The fact that literature, before being shut away in the book, is now gone out from it, force it to confront to the reality of that medium which is now completely its one: the screen. From that relation are emerging new questions and sketching creative possibilities never perceived before.

When the screen is also a digital screen of which the potential is a fundamental technical component, literature, while keeping to be literature, but coming close to something like a show, changes yet its qualities: its texts diffracting into the space of their potentialities, are inventing a new expression space.

To the question of presence, or in other words, What is it that is before me in space and in time, today one could respond as follows: a desire to truly go beyond, which seems to mean annihilating this same space and time and with them the object of perception itself. In other words, while presence is still presence to something and of something, this something tends to slip away and disappear.

We are living in the era of "ultramediality." An era in which space-time (from nanometers to gigahertz) and matter itself are "worked" in such a way as to place them beyond all possibility of sensory detection.

Spatio-temporal communication at a distance, which aims to suppress this distance, is one of the forms of ultramediality.

This situation, which on the one hand excludes the sensorium de facto and on the other poses the question of the irreversibility and the dangerousness of the processes into which we are locked, thrusts us into an ethical dynamic (as the ineluctability of a possible choice, consciousness of an absence and the perspective of a substantial alterity), a dynamic that assumes basic importance and puts artistic activity in the context of its responsibilities. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Images and more generally the media condition and model our way of perceiving and organizing reality and, recursively, our way of reporting it and playing with it, and even our temptation to construct realities. With interactive media, our relationship to time and action, our ability to grasp things, are redefined, giving rise to an art of operations and real time operators.

A number of projects completed or underway will be presented during this presentation. Many can be see on the Web site: www.dispotheque.org. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

The inaugural piece – in 1939 – opens to the electronic era in introducing for the first time periodical recurrent and diversely manipulated frequencies against instrumental sounds left "dry". The work develops according to a preestablished time pattern. But since there is no identifiable link between such an abstract rhythmic pattern and the effective evolution of sound, the architectonics can only get unnoticed. They nonetheless constitute much more than a simple safeguard : a regulating concept. The first Imaginary Landscape renews with a strategy of the "mise en abyme" – the age-old scheme of the microcosm's fitting onto the macrocosm - whose diverse avatars are well known since (at least) Guillaume de Machault (XIVth Century), but which, be it in the species of "fractal geometry" and thanks to the developments of electronic technology, has to be more and more reaffirmed as the XXth Century is growing old.

The concept of programming broadens day by day as if the control and the harnessing of technology broadened its ambit. Nevertheless it is surprising to note that based on a logical-analytic machine language whose presuppositions are theoretically questionable, it is possible to produce the unanticipatable, the incalculable and the unpredictable, or in other words the perceptible. The fact that computer programming can enter into relation with aesthetics and logos casts doubt on the dominant ideology of the anthropological instrumentality of technologies and perhaps makes it possible to sketch out a new aesthetic project. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Edmond Couchot (France), theoretician

Biography: Edmond Couchot has a Ph.D. and is Emeritus Professor of the French Universities. He chaired the programme Arts and Technologies of Images at the Paris 8 University for 20 years and is still involved in the research programme of the Centre for Digital Images and Virtual Reality. As a theoretician, he is interested in the relations between art and technology. He published on the subject numerous articles and two books : Images. De l'optique au numérique, Hermès, 1988, and La Technologie dans l'art, J. Chambon, 1998. Originally an artist, he created since the mid-sixties interactive cybernetics systems involving the participation of the spectator. For some years, "real time" technics allowed him to further his researches.

Contribution: From Communication to Commutation

Abstract: A consideration of the technological arts and especially the digital arts from the point of view of aesthetics cannot do without an analysis of the technological objects on which these arts rest and which without determining them nevertheless strongly influence the processes of creation and reception. We will try to show how, with the advent of the computer and digital networks, the production, distribution and socialization of information (in the cybernetic sense) have gone over from the realm of communications in the strict sense of the term to the very different realm of "commutation." How the mode of linking "one with all" corresponding to non-digital media (like television and radio) has been joined by (and all but replaced by) the mode of "all with all, all at once" corresponding to cyberspace. Thus, in an extension but also a rupture with an aesthetic of communication there would emerge an aesthetic of commutation corresponding not only to networks but to the ensemble of digital mechanisms. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Luc Courchesne (Canada), artist

Biography: Luc Courchesne est né à Nicolet (Québec) en 1952. En 1974, il a reçu un baccalauréat en Communication Design du Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax) et en 1984, un Master of Science in Visual Studies, du MIT (Cambridge). En 1984 alors qu'il réalise, avec un collectif du MIT, Elastic Movies, une des premières oeuvres interactive utilisant la vidéo.

Il a créé depuis plusieurs installations dont Encyclopédie clair-obscure (1987), Portrait no.1 (1990), Portrait de famille (1993), Salon des ombres (1996), Paysage no. 1 (1997), Passages (1998), Rendez-vous (avec un collectif de la SAT, 1999) et The Visitor: Living by Number (2001).

Son travail a été présenté dans une douzaine de pays en Amérique du Nord, en Europe, en Asie et en Océanie. Il a notamment fait l'objet d'une exposition personnelle au Museum of Modern Art de New York. Ses installations font partie notamment des collections du Musée des beaux-arts du Canada (Ottawa), du Medienmuseum du ZKM (Karlsruhe, Allemagne), du NTT Intercommunication Center (Tokyo) et du Musée de la communication (Berne).

Luc Courchesne est président de la Société des arts technologiques et, depuis 1989, professeur à l'Ecole de design industriel de l'Université de Montréal.

Contribution: The Discovery of the Horizon

Abstract: In the 18^th Century something happened in thought that sooner or later had to be formalized in the way the world is represented. When in 1787 Robert Barker applied for a patent for a cylindrical image that would surround the viewer, he formulated a mode of representation that is still being refined. From that panorama to the interactive and immersive interactive mechanisms of today, a certain idea of reality and of our relationship with the world has been struggling to be born. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Vincenzo Cuomo (Italy), theoretician

Biography: Vincenzo Cuomo (Torre Annunziata, 1955) is a teacher of philosophy in Italian State Grammar Schools. Since 1986 he has been cooperating with the research laboratory Artmedia, under the direction of Mario Costa of the University of Salerno, and has written numerous articles and essays on philosophy of technics and media aesthetics. In 1998 he published the book "Le parole della voce. Lineamenti di una filosofia della phoné" (published in Salerno by Edisud) and has recently edited a volume of writings by Th.W.Adorno about the connections between the music and media (published in Naples by Tempo Lungo Edizioni, 2002). He is co-editorial director of the magazine "Kainos. Rivista telematica di critica filosofica" (www.kainos.it).

Contribution: Tele-cum-Being-Here. Topology of Impersonality.

Abstract: The experience with presence at a distance is ambivalent from a cognitive point of view. In this experiment with the cognitive contradiction between sensation and thought, they continually bounce off each other without ever being able to harmonize. We could hold that in that kind of paradoxical experience the body feels incomprehensibly and the mind thinks insensibly.

Text of the proceedings : in french

Matteo D'Ambrosio (Italy), theoretician

Biography: Professor of History of critic of literature (university of Napoli "Federico II") and professor of methodology and history of critic of literature and history of Italian at the Istituto Universitario S. Orsola Benincasa, Napoli ; Visiting professor at the P.U.C. of São Paulo ; Visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Semiologist, historian of the avant-gardes, specialist in concrete poetry ("Sémiotique de la poésie concrète", Canadian Journal of Research in Semiotics, VII, n. 1, 1979) and visual poetry ("Collage et poesia visiva : problèmes de définition, lecture et analyse rhétorique", Revue d'Esthétique, n. 3/4, 1978), he wrote about videopoetry (1984) and computer poetry (1986). Among his last publications : Le "Commemorazioni in avanti" di F. T. Marinetti. Futurismo e critica letteraria (1999); Futurismo e altre avanguardie (1999); Il testo, l’analisi, l’interpretazione II (2002).

Contribution: A Semiotic Approach to Cyberpoetry

Abstract: The paper is an attempt to evaluate the adaptability of the semiotic knowledge to methodological problems raised by the different tendencies and typologies of cybertexts (computer poetry, hyperpoetry, holopoetry …), in view of their main peculiarities and expressive strategies. The aim is the development of a critical methodology able to describe, to analyse and to interpret the cyberpoetry. The paper will single out the theoretical contributions that, through the reformulation of notions like author, writing, text, form, device, reader, criticism …, have proposed the institutes of a metalanguage adequate to the complexity of computer-generated texts and to the translinguistic phenomenology of Web poetry, preparing the experimentation of new techniques of textual analysis. References: writings by A. Vuillemin, G. Landow, A. Cauquelin, J.-P. Balpe, M. Costa, Ch. Funkhouser, T. Papp, E. Kac, M. Perloff.

Text of the proceedings : in french

Steve Dietz (USA), curator

Biography: Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996. He is responsible for programming the online Gallery 9, including more than 20 artist commissions and one of the earliest archive-collections of net art, the Walker's Digital Arts Study Collection.
He has organized and curated new media exhibitions, including "Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net" (1988), "Shock of the View: Artists, Audiences, and Museums in the Digital Age" (1999), "Digital Documentary: The Need to Know and the Urge to Show" (1999), "Cybermuseology" for the Museo de Monterrey (1999), "Art Entertainment Network" (2000), "Outsourcing Control? The Audience As Artist," for the Open Source Lounge" at Medi@terra (2000), "Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace" (2001-02), a nationally traveling exhibition, and, with Jenny Marketou, Open_Source_Art_Hack, opening at the New Museum in New York in May 2002. In 2003, "Translocations" will open at the Walker Art Center.
He speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Design Quarterly, Spectra, Afterimage, Art in America, and Museum News.
http://www.walkerart.org - http://www.artsconnected.org - http://www.mnartists.org

Contribution: Translocations and How Latitudes Become Forms

Abstract:How is the "local" situated in a globally networked society? This talk will focus on translocal artistic practices, especially in contradistinction to "glocal" and transnational rhetoric, as well as whether they might give rise to new or altered artistic forms beyond medium-dependency. Finally, how might institutions engage with these practices?

How should these products be treated in institutions devoted to the arts? How will the museums, already subject to change (networked museums, virtual theatres etc.), be expected to evolve? Will it be necessary to find new channels or strategies of distribution? What's happening to copyright laws ? What forms of economic transaction do these products give rise to? How can net art be preserved (collection, archive)? Will the net be the only form of presence of these products? How are the authorities being called to intervene with regard to this type of production?

Reynald Drouhin & Jean-Paul Fourmentraux (France), artist / sociologist

Biography: Both net and video artist, Reynald Drouhin has presented his work in Montreal at the Biennale de Montreal and at the festival Champ Libre manifestation internationale vidéo et art électronique in 1999. He has also participated in ISEA 97 Chicago, Imagina à Monaco (1998) and the Web Art Festival " Web bar " (1999) in Paris. Drouhin has received the Grand Prix at the Cyberfestival in Rueil-Malmaison in 1999 and the Multimedia price at DRAC Auvergne/Vidéoformes in Clermont-Ferrand in 1997. Since 1990, Reynald Drouhin works on many Web art sites and digital projects. Artist-teacher in Fine Art at Rennes in France since 2000.

J.P. Fourmentraux est attaché d'enseignement en sociologie et arts plastiques (DESS de Création Multimédia, université de Toulouse II). Chercheur au Centre d'Étude des Rationalités et des Savoirs (CERS - CNRS, UMR 5117). Co-auteur de deux rapports de recherche commandités par la Délégation aux arts plastiques du ministère de la Culture : " Culture visuelle et art collectif sur le web " (1999), " Entre l'artiste et l'informaticien : un espace de médiation, traduction, négociation " (2001). Auteur de divers articles sur le Net.Art pour les revues " Sociologie de l'art ", " Solaris ", " Archée ", " Chair et Métal - (Veille planétaire d'art en réseau) ".

Contribution: Backstage in the Making of the Net.Art Piece Des_Frags Process

Abstract: The conception of computer artworks requires different contributions in the sphere of art and information technology, leading to a fragmentation of creative activity and the multiple modes of designating what makes an "artwork." Upstream, creative activity negotiates a constant interplay of antagonistic spheres and logics of action. The mise-en-scène of creative activity brings together two forms of writing, the writing of the programming algorithm on the one hand and the writing of the artistic idea or concept (in the intentional sense) on the other. Downstream, the digital mechanism is alternately designated as a "product" disassociated from the artwork as a fragment of a software application or a computer algorithm, and as an "artwork" which subsumes the IT aspect of the program. Finally, viewers are in turn involved in the artwork that they actualize through contributing to its development by altering the original idea or by contributing their own materials. Consequently, the Internet artwork no longer correspond to the concept of a finished and locatable object but rather is more like a process, an open and interactive collective mechanism. This paper seeks to use a specific mechanism (Des_Frags) to emphasize the shifts engendered by this sharing and delegation of the creative process in terms of the traditional concept of an "artwork." What makes an "artwork" in this context? What are its identifying characteristics? Between stage front and backstage, how is it simultaneously designated, perceived and operated? (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Mariapaola Fimiani (Italy), philosopher

Biography: Teacher of Moral Philosophy at the university of Salerno. Former director the Philosophy Department of this University (1993-2001), she is currently its vice-dean. Her research was about English empirism and more specifically about the theory of meaning and the theme of nature as a "visual language" after Georges Berkeley. Since the beginning of the '80s she focused on the issues of the archaïc, the magic, the myth, the symbolic, the sacred (Marcel Mauss e il pensiero dell’origine, Napoli, 1984 ; Lévi-Bruhl. La différence et l’archaïque, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000). To her thinking about the relationships between truth, power and ethic are linked her research on Michel Foucault (Foucault et Kant. Critique Clinique Éthique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998 ; L’arcaico e l’attuale, Torino, 2000).

Contribution: Aesthetics and Ethics: the Force of Things

Abstract: The topics "pre-systemic flux" and "primary present" lead to a discussion of the question of the "real medium" as a locus of the "indeterminacy of things." It is indisputable that the new subject, or "hyper-subject," is always shifted in this medium. While it is true that aesthetic investigation undertakes to reveal the mechanisms and logic of the new technologies of the poiein, and that this analysis points to the tendency toward "shared projects," it is also true that philosophy is called upon, on the one hand, to understand how things are intertwined, and on the other, to ponder the ethical question of the links between the new subjects who are able to both give their consent to the world and to force "appearance." Thus aesthetics should extend into ethics or contain ethics as its most essential component. From this point of view, an ethics of communications cannot avoid facing up to the centrality of "the force of things" implicit in the ritual theory of the gift and which serves as an indispensable phase in a renewed practice of community. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Monika Fleischman et Wolfgang Strauss (Allemagne), artists
monika.fleischmann@imk.fhg.de
wolfgang.strauss@imk.fhg.de

Biography: Monika Fleischmann, 51, German research artist. Studied visual arts, theater and computer graphics. Since 1992 artistic director of the institute for media communication; since 1997 head of the MARS exploratory media lab at the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication in Sankt Augustin, outside Bonn.

Her work - always produced with her partner Wolfgang Strauss - was exhibited e.g. at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Museum for Design, Zurich, presented at MoMA, New York and Festivals like Siggraph, Imagina, Art Futura, ISEA and Ars Electronica. 1992 "Home of the Brain" was awarded with the Golden Nica for interactive art at Ars Electronica in Linz. "Liquid Views" was part of the opening exhibition of the ZKM Media Museum in Karlsruhe.

Her main research topics are intelligent information interfaces combined with interactive virtual environments on the base of perceptive processes. Knowledge discovery and mixed realities are important issues of her actual work. http://imk.fhg.de/mars

Biography: Wolfgang Strauss, 50, is architect and visiting professor in interactive media. Strauss studied Architecture at the Academie of Fine Arts Berlin and has held teaching positions in Visual Communication at the HDK Berlin, at the KHM Media Art School Cologne, at the School of Fine Arts Saarbrücken and the Kunsthochschule in Kassel. Together with Monika Fleischmann he was a co-founder of Art + Com, Berlin in 1988. His artistic work has been included in exhibitions and festivals of new media art worldwide. As an architect his main interest is to develop methods for intermedia representation in Mixed Realities. Currently he is co-director of the MARS.

His recent work is about intuitive interface environments related to the human body and digital media space. http://imk.fhg.de/mars

Contribution: Metaphors of Online Navigation : netzspannung.org – a Collaborative Knowledge Space for Art and Technology, a Community-based Internet Platform

Abstract:How does an online exhibition become an artistic event on the computer screen? In conjunction with continuing developments in the field of networking technology, artists and curators are trying out new presentation concepts that sound out the inherent properties of the network for virtual exhibition areas.

Text of the proceedings : in english

Fred Forest (France), artist and theoretician

Biography: Artist, emeritus professor of the University of Nice, co-founder of the Group of Sociological Art (1974), co-founder with Mario Costa of the International Movement of the Aesthetics of Communication (1983), director of the programme in aesthetics of communication at the MAMAC, Communication award at the XII São Paulo Biennale in 1973, participated in the Venise Biennale in 1976, the Documenta 6 in 1977, Award of the City of Locarno, Festival des Arts Electroniques in 1995, founder of the www.webnetmuseum.org. Books : L'art sociologique, 10/18 UGE Paris 1977, "Pour un manifeste de l'esthétique de la communication", + - 0, Bruxelles 1985, Pour un art actuel : l'art à l'heure d'Internet, l'Harmattan, Paris 1998, Fonctionnement et dysfonctionnements de l'art contemporain, l'Harmattan, Paris 2000. Web site : http://www.fredforest.org

Contribution: Small journey in the past: by going back from the Net art to the historic foundations of the aesthetics of the communication

Abstract:In the field of the art, any emergent shape is always in touch with what precedes it. Either that this shape appears as its logical and natural continuance, or, on the contrary, that it shows itself and is imperative (opposes) as its formal, even ideological, alternative. For lack of being able to stop in a definitive way one, or more, "aesthetics" of the art of the networks, we can find constants which are already specific to it.

Text of the proceedings : in french

Eduardo Kac (Brazil/USA), artist and theoretician

Biography: Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and his bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web '80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced "Katz") emerged in the early '90s with his radical telepresence and biotelematic works. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac shocked the world with his "transgenic art"--first with a groundbreaking net installation entitled Genesis (1999), and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000). Eduardo Kac is represented by Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago. His work is documented at <http://www.ekac.org>.

Contribution: Telepresence, Biotelematics, Transgenic Art

Abstract:Telepresence art is the merger of telecommunications and telerobotics. Biotelematic art is based on the integration of a biological process to digital networks. Transgenic Art is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to create unique living beings. Eduardo Kac, the proponent of these new concepts in art, will discuss his recent work. After an introduction contextualizing his pioneering telepresence work, in progress since the mid-1980s, Kac will give examples and further discuss his biotelematic and transgenic work of the 1990s.

Text of the proceedings : in french

Biography: Sharon Daniel is an Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice. Her research involves collaborations with local and on-line communities which exploit information and communications technologies as new sites for "public art."

Contribution: Mapping Databases: Online Representation of Spatiotemporal Experience

Abstract:Mapping Databases: Online Representation of Spatiotemporal Experience
This paper presents a project I am developing with Sharon Daniel Mapping the Database. One of our main goals is to bring to light cross-cultural perspectives on the representation of spatiotemporal experience. How can these representations be created and used by individuals and communities?
Our collaboration examines the notion of an aesthetics of database within the context of prototyping and testing interactive systems for the creation and collection of maps. For our purpose mapping is seen as collaborative, intersubjective, communication or information design and exchange. We are using databases as instruments for investigating non-hierarchical information systems through two developing project prototypes, Substract the Sky and A Map Larger than the Territory.

Text of the proceedings : in english

Frank Popper (France), theoretician

Biography: Professor emeritus of aesthetics at the University of Paris VIII, he is the author of Naissance de l'art cinétique, 1967 ; Art - Action and Participation, 1975 ; L'artist et la créativité aujourd'hui, 1980 ; Art of the Electronic Age, 1993 ; Réflexions sur l'exil, l'art et l'Europe, 1998 and is at present working on a study of Virtual Art. He was also organizer and author of the catalogue of the exhibitions Kunst-Licht-Kunst, 1966 ; Lumière et mouvement, 1967 ; Electra, 1983, and L'art virtuel, 1998.

Gilbertto Prado (Brésil), artist

Biography: Born in Santos/Brazil, 1954, multimedia artist, studied Engineering and Visual Arts at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. In 1994 he obtained his doctoral degree in Arts at the University of Paris I. He has participated in several art exhibitions in his country and abroad. Currently he is Professor at the Department of Visual Arts at the ECA/USP - Communication and Arts School at University of São Paulo.

http://wawrwt.iar.unicamp.br/gilbertto/gilbertto.htm
http://www.itaucultural.org.br/desertesejo

Contribution: Recent Experiments in Multiuser Virtual Environments in Brazil

Abstract:This article presents four recent web experimentations in the virtual environments in Brazil. The first one is the Imateriais 99 (1999), created at Itaú Cultural São Paulo. It used videogame technology to explore some key issues in contemporary thought about the relationship between what is virtual and what is real. Desertesejo (2000), a networked virtual web-based environment by Gilbertto Prado, is the second project which is a poetical exploration of geographical extension, the temporary ruptures, the loneliness, the constant re-invention and the proliferation of points of meeting and sharing. The third one, entitled The Xamantic Journey (2001) by Tania Fraga, is an amalgamations of myths, dreams, natural world phenomena, shadows of the past, all entwined. The last project, Artificial Voices (2002) by Suzete Venturelli, searches a dialogue between real and virtual bodies by using interactive interfaces in order to capture voices in an installation atmosphere.

Text of the proceedings : in english

Nicolas Reeves (Canada), artist

Biography: Teacher at the School of Design of the UQAM (Montreal). Runs the NXI GESTATIO laboratory (architecture/design/computer science) at the UQAM and the axis Artificial Life and Robotics Art of the new institute Hexagram dedicated to the arts and media technologies. His creative approach is reinforced by a theoretical research which questions the basis of the notion of order, information and organisation.

In 1995, he exhibited the architectonic installation Morphologies Surrationnelle which inscribes his work within the arts-science relation, which has been strenghten by the project Harpe à Nuages ((1997-2002). He created several technological art installations, sound-based and reacting to the variations of natural phenomena: Le Jardin des Ovelyniers, La Chambre Forcluse, Le Mascarillon, Sixième Diffractale.

Contribution: The Terrifying Trouble with Lucidity: Essay on Pseudo-Infinite Worlds

Abstract: The finitude of digital universes (DU) is often seen as a limitation of their potential which makes it possible to grasp all possible worlds right away, even those never realized. Our knowledge of the basic elements and their various states would seem to eliminate any possibility of the unexpected. Of course, new phenomena emerge from explicitly-definable mechanisms; these finite worlds have not nearly delivered up all their secrets. But this only pushes back the point at which the finite character of the universe manifests itself and we can recapitulate not only all that is known but also all that can be. For many writers (Nietzsche, Baudelaire), such worlds have a desperate aspect–we have to get out of them at all cost.

Text of the proceedings : in french

Jemima Rellie (UK), curator

Biography: Jemima Rellie is Tate's Head of Digital Programmes, with responsibility for the strategy and co-ordination of public-facing digital content. Prior to Tate, she worked in interactive TV (EC1 Media), internet development (Saltmine Creative), and art book publishing (Phaidon and Macmillans). She has an MA in The Social History of Art (Leeds University).

Contribution: Intervention and subvention, collaboration and communication - Net Art's contribution to the transformation of the museum

Abstract: It is no longer unusual to find museums exhibiting Net Art. It can be found in science museums, applied art museums, design museums and fine art museums, albeit seldom as the main attraction. Yet Net Art still confounds the economic system of the art market. Commercial galleries remain hard pushed to realise a return on investment in Net Artists, which means that museums and other organisations are now taking a lead in commissioning and showing works in this area. Furthermore, with the ever-increasing commercialisation of the internet it is possible that museums will, despite their late involvement in Net Art, soon become the primary platform for the distribution of Net Art.

Text of the proceedings : in english

Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarié (France), theoretician

Biography: Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarié, theoretician and critic in art and new technologies, studied F. Forest's Aesthetics of Communication (Epiphaneia n°2, 1997). In her synthetic book "La Société des clones à lère de la reproduction multimedia" (Actes Sud, 1999) she analysed the grounds of virtual aesthetics in the light of W. Benjamins insight into the outcome of the artwork in the age of multimedia reproduction ("Web Museum 2000") and from her works about "Computer Assisted Palaces of Memory" (Jasis n° 48, 1990) and about "Artificial Life".

Her current researches deal with aesthetic aspects of autonomous virtual creatures (Festival @rt Outsiders, 2001).

Contribution: Artwork's Pathes beyond Utilisability (Whitin Net Range: Which Kind of Proximity?)

Abstract:Does "Distance Presence" produce this false proximity which abolishes the distance or does the Aesthetics of Path counteract the so-called ubiquity of the net thanks to the spacing of Experience? Does the net, where everything would be "ready to interactive hand" increase this familiar proximity, typical, according to Heidegger, of the Zuhandenheit (what is "ready to hand", ready for usage), which apprehends objects as products. Or does the different proximity of certain artwoks transport us in another place than the one we are accustomed to, revealing the truth of the product as such, of the thing as such, of the artwork as such? Can the Aesthetics of Path, which makes the value of exhibition as an artwork triumph on the net, clear the way for the Open, beyond utilisability? Do the aesthetic attitudes apprehending networks as a territory on which you can imprint your foot (cf. F. Forest) turn the web into a world and no more into the continual connection of the links of utilisability?

Text of the proceedings : in french

Anolga Rodionoff (France), theoretician

Biography: Architect Anolga Rodionoff is an associate professor at the University of Paris with a Ph. D. in Political Science. Her research shows that the upheavel produced by the impact of communication on architecture pre-dates the use of communication techniques particulary this of the web by architects themselves. A University of Paris researcher on communication media and personnel, she is also commentator and curator for the architecture collection at Fred Forest's Web Net Museum. Her latest publications include Architecture : from production to communication, (MEI 14, l'Harmattan, Paris, 2001).

Contribution: Network Architectures, Architectures of Interactivity?

Abstract: What is the significance of the almost total absence of information and communications technologies (ICT) in built architecture, except insofar as the former are reduced to their functionality? And how have certain architects and artists envisaged the hybridization or crossing of ICT and place? While there have been a few concrete attempts to integrate the two and many projects that would do so, do they really share any filiation or common principles to a degree that would allow us, for example, to speak variously of a network architecture and an architecture of interactivity? (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in english

Timothée Rolin (France), artist

Biography: In Paris, Timothée Rolin studied at the Superior National School of Decorative Arts (ENSAD) and later he designed the website for the school. His interest in systems related to databases prompted him to start his own participative site in January 2002, www.adamproject.net. This site records his daily life and that of every one who is willing to participate in the project, in the form of dated and timed photographs, commented on and described by key words, thus creating an original collective memory that is permanently accessible. Some tools, such as a semantic search engine, allow us to reach out to this network of memories."

Contribution: Presentation of the ADaM project

Abstract: see http://www.adamproject.net

Text of the proceedings : in french

Eric Sadin (France), theoretician

Biography: Eric Sadin is a writer, a multimedia author and a theoretician of the relations between arts, language and new technologies. He is the founder and editor of the journal : éc/art S:. He founded <world.wide.writings.Studio > agence_d'écriture™ éric.sadin & partnerS« , a new organization dedicated to the production of textual systems based on collaborative work and open to contemporary technologies. In 1997, he published " : ", a text that incorporated different levels of writtings (poetry, theory, fiction) (Pécuchette éditions). He has published theoretical and poetic texts in more than 15 journals. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy. He has been fellow of the Villa Kujoyama, Kyoto, Japan, in 2002.

Contribution: Urban Surfaces/Textual Territories >Signs, Bits & the City

Abstract: The intersection of digital technologies and telecommunications networks is producing transversal convulsions throughout general economy of the text and disseminating frames for the visibility of the written, particularly visible in contemporary urban space (giant screens, posters, electronic panels, cell phones, interactive posts, synthesized voices, etc). By focusing on the connections between text and city we will bring out the breadth of mutations that modify simultaneously our relationship to the written and to the urban, and make it possible to conceptualize literary enterprises of a new type, developing regular observational strategies and production methodologies involving the surface of the book as well as that of the monitor or the city. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Bruno Samper (France), artist

Biography: Multimedia artist. En 1998 he initiated the online magazine www.panoplie.org which aim is to experiment the langage of the web that is open, not pre-determined, not pre-categorized, a powerful miw of influences in any expressive forms : multimedia magazine, video games, webdesign, interactive series, online utopia, etc. In 2001, he is the co-founder, with Rouanet, of the studio panoplie.prod (of which he is the artistic director). The studio developps multimedia projects on and offline : interactive fictions, documentaries, games and long term universes projects. The project www.protoform.net is an example.

Contribution: Creators of Persistent Worlds: Artists as Forces for Convergence

Abstract: Our talk will pose a certain number of questions regarding the passageways that can be created between the problematics of the video game cultural industry and the making of art.

Text of the proceedings : in french

François Soulages (France), theorician

Biography: Professor of University, he is director of the DEA "arts of images and contemporary art" at the University of Paris VIII. He is the director of the section "aesthetics, arts and industries" at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Paris Nord. He has written several books about image and contemporary art among which "Esthétique de la photographie" (Paris, Nathan, 2002, 4°édition), he is curator of international exhibitions and director of book collections. Currently he is researching on the image from different perspectives : philosophical, aesthetical, psychoanalytic and political. His two recent books "Dialogues sur l'art & la technologie, autour d'Edmond Couchot" (2001) & "La couleur réfléchie" (2002) open to new research fields and perspectives.

Angelo Trimarco (Italy), historian and art critic

Biography: Teacher of History of art critic at the university of Salerno and Dean of the Humanities at the same university. Since the early '70s, he developped researches on the Freudian theory of art and on the social history of art. He studies themes and issues dealing with the historical avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes. He wrote several essays on the theories of surrealism. He is actively involved in the discussion, both on a theoretical and critical level, on current state of the art. His contributions —books, essays, critical articles— have been published in major international journals. He curated several exhibitions of Italian artists. In 1993, he was curator for the Venise Biennale.

Contribution: Criticism in the Age of the Virtual

Abstract: Taking the theoretical and critical positions of Baudrillard, Virilio and Lévy, among others, as my starting point, I consider the possibilities for art and criticism in the age of the virtual. Radically: is it still possible to carry out a critical practice in the context of a "cartography of the virtual"? A practice which still considers criticism and art as a space of knowledge and change. (Translation, L-S Torgoff)

Text of the proceedings : in french

Victoria Vesna (USA), artist

Biography: Victoria Vesna is an artist, professor and Chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. Vesna's work can be defined as experimental research that connects networked environments to physical public spaces. She explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior, and the shifting perceptions of identity in relation to scientific innovation. Most recently she was building a 'community of people with no time' and is exploring the impact of nanotech on culture and society. In 2000 she completed her Ph.D. at CAiiA, University of Wales, entitled "Networked Public Spaces: An Investigation into Virtual Embodiement".

Contribution: Mind Shifting and Future Bodies: from Networks to Nanosystems

Abstract:In what new situation do networks place the body? Do they foster and accelerate the obsolescence of the body, as Leroi-Gourhan foretold, or do they amplify its multi-sensorial capacity and involve it as never before? As network servo-mechanisms develop, which will come to the fore, the cortex or the body? How is the networked mind in operation called and stimulated to think? Is it plugged into the network which is allowed to penetrate it through and through, or does it shut itself away in the "cogito"?

Text of the proceedings : in english

M