The best of the 2 Worlds
The real world and the virtual world, that of communication and that of 'art', that of the institution and of daily life, the world of technique and the world of forms, that of the spirit and that of its specific materialisations, ... which of these two worlds are we talking about?

It doesn't really matter. Or, we could say that what does matter is that net.art lies right on the borderline, the border between all of these 'two worlds' -and surely of many others. Perhaps because its most perverse and yet most attractive quality is its delocalisation, its permanent displacement.

As if it were a final frontier, whose ability to always move further off still has the power to captivate us; ... the same way that the true traveller's gaze is drawn only to the horizon, that no-where place that always delineates his own back of beyond.

In our selection, we have tried to highlight the fact that the condition of what only a while ago we began to call net.art, with punctuation that graphically expresses our consciousness of its differential specificity, always moves with a worrisome dangerousness between two spheres, two missions, two tasks. On the one hand, it does not seem that the contemporary Art-institution universe can allow itself to ignore any longer the achievements that are being made in the field of net.art (this effective attention is already a fact, at least when we are discussing international institutions). On the other hand, at the moment there does not appear to be any conceivable form of communication so effective for resisting the separated existence of autonomous art, and therefore for resisting the Art-institution that sustains it, as the net.art itself.

Indeed, in practice there is something of that dream of a direct communication that thought of art merely as an effective instrument for a conscious construction of everyday life in whose fulfilment this same art would become unnecessary as a separate activity, reserved only for a professionalised sector and not for all human beings. As a practice of simultaneous production of forms and direct communication, visual support and medium for its transmission, net.art seems to be able to put direct communication within everyone's reach (in a way that we have been unable to even dream of since the Situationist utopia), a capacity to communicate actively and effectively with other subjects of experience, in a process of intensified, direct exchange, unmediated by the intervention of any institutionalised control.

The very ideas of 'artwork' or 'artist' lose consistency when considered from this perspective, or they become, once and for all, paradoxical or problematical. It is not easy to think about the terms in which the art market or the museological or critical systems would be able to absorb these realisations, which implement how they themselves are received socially. We have no 'artworks' in the sense of masterpieces, that modern idea which in this field is beginning to become completely obsolete and not only because it is nearly unthinkable to market these subtle, dematerialised 'objects'.
Nor is it possible to conceive of an idea of the 'artist' that is not definitively cut off from the old Romantic myth of the genius. All contemporary criticism of the essentialist conceptions of subjectivity find fertile ground in this field, in which the effects and possibilities of the experimental 'construction' of subject-formations is nearly unlimited both in terms of identity-fiction, without any biological determination being able to appear as relevant, as in terms of exercising pseudonimity or in terms of a strategically collectivised definition. All of this makes any pretensions towards authorship, here, seem ridiculous and outdated. The products and objects that circulate on the Internet are, in a certain way, dispossessed of any reference to ownership, collectivised by the total community that exchanges them, appropriates them, and remixes them. There is a spontaneous communitarianism on the net, and this makes the classical definitions of the ideas of 'artworks' or 'artists' seem absolutely absurd.
For all of these reasons, we made what we felt to be the most coherent decision: not to present a selection of 'artworks' on the web, nor a selection of 'artists' or net.artists. Rather, to present two worlds, two radically different approaches to this universe of net.art: or, if you prefer, a 'double-take' both in the filmic and the Derridian senses of the term.
Firstly, we present a selection of places, nodes, intersection points: precisely those in which this critical conception of net.art as direct communication can be found. Of course, there is no fixed formula, nor any single model. We have nevertheless taken a few decisions: not to list purely informative websites, whether institutional or commercial, nor those which point towards an 'organism' different from or behind themselves (for example, neither the ZKM nor any website of media labs, museums, festivals or whatever). All of the websites we present are just themselves; they are, in this sense, 'specific objects', they have a certain significant autonomy, a certain sense of belonging to themselves.

Above all, we are interested in them as 'specific location units', as tensional communication nodes. We have not wanted to restrict ourselves, however, to those which exclusively present 'works', precisely because we understand that this communicative activity, which we identify as net.art, is not so much a matter of producing exclusive stylised or attractive visual forms, but rather of diffusing instruments of critical understanding and intensified communication. In this sense, text has the same value as images and in fact, it seems to us that the practices we call net.art confirm a profound collision in the economies of text and images and we have no doubt that including "Rhizome" or "CTheory" in our list makes as much sense as including ada'web or the Moscow Web Art Centre.

Secondly, and together with this very precise selection of web-sites, we also wanted to offer a second take on this netscape: a (non)selection. The effect and result of an operation of communication with the net.art community itself. We have restricted ourselves, in this second take, to listing (in the same order in which we received them) all of the proposals that have been sent spontaneously by those who wanted to do so, in response to our proposal to the net.community regarding our intentions, concerns and interests.

We believe that this second unrestricted selection, the rhizome, shows that to conceive these communication processes settling into the conventional patterns of the Art-institution would be equally obsolete. It is not a matter of reproducing the model of the 'temporary exhibition' or of 'art curatorship'. Rather, it is one of transversally inducing and reflecting an act of collective communication and exchange. We have presented certain interests, criteria and objectives before the net.community, and with this second non-selection, which reflects another world, we are displaying the undercurrent of a communication that flows both above and below any hierarchisation of the nodes; it is merely the effect and result of this multidirectional, rhizomatous interaction.

We believe that we must prevent a repetition of the process of institutional absorption that other artistic-communicative practices have suffered. Therefore, we refuse to treat it as a genre or as a grab-bag. We believe that it is a very open and disseminated field of practices, in which we must distinguish very differentiated trends, intentions, attitudes and results in order to recognise those that are able to profoundly alter many of our communicational habits. Those able to express all of the potential possessed by a technical novelty referring to general forms of knowledge and experience of existence. Those whose potential to transform ways of understanding and experiencing art is enormous, even unthinkable, while the structure of their forms of production and social reproduction resists the already institutionalised models and formulae.
Herein, precisely, lies the last of the paradoxes that always force us to look at net.art with two eyes, from two worlds, simultaneously. The more it resists these already institutionalised forms of art -even making it conceivable again that it will be possible to exist independently of that sphere- the more it has the right to claim a place in the tradition of contemporary art practices, which is none other than the critical tradition of its self-questioning.

Now, net.art simultaneously inhabits the art world and the non-art world, the real world and the virtual world, that of the medium and of the object, of the institution and of daily life, of technique and of forms, of the spirit and its specific materialisations. Postulating between them an always movable, always drifting, always displaceable borderline. This borderline that is neither a midpoint, nor a tepid zone, but rather the contradiction of opposites, the confrontation of -as Benjamin would have said- "the alien with the alien", at the crisis point where two contradictions meet, armed with all of their potential to territorialise precisely this no-place that contains ... the best of the 2 worlds.