the eventual physical assembly/action of tactical media deployments like "The Battle for Seattle" versus a private interaction with a work of net art with no successive physical event inherent to its programming. This is where the gallery (or any venue, for that matter) can provide a metaphorical threshold for the assembly of the physical and the virtual. Because the museum/gallery supposes a social space and an active space it has the potential to become a forum and a site of activism, with the appropriate shift in thought. Although it may be easy to dismiss the gallery as a site of recreation and passivity, as it primarily functioned for its Bourgeois predecessors, the view that 'art speaks for itself' has lost ground. Contemporary visitors to museums and galleries expect to engage in exchanges of information. (Blunden, 2009) And, this is only going to intensify, both in the context of the museum/gallery and beyond. As Howard Besser so eloquently prophesized in an article in Wired Museum, "that the public would come to 'view culture less as something to consume and more as something to interact with'." (Hin & Hecht, 2007: 60) The contemporary gallery is becoming synonymous with visitors who are prepared for interaction, receptive to learning and have a heightened awareness of sensory and textual information—preconditions to the successful reception of net art.

In January of 2011, Gulan tested this new visitor aptitude when he decided to exhibit a selection of works from Web Biennial 2010 at Plato Art Academy (Plato Sanat) in Istanbul. Curated by Marcus Graf, Regeneration.011: A Selection of The Web Biennial Revealing The Poetics and Politics of Net Art ran from 20 January through the 20 March 2011. It featured twenty-three artists from Web Biennial 2010 as well as a complete archive of the works exhibited in previous biennials and auxiliary programming such as online discussion panels. In the curatorial essay, Graf and Gulan describe the exhibition's title as an analogy for the cultural/spatial renewal that occurs with the translocation of the artworks from the virtual space of Web Biennial to the real one of Plato Art Academy. They then go on to call the exhibition an "artistic bridge," that raises particular questions, "regarding the need of its representation in a real location."

It is clear that Graf and Gulan were aware of the layered issues evoked by such an exhibition, and the irony involved in its display. The installation of the works was flippant, with a series of polygonal computer 'stations' connected to the ceiling by melodramatic groupings of cables. In a similar gesture, the computers reserved for the archives were given neon signage of their respective folder names to hang above them.

(Figure A)

Some works were purposely skewed, projected into corners and onto "various surfaces". (Graf & Gulan, 2005) Others were displayed on larger flat-screen monitors set in grid-like shelving that stood over the stations—the only 'spectacular' aspect of the show.

(Figure B)

But, even then, the shelving was devoid of any visual treatment, made of unvarnished and unpainted two-by-fours. Wires were not necessarily exposed, but there was no attempt to hide functional equipment. It seemed an exercise in techno-minimalism; underscoring the absence of ornament and object akin to net art while parodying postmodernist sensibilities of emphasizing the banality of gallery space.

Though this treatment seems to mock the display of net art, it does suggest a simple and viable format for a hybridized virtual/physical exhibition model. The polygonal computer stations were large enough to accommodate multiple computers and users at the same time. Their heights were set at waist level, inviting viewers/users to lean, sit, observe and converse.

(Figure C)

This encouraged viewers/users to break with behaviors of quiet stoicism in the gallery, as well as ideas of net art being a private viewing experience. Instead, the exhibition moved from a trope of demonstration to one of discourse.

Viewer/users of Regeneration.011 interacted with other visitors in the physical space; interacted with other viewers/users of the net artworks (directly or indirectly); conversed about the works and their concepts, and created a temporary community around a set of issues and a subsequent discourse. This movement into discourse and beyond geographies is the defining characteristic of the simultaneous exhibition platform for net art—the creation of a translocal public sphere. The attendance at Plato Art Academy, being comprised of both physical and virtual visitors, expanded the scope of Regeneration.011 from the purely physical or virtual into the metaphysical, where the aesthetic of net art registers as a practice of cultural discourse within the history of art objects. The aesthetic employed in such a discourse is then focused on an 'object' of perceptions rather than something material. Artists, and particularly new media artists, have long understood this immaterial dimension of art making, but is a recent development to expect the viewer/user to do the same. (Chandler & Nourie, 2005: 38) Exhibition models such as Regeneration.011 necessitate a translocal social exercise around the works to perceive the full experience of those works. Subsequently, this social exercise begets a social authority and a political body. (Habermas, 1995) The concurrent physical and virtual exhibition of net art can then be considered activism, because it politicizes its viewers/users, allowing them to play an, "active role in attempting to restructure elements of place," (O'Lear, 1999: 165)—the gallery remaining the only constant, or the nucleus of a new sphere.

However, it would be foolish to assume that the gallery is the most effective venue for this kind of exhibition. To say that the works 'presence' in the gallery in Regeneration.011 allowed their individual messages to become more immediate or effective is illogical. With net art the most immediate and ideal reception—truest to its context of utter distribution—takes place outside the walls of an art institution. Consequently, an ideological tension arises from this situation of net art 'on display'. The activist sentiment as its impetus is often hollowed out by the priority of 'aesthetic effect' in museum/gallery displays. Although net art does deploy itself visually (and here is where we see a breaking point from the majority of artistic practice) the curation and display of net art according to formalist aesthetics—as opposed to a relational or perceptual aesthetics—relegates it to the level of an interactive novelty. In particular, net artworks that function as tactical media run the risk of being received as 'scenarios' or 'theses' when put on display; as microcosms or prototypes of activism that have yet to be tested in the 'real' world, even though they're already out there, existing in the hyperreal of the network.

A similar but different tension arises with the display of net art because it also represents the antithesis to autonomous art production. And, as a result, this challenges the autonomy of museums and galleries. Because net art is by nature embedded in a medium of interconnection and simultaneity, its origins are so imbricated that it becomes impossible to define net art as an utterance (Bahktin) or singular, autonomous work in the way that the majority of society conceives of artistic production. Furthermore, museums distinguish themselves and become known for their specialties through the accession of works, and galleries do the same by retaining the rights to show certain artists. How can either of these tactics truly be accomplished in regards to net art, when a single individual or institution cannot own the artwork, or monitor its access or, in some cases, identify its creator(s)? Similarly, how can a museological rhetoric be established around the artwork (i.e., cataloguing, provenance, material history and preservation) when it is, for all intensive purposes, inextricable from its medium, which doubles as its means of display? The problem posed to institutions then is that net art cannot be 'processed', or assimilated into conventional practices around display, classification or collection; the artwork refuses to adapt to the codes of the institution. Instead, museums and galleries are forced to adapt to the artwork and invent new methods that are more collaborative and less concerned with autonomy as a prerequisite to a system of canonization. Essentially, this threatens to destabilize their conceptual foundations.

But prized-concepts like autonomous art cannot live on forever in the stasis of the gallery space, detached from the trends of the outside world. Museums and galleries must respond to the evolving needs of their audiences and the shifting (dis)interests of their artists.

The increasing disinterest of net artists in autonomous art production is both a postindustrial fantasy (Barney, Warf & Grimes, 1997) and a reflection of a society that is increasingly less interested in autonomously authored media and broadcast culture [7]I am using broadcast here to mean more than the transmission of television or radio signals. Instead, I am referencing the philosophy behind broadcasting practices that supposes a passive, and generally uneducated, mass public as its audience.. From voting via cell phone for contestants on reality television to Yelp.com user reviews superseding newspaper columnists, there is a popular culture movement underway toward more lateral and interdependent information structures. This turn has, of course, been facilitated by networked technologies, and so the artists who are utilizing these technologies realize that these relationships must be reflected in their work. In respect to the works included in Regeneration.011, pieces like:

(Figure D)
Ian Wojtowicz's Aspects of Polishness

(Figure E)
Newspeak by Immo Blaese

(Figure F)
Martin John Callanan's I Wanted to See All the News from Today

illustrate this interdependency by integrating search engines and social media sites as content generators. Wojtowicz's piece, which takes two keywords and graphs their popularity against one another using the image of the Polish flag, relies on Google to perform a live search for each keyword and determine its number of hits. Set against a backdrop of the Polish flag, the viewer/user selects two words at random to enter into a transparent window with search fields. When s/he clicks the 'compare' button the search field disappears and his/her terms become respective labels for the red and white blocks that halve the flag. The proportions of the blocks fluctuate up and down as the search calculates, and they eventually settle to show which is the 'bigger', popular keyword. In this way, Google, which exists as a separate piece of software designed and maintained by multiple programmers, is a necessary component to the concept and the functionality of Wojtowicz's piece. Aspects of Polishness is not only dependent on Google to generate the content, but also the viewer/user to define the search terms, and the billions of Internet users who generate those search results. It is intrinsically a collaborative work of an extreme degree (whether any party is aware of their involvement or not).

Newspeak by Immo Blaese is made through an equally collaborative process. But, instead of integrating a 'monster' search engine as a functional component, Newspeak continually rakes the content of Flickr and Twitter. Designed by Blaese to resemble breaking news segments, the website randomly displays images from Flickr which play in succession like a slideshow. In the center of the site posts from Twitter feeds are superimposed. The imagery and the text in this situation, obviously, have a completely arbitrary relationship. Nonetheless, Blaese's use of bold and capitalized sans-serif type, a sleek charcoal background and motion graphic headlines infuses a familiar narrative structure of a television newscast. Blaese's 'original' artistic contribution then is the aesthetic framing of the content, and none of the content itself—which is continuously being generated in real time; a sort of perpetual art machine.

In I Wanted to See All the News From Today, Martin John Callahan creates a topography of current events by sampling online news sources. Each day, Callahan's piece, which has been ongoing since 2007, gathers the front-page image from 600 news publications in six continents and displays them in a grid against a white background. The density of images created by the grid of cover-page designs almost cancel one another out, creating an ironic flatness in contrast to the depth of information that they represent. This flatness is reinforced by the fact that none of the cover-pages are hyperlinked to any of the content they picture. However, there is visible linkage between the cover-page designs. International news stories and political figures, repeated celebrity sightings, and even duplicated publications produced in other languages; all begin to emerge as patterns that eventually construct a narrative of their own—a map of globalized identity.

Like Blaese, in I Wanted... Callahan has constructed a perpetual art machine that feeds on a continuous generation of content. But, it has a different conceptual agenda than that of Newspeak. Where Blaese is interested in a completely unfiltered sea of user-generated content, Callahan plays with the highly filtered and crafted practice of journalism where authorship is key. In this way, Callahan's piece not only functions to critique the globalization of media, but also produces a critique of authoritative media sources. These are news media sources whose content is driven by underlying economic agendas as businesses and political agendas as businesses of information. So, while contemporary news sources appear to lend many 'voices' to pertinent issues, many perspectives are "frequently stifled by the conservative corporate ownership of newspapers, television, and other media outlets." (Barney, Warf & Grimes, 1997: 260)

This critique of authoritative media is a facet of the larger critique of the Author that has been explored in Western cultural production since the late 1970s. While, it's fairly clear (whether a direct result of Postmodernist inquiry or not) that since then the persona of the artist as Genius has been put to rest, it is unclear if society continues to argue for the true 'death' of an authorial figure. (Barthes, 1977) A death implies finality and a permanence of loss. In contrast, if we take the diverse collaborative models of net artists as our example to counter an epic and singular sensibility of the Author, then it is not so much a death but a deterritorialization of the concept. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) As a highly distributed and participatory kind of 'writing', net art epitomizes a dissolution of the modern author function (Foucault, 1979), both liberating the artist from the obligatory role of a historical figure and empowering the viewer/user to recognize his/her own stake as a maker of meaning. Some net artists and new media scholars suggest that, similar to the oeuvre of Joseph Beuys, net art practices engender a kind of social sculpture. They "expand" the concept of writing from a meticulous and internalized activity into a spontaneous and externalized one, "that performs with and in the networked space of flows [which] may open up one path toward a form of social-utopian network culture." (Amerika, 2007: 188)

If the physical exhibition of net art does, in fact, generate a translocal public sphere, then the word "author" becomes a term that is independent from the 'work'. Instead, it is embedded within a process of visual and linguistic discourse surrounding the work—the transition of "author" from being understood primarily as a noun to a verb. Although this authoring is not exclusive to the gallery (for instance, blogs embody this procession of collaborative authorship), the physical exhibition of net art provides a unique opportunity for its viewers/users to participate in concurrent virtual and physical authorship. It is this simultaneity of authorship, or a complete translocality of discourse, that is the revolutionary product of such an exhibition model.

Of course, this paradigmatic shift of creative genius to collaborative authorship is not new or unique to new media:

Think of medieval cathedrals, traditional painting studios which consisted from a master and assistants, music orchestras, or contemporary film productions which, like medieval cathedrals involve thousands of people collaborating over a substantial period of time. In fact, the romantic model of a solitary single author occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. (Manovich, 2002)

It would seem that the view of an authoritative, creative figure who is seen apart and largely above the rest of culture is specific to Modernity, and should be viewed as a temporal perspective on the creative process. It is the opening up of the terminology involved in its discourse that has facilitated a turn in authorship. This can be seen in the way that the vernacular of musicians, game developers and software programmers has infiltrated the lexicon of 'art-speak'. Throughout the 1990s, as practices such as multi-player online games and digitally DJing became more prevalent, words like 'remixing', 'open-source' and 'sampling' became applied to a wide range of artistic production. (ibid.) In particular, 'sampling' has interesting implications for the authorship of net art. In its original musical production context, 'sampling' refers to the unrestrained use of others' digital sound recordings as central compositional elements in a song. The term then can be applied to net art as a better encapsulation of the extremist collaborative processes of Wojtowicz, Blaeme and Callahan, who rely on pre-generated content from a wide array of users and sources to compose the 'cores' of their artistic projects. This kind of wording is positioned alternatively to terms like montage or collage that are characteristic of the dialogue between Modernism and Postmodernism, where even 'original artists' working in such ways were appropriating their content—implying that their work was 'owed' to a preceding author. "[One] can say that with sampling technology, the practices of montage and collage that were always central to twentieth century culture, became industrialized," (ibid.) or perhaps post-industrialized for the information age. This reform to the language game (Lyotard) of authorship in contemporary art is where we can (finally) begin to see a move away from the stalemate discourse of Modernist and Postmodernist values.

Lastly, I would like to consider a critique of Baudrillard in order to bring the conversation of the hybrid exhibition of net art as activism into a greater historical and art historical significance. While Baudrillard's theories of simulation and hyperreality are still relevant to net art, they were constructed in the early 1980's—what some would call the height of the Postmodern era—before the grand proliferation of net art practice in the 90s. If the hybrid exhibition of net art presents a possible departure from the Modern/Postmodern paradigm, how do the meanings and implications of Baudrillard's terminology change?

In, "A Critique of Baudrillard's Hyperreality: Towards A Sociology of Postmodernism," a 1998 essay by Anthony King, the concept of a hyperreal dimension is debased by the concept's dependency on two key factors: 1) That it is built upon a fully closed circuit of referentiality, and 2) that it claims (either through its direct visual and textual attributes or through the rhetoric that surrounds them) to be realer than the Real. King's essay is a debunking of these stipulations, after which he posits that Hyperreality, as a self-determining dimension of semiotics is impossible on a pragmatic level. Instead, he suggests that hyperreality functions solely on a theoretical level, and more specifically as a metaphor to describe the sociological conditions predicated by the postmodern condition.

To take up King's first point, that the closed circuit of hyperreality is practically impossible, applies to and complicates my own claim that net art occupies and functions from a hyperreal environment. With net art, and especially in the case of Web Biennial 2010's political subject matter, a fully closed circuit of referentiality cannot be maintained. In Baudrillard's definition, "hyperreality emerges when cultural representations (and therefore our knowledge) no longer have a social or human reality against which to verify themselves." (King, 1998: 48) But, due to its subject matter being deeply embedded in "human reality", political artworks like those exhibited in Web Biennial 2010 and Regeneration.011 are inseparable from the Real. Their references to reality are heightened when one considers that the works exhibited in each is intended to produce an awareness of Reality, which aimed to 'extend' the viewer/user's concerns beyond the convincing, but limited digital environment.

Still, in respect to the majority of websites and the protocol of their navigation, there are many aspects of Baudrillard's definition of hyperreality that do apply. For one, although most websites picture and reference events or products in reality, their use of totally digital and designed interfaces that simulate those events and products behave as persuasive substitutions. In other words, the digital reproduction of events and products constitutes a digital reproduction of experience. The simulated versions of objects and occurrences create a parallel system of values and behaviors, supplanting the empirical value of the Real with the textual value of the Hyperreal. This relationship is exceptionally true for online games and virtual environments such as World of Warcraft and Second Life that present a completely graphic and simulated mode of perception and an insular social structure.

However, once again, in terms of net art this tenet of hyperreality—the simulation of a reality that claims to be realer than the Real—does not hold true. As King is so adamant (and correct) to point out this is largely due to hyperreality's narrow phenomenal basis. Baudrillard's initial conception of hyperreality was derived from the advent of television, which not only represented a one-way transmission of a simulation, with no opportunities (at the time) for interaction or intervention, but it also aimed to persuade its viewers into conflating fantasy and reality. King affirms this reading of hyperreality as narrow by citing Baudrillard's heavy reliance on what is generally considered the first reality TV series, the Louds, which originally aired in 1971. The characters featured in this series were not an actual biological or even a platonic family, but a troop of actors simulating a family. In Baudrillard's view, "this programme was hyperreal then because it tried to be realer than Real; it denied that it was a representation of family life, claiming, instead, that it captured this life as it was." (King, 1998: 49) From this, Baudrillard asserted that television posed the greatest danger to the verity of human experience, because it was based on ambivalence towards the distinction between fantasy and reality, and therefore symbolized the death of the Real. However, the interactive and collaborative behaviors associated with the Internet and its byproducts, such as net art, are far different and less illusionistic than television. This, in combination with the impossibility of an exclusive referentiality and Baudrillard's underpinning premise that this phenomena is occurring within a society recently unhinged by the realization of its own fragmentary nature (Postmodernism), led King to surmise that, "the notion of hyperreality is not…a critical concept providing a means by which sociologists might analyze contemporary cultural change; rather, the notion of hyperreality is itself postmodern."(47)

Nevertheless, even if the theory of hyperreality is inherently faulted (or at least the notion of hyperreality being a 'space') and instead symbolizes a social edification of the Postmodern ideology, net art still qualifies as a hyperreal phenomenon within that context. For the short period in history that net art has occupied, its practice and its practitioners have firmly reinforced it as the epitome of postmodern culture, in which the notions of access, distribution, translocality and authorship, as I have discussed, are prime and triumphant over a top-down societal structure. Hyperreality takes on a different meaning as a sociological model, but still pithily summarizes the goals and ideals of net art activity. Hybrid net art exhibition models such as that of Regeneration.011, still construct a bridge between the Hyperreal and Real; the Real being that museums and galleries continue to proliferate (or, at least, contain the ghosts of) the societal values and behaviors associated with the Modernist epoch, and the Hyperreal being the postmodern social practices that develop from and around net art. The collision of these two philosophies becomes a deterritorialization of one another. The dissolution and blurring of borders between whom and where the audience is, in addition to the dissolution of physical borders and jurisdiction of the art institution creates an opportunity for new aesthetic modes and interactive practices to gain credence and make impact. The bridging effect that the hybrid exhibition of net art creates is then poignantly two-fold—a double-edged sword of great (im)material and historical significance—as it moves us farther away from the physicality of art, and from sociologies embedded in a combative, binary opposition.

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