Femenino.net.art: feminización de la cultura y red Internet

Remedios Zafra

Teniendo en cuenta que lo femenino ha sido uno de los "otros" visibilizados en las últimas décadas, origen y sentido de relevantes cambios sociales, nos encontramos con la dificultad que supone "definirse" para la mujer o para cualquier "otro" que haya estado excluido del juego social. A partir de esta dificultad indagamos en el doble juego de deconstrucción de su imagen pasada y la afirmación de un "querer ser" (darse forma a sí mismo), sólo posible como proceso (siempre inacabado). De esta manera vemos cómo se favorecen 'identidades' que rehuyen el esencialismo y se definen en lo provisional. Teniendo en cuenta que muchas manifestaciones de la provisionalidad y multiplicidad en nuestra cultura, incluida la adopción de personalidades online, están contribuyendo a un replanteamiento general de las tradicionales concepciones unitarias de la identidad, las experiencias en la red Internet nos ayudan a elaborar estas nuevas visiones del "yo".

En Internet el mundo (nosotros) sólo existe en nuestros representantes (temporales), en el e-mail, en el chat, en la WWW,.... en la interacción concluida. El mundo en Internet es "un chapoteo, una polvareda", una estela que se autodestruye cuando finaliza la comunicación. En Internet aquella idea de Deleuze en relación al pensamiento Leibniziano que sugiere una percepción por texturas y no por estructuras, tendría un referente. Las texturas son las que conforman múltiples posibles formas de ser y hacer en la red, son las que liberan el inconsciente (como quien se disfraza para dar rienda suelta a sus facetas más escondidas y liberadoras). Texturas y pliegues que se convierten en autónomos y desbordan al cuerpo, bien para destruirlo, reestrablecerlo o elevarlo, pero siempre para darle la vuelta y moldear su interior.

Para indagar en todo ello hemos ideado una estructura conceptual que engloba dos apartados que atenderán a los siguientes criterios de organización: en un primero esbozaremos un análisis desde enfoques históricos y sociológicos de la relación mantenida entre mujer, arte y tecnología en los últimos cincuenta años.

1. CONSTRUCCIONES SOBRE EL GÉNERO, LA TECNOLOGÍA, EL TRABAJO Y EL ARTE EN LO RELATIVO A LA MUJER

En un segundo nos acercaremos a las prácticas y recorridos artísticos y políticos online y especularemos sobre el papel de las mujeres en los nuevos espacios tecnológicos y artísticos de la red Internet, así como sobre las posibilidades de dar por cumplidas las esperanzas emancipatorias, deconstructivistas y feminizadoras de la mujer en la red.

2. EL PODER DE LO SUBVERSIVO EN LA FEMINIZACIÓN DE LOS NUEVOS ESPACIOS ARTÍSTICOS Y TECNOLÓGICOS

Para ello nos acercaremos a las distintas visiones que sobre el ciberfeminismo se están gestando y analizaremos proyectos de net.art que tratan de manera explícita el tema del género y en los que colisionan "arte, feminismo e Internet" y aquellos que, si bien no introducen explícitamente cuestiones feministas en sus obras, investigan líneas propias del metalenguaje de la red, indagando sobre los límites que separan lo real de lo virtual, los nuevos lenguajes que cuestionan las formas convencionales de narratividad, y la re-creación de subjetividades ficticias y virtuales en un nuevo espacio epistemológico y existencial del ser.

En estos dos apartados apuntaremos distintos conceptos sobre la feminización para llegar al que surge subversivamente de lo 'no dicho' y proclama su espacio de acción en las nuevas estructuras tecnológicas donde se están construyendo los sistemas de comunicación del futuro. Para ello acudimos al pensamiento de Derrida y de Kristeva para los que la mujer es la sede privilegiada desde la cual es posible desmontar el pensamiento occidental falocéntrico. También encontramos importantes referencias en las propuestas de escritura femenina de Cixous según la cual se pretendía desarticular (deconstruir) el discurso dominante, bajo una primacía, no de la mirada sino de lo simultáneo, lo que fluye, lo que se opone a todo tipo de figura o idea rígidamente construido. Esta propuesta, que nosotros vinculamos a las escrituras online, plantean una estrategia de destrucción del modo de funcionamiento del discurso tradicional, una relación de una "economía femenina" cercana al cuerpo, a lo que fluye, al ritmo, y opuesta a la economía masculina apoyada en lo filosófico, lo simbólico y lo discursivo. Esta sería una escritura que hablaría de lo inconsciente, lo reprimido, lo excluido, de los miedos y deseos no materializados. Escritura que se relacionaría con "lo otro viviente", lo "otro salvado" lo "otro ya no amenazado por la destrucción", proponiendo una feminidad que sería el "verdadero objetivo de ambos sexos".

En esta propuesta de feminización de la cultura podemos encontrar coincidencias en la crítica filosófica del esencialismo de Derrida. Tal vez, paradójimente, pues aunque la idea de esencia es rechazada por la teoría posestructuralista, (recordemos que para Derrida el esencialismo era cómplice de la metafísica occidental y plantear la oposición hombre-mujer suponía plantear un falso universalismo -seguir prisionero de la metafísica con su ilusión de presencia, ser identidades estables-) el programa de "ecriture femenine" que se basa en los mismos fundamentos, sí se mueve ocasionalmente hacia posturas esencialistas.

No podemos pensar ninguna realidad auténtica que no contemple la importante dimensión que todo (cualquier) real excluye. Es lo excluido (lo "otro") lo que marca las economías del deseo, así como de los cambios sociales y políticos, lo que marca la tensión mantenida del progreso.

En una sociedad en red, en una época donde no tiene sentido hablar de arte, artista, objeto y sujeto en los mismos términos que hace una década, la diferenciación biológica y sexual basada en la confrontación dual resulta insuficiente y se torna poco concreta. Las identidades fijas y condicionadas, reforzadas por una imagen del género como herramienta de subordinación, propiciatorias de una actuación políticamente diferencial (y por supuesto no neutral), dejan paso a identidades múltiples, re-hechas, re-articuladas, que intervienen su anterior lógica binaria y la subvierten.

Estrategias de (auto)creación basadas en el injerto, en la re-contextualización de fragmentos, en el copy-paste, convierten el interfaz, como campo maquínico de mediación intersubjetiva, en un nuevo espacio epistemológico del ser. Cuerpos articulados con escrituras digitales que interrumpen los discursos de la dualidad cuestionando la inmóvil "mismidad" del sujeto en las múltiples morfologías del interfaz, condicionando su inscripción social al efímero de su duración, a su genuina temporalidad y total contingencia.

En el ciberespacio somos cuerpos (géneros) hechos a través de la máquina, con palabras e imágenes, con fusiones y códigos que nos inscriben social y culturalmente mediante una tecno-anatomía. El ratón es a la vida digital (social -en red-) un inmediato y efectivo bisturí que, mediante código y palabras, modela sujetos online cual ciber-cirugía orlaniana.

Históricamente el género ha sido un instrumento de jerarquización proveedor de formas falsas y concretas a los cuerpos. Ahora, en una época donde se cuestiona todo lo aceptado como inamovible, el género se convierte en algo así como un "espectáculo diario" compuesto de imágenes que se dibujan en la pulsión del cambio posible, imágenes en permanente construcción.

En este nuevo espacio hablar de lo femenino nos remite a hablar de "la feminización" de la red Internet, de la acción desjerarquizadora de la misma, en términos de resistencia, deconstructivos. Términos que no supondrían, por tanto, recuperar los atributos tradicionales de la mujer, sino deconstruir el ser "feminizado" (revelador de una estructura de poder-sometimiento) y ejercitar la voluntad de "querer ser" en un espacio concebido sin jerarquías, un espacio al que se le presupone (sobre todo en sus inicios) una menor carga de prejuicios sobre las formas posibles de ser en el mundo. Esta feminización, tal como sugiere Derrida, debe "por un gesto doble, una ciencia doble, una escritura doble, practicar una inversión de la oposición clásica y un desplazamiento general del sistema".

Si recordamos la construcción de la conciencia feminista anterior y posterior a los setenta tiene en la naturaleza de la identidad femenina un punto de inflexión en su tratamiento y consideración. A principios de esta década (los setenta) las artistas empezaron a ser verdaderamente conscientes de la artificialidad y del poder represivo de la "construcción social del género". Uno de sus objetivos sería descubrir en una imagen de sí mismas (gravemente deteriorada por el pasado, la historia y la imposición social de un papel a cumplir) una auténtica voz que pudieran utilizar como sustento para una nueva construcción de su identidad.

De esta manera, concebir una feminización de las prácticas artísticas de la red implica, más allá de suponer solamente la presencia femenina en dichas prácticas, indagar si su presencia y su labor incita una deconstrucción de los modelos de enfrentamiento dual en torno al género.

· Deconstrucción mediante dispositivos digitales, protocolos, lenguajes hipertextuales, correo electrónico, código ... todos ellos piezas clave en la producción de l@s net.artistas a lo largo de la última década. Dispositivos donde la "matriz" como comienzo, origen, principio de sentido -también digital- es una de las metáforas de acción y teorización recurrente y de mayor carga simbólica. Con esta analogía nos adelantamos a la dualidad bajo la que hemos construido nuestra estructura social y moral, cuya raíz descubrimos en el código binario de nuestro sexo y en el código digital de la máquina.

· Deconstrucción mediante nuevos lenguajes. Palabras que se dimensionalizan, sistemas conceptuales que abandonan nociones como linealidad, centro, margen o jerarquía y las reemplazan por otras apoyadas en multilinealidad, enlaces, nodos y redes de relaciones.

· Deconstrucción mediante dispositivos de comunicación global en red, mediante activismo informatizado. No sin motivo las prácticas artísticas más relevantes que desde los años sesenta se han manifestado y consolidado mediante debates estéticos, en lo relativo a la producción femenina, han estado protagonizadas por "mujeres con conciencia de serlo", es decir por artistas que han desarrollado su trabajo desde perspectivas críticas y feministas, desde discursos de la resistencia. En este sentido, Maria Damon nos habla de las "ciberfems de la utopía futurista": un tipo de posfeministas que basan sus acciones en la consideración de la red Internet como espacio óptimo para sacar partido a la incorporeidad del sujeto y la posibilidad de su realización para sí y para el contexto al que se vincula mediante la tecnología. Sadie Plant ejemplifica en sus teorías la importancia de este vínculo "ciber-fems" constatando a través del mismo algunas de las más agudas reivindicaciones de las mujeres en relación a la tecnología, así como la necesidad de tenerla presente en la construcción contemporánea del género, por cuanto su emancipación se verá facilitada en la gestación del ciberespacio como nuevo espacio de acción.

Las producciones de las net.artistas habitantes de esta "frontera", generada a partir de los diversos mundos posibles en torno a la red, tendrían en este contexto una doble lectura. Por una parte, las prácticas que evidencian un tratamiento explícito del género y que se posicionan desde una perspectiva crítica y feminista. Por otra, las producciones que introducen estas cuestiones de manera implícita en la investigación de líneas propias del metalenguaje de la red, en los nuevos lenguajes que cuestionan las formas convencionales de narratividad, y en la re-creación de subjetividades ficticias en el nuevo espacio epistemológico y existencial del ser.

Por otra parte, no podemos olvidar que la feminización que promueven estas prácticas no es exclusiva de la mujer, y entre las producciones y actitudes de artistas como VNSMatrix, Anne de Haan, Shu Lee Cheang, Victoria Vesna o Kathy Rae Huffman, y entre las proclamas "The vagina is the boss on the Internet" o "The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix", encontramos también exponentes -más sutiles- en los Keikos Suzukis y las Sociedades Anónimas del ciberespacio, en cuyos gestos descubrimos también el carácter diferencial y deconstructivo de Internet.

Y es que aquí, en la frontera de los mundos posibles, no es difícil imaginar un futuro cuyas producciones artísticas tengan detrás de sí, no artistas, ni hombres, ni mujeres, sólo productores y sociedades anónimas con nostalgia, o tal vez no, de su cuerpo.

En la red lo "no dicho" adquiere otra dimensión, parece como si lindásemos su frontera (su abismo), como si acercarnos a "esa ausencia" fuera ahora más fácil. Un mundo por construir siempre es lo más sugerente, un espacio en blanco para quien ha visto rellenar y usurpar su espacio a otros, es, cuando menos, una oportunidad para adueñarse de sus actos, de su vida. Y aun cuando esta sensación es efímera, y podemos decir que dura 'un instante', 'un infraleve', lo que dura la ilusión del espacio virgen antes de ser mancillado por la ausencia de imaginación y la repetición de los mismos parangones sociales y los mismos temores a la diferencia, el deseo sigue perviviendo, y en relación a la red, el deseo es el motor de la construcción de un lugar de "lo individual" y de "lo común" para todos.

Resumen bibliografía:

CIXOUS, H. (1995): "La risa de la medusa". Ensayos sobre la escritura. Barcelona, Anthropos.
DELEUZE, G. (1989): "El Pliegue". Barcelona, Paidós.
DERRIDA, J. (1989): "Márgenes de la filosofía". Madrid, Cátedra.
DERRIDA, J. (1997): "Estados de la mentira, mentira de Estado. Prolegómenos para una historia de la mentira", conferencia en la Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, 22 abril de 1997.
HARAWAY, D. (1995): "Ciencia, cyborg y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza". Madrid, Cátedra.
KRISTEVA, J. (1974): "La revolution du langage poetique". París.
KRISTEVA, J. (1980): "Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjetion". Cast, París, Seuil.
POLLOCK, G. (1990): "Vision and Difference. Feminity, Feminism and the Histories of Art". Routledge, Nueva York.
WILDING, F. & CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE: "Notas sobre la condición política del Cyberfeminismo". Estudios online sobre arte y mujer: w3art.es/estudios/ .

Hacking vs Hacktivism: Sniffing the net

Outline of my research during my grant period in MECAD

Jenny Marketou

2000-2001

http://smellbytes.banff.org
Sniffing/Splashing 2000 (CD-ROM)

"As hackers become politicized and as activists become computerized, we are going to see an increase in the number of cyber-activists who engage in what will become more widely known as Electronic Civil Disobedience."
Stefan Wray, 1998

The discussion of the political impact of the internet has focused on a number of issues: Access, technological determinism,encryption, comodification, software, intellectual property, the public sphere, decentralization, anarchy, hacktivism, gender." On the other hand the net is the paradise of no-copyright, plagiarism, confusion and exchange.Hacking means reappropriating, reforming and regenerating not only culture but also redefining systems and processes, and it can account for a new coinage when the process is an open system.There is no question that Hacktivism is s a new breed of activism -- wired and confrontational.

My current investigation has been focused on hacking vs hacktivism and
the role those actions have played in the construct of a sociopolitical imaginary in our networked culture .I am particularly interested a how the above tactics have been dynamically appropriated and how the computer underground hacktivism has been infiltrated and interpreted in the work of many internet artists and collective groups working on the net as a meaningful political activity and radical practice.

Some of the following topics I would like to address:

1- Defining characteristics of the internet and therefore of "hacktivism".
2- Hacking vs Activism vs Electronic Civil Disobedience vs meaningful
political practice.
3 Hacking + hacktivist culture and the e- community that hackers +
hacktivist claim to embody.
4- What about e-Girl e-Geeks?
5 -Hacktivism as a conceptual art practice and artists as cultural
hackers.
6- Hacktivism as performance, as hard sport, as an activist
intervention, as radical practice/subversion, as erotic fantasy.
7- Stunts and Pranks and other tactics.
8- Sensationalism and e-Media Hype.
9- Other artistic - isms -contemporary or historical as basis for
comparison.

In reference to the above research the following interviews have been
published and projects and panels have been presented by the artits.

1-Interview Jenny Marketou with Cornelia Sollfrank, Artist, "Hacking
Sublime", SYNOPSIS 1, catalog, Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, September 2000.

2- Interview Jenny Marketou with Claudia Giannetti, Director, MECAD,
Hacktivism No 5 MECAD e-journal on-line, MECAD, Sabadell, Spain, 2001.

3- Open Source Lounge: Game Patching and Hacking Sublime and Viewers as Artists, a collective project, organised by Jenny Marketou in collaboration with Steve Dietz, curator of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center, USA. This project was first presented during the Medi@terra 2000, Art and Technology Festival, Athens, Greece.

4- NO CENSORS/ DYSTOPIA, 2001. A panel discussion with Marina Griznic,
Natalie Bookchin and Jenny Marketou organized by Christine Wang, Curator New Media Initiatives, Alternative Museum, New York City.

In preparation for this talk I was sent a series of speculative questions by Gerrit Gohlke proposing issues to be covered on this panel. He suggests that thus far, net art has failed to deliver what it had originally promised. It has not destablized and offered a way out of the traditional art system or provided access to a social reality through the networks. Proposing a "net split" he argues that many of net art's protagonists have either turned away from art and towards political activism or entered a mainstream art world with worn-out strategies, and he ends by suggesting that perhaps the Internet has been overrated as an aesthetic medium.

I wanted to begin with this summery because it contains some common assumptions about net art that I would like to call into question. First, I should begin by saying that there is no doubt the net is here to stay and artists are and will continue using it. The question proposed as the topic for the panel can not begin to account for the fact that the net has become an indispensable tool and material for numerous artists. Moreover, as audiences on the net get larger so do the possibilities for artists to tap into them. As activities on the net become more formalized, so do the possibilities for artists to manipulate those same forms. Thus, the more relevant question for me is less whether net art is making enough innovative strides at the moment, or if net art failed, but rather how has the net altered artistic production?

I also wonder how useful it is to qualify and limit our understanding of the diverse ways that artists are using now the net by applying the label net art to all these different artistic activities. Such practices include the regular emergence of international collectives and networks of artists developing projects across distances, performative network manipulations (such as this past summer's borderhack project in Tijuana which was as much of an international net performance as it was a live local event), or even the ways in which the net still functions as a cheap and easy method for artists to have direct contact with audiences, regardless of whether they choose to be or are accepted in the traditional art system.

It is not uncommon today in some circles to harp back nostalgically to the early days of net art when there was an apparent wave of creativity that has now subsided, those days when a small international group of people named and produced a lot of "net dot art". Where have they all gone?

But there is another way to think about this. I think the fact that art production on the net was thrust into the limelight very quickly and for a short period of time had more to do with both very creative manipulation of networks and with a growing awareness of how information could travel over the net, than with a rush of artists' websites sweeping the net. These creative manipulations were used in such a way that propelled a particular group of people into a highly visible place, and this activity was then, quite self consciously labeled net.art.

This is not to dismiss early net.art as mere self promotion. Rather I am arguing that the "art" was located less in the individual web sites and more in the fierce collective manipulation of all aspects of the networks: mailing lists, spam, email, websites, links, web rings and mirrored sites: all devices for trespassing into and parasiting networks for alternative ends. This concerted effort created the earliest net art "movement", a first wave of artists who knew how to work the net.

As Health Bunting wrote to me in an email in 1997,

"i think self promotion is a viable tactic for infiltration in this current art star system. many of my european friends who have not yet suffered advanced capitalism (thatcherism) still have an aversion to these methods."

By focusing primarily on network manipulation, these works took on and engaged the materials of the net. Their self referentiality was an important aspect of an art grappling with new materials and a new medium.

Artists are of course still manipulating the net, but in the most compelling works, the focus is no longer just on the process itself, nor on artists simply directing attention to themselves. For example, it is not enough just to highjack people to your site, as it was in 1995. (Moreover so called hijacking has since been appropriated by the porn industry. Last year a porn company was sued for "highjacking" unwitting audiences who claimed they were taken to porn sites against their will, and their jobs were put into jeopardy when they were discovered by their bosses viewing this same porn). The question for artists now is what to do with your captive audience once you have their attention.

I would like to refer back now to another speculation that I received in the preliminary email about this panel, which suggested that many net artists have moved away from art into political activism. This position assumes that one is either making art or making politics and sets up a great divide between the two spheres. In fact, I think that the net has facilitated just the opposite - that is, an ease in which one can move between different spheres and contexts in the same work, not just referring to, but actually entering into them. It is of little effect for artists to refer to the political only from privileged spaces dedicated to the viewing of art nor the expected social spaces delegated to political activism. The net has made it simple to shuffle between these different areas, permitting artists to show up where they are neither expected nor particularly wanted.

As artists have become more adapt at working the material of the net, questions of how to use this manipulation to engage in different levels and subjects have become more critical. Early net artists' investigations into alternative distribution systems are now being put to use by newer art collectives, but the subject is now not distribution itself, but rather a distributed political or social critique.

Today there are artists whose creative and subversive uses of the net intentionally rub themselves against the grain not just of the art system but of the larger mainstream in a way that produces a quite visible effect. This work reaches sizable audiences unthinkable before the net, stretching as far and wide as the offices of major political candidates, the Pentagon, the director general of the WTO, and frequently showing up in the channels of mainstream media. One recent example is the project voteauction.com, which used all the conventions of the online auction house to highlight and provoke a corrupt system posing as a democracy, and in turn, created a not insignificant ripple in art, mainstream media and political realms.

There is an important legacy of artists who have been concerned not just with the depiction of political content, but with the politics of distribution and display. Since we are in Berlin, I will mention Berlin's own John Heartfield. A proto-net artist of sorts, he made political performance out of the manipulation of his public identity by cutting his name Helmut Herzfeld and pasting a new anglicized one, John Heartfield, in a show of disgust for the nationalist proto-fascist regime under which he was living. Perhaps more relevant to today's conversation were his innovative methods of distribution, whereby he used the new mass media to disseminate his subversive and political photomontages, aiming for and reaching not the galleries and museums, but the streets.

Finally I would like turn to a brief discussion of a project I am currently developing, first because it attempts use the methods I have been outlining and second because it is a project that would be unthinkable without the Internet. It first requires a little bit of background information .

There are a series of shows and commissions on the subject of genetics currently underway in the States. As part of this initiative, I was invited by a NY public art organization to develop a public art project.

Along the way, I made an intermediary piece (with Jin Lee), a power point presentation called Biotaylorism, which addresses how, by combining Taylorist and Fordist methods with biotechnology, organic life is now being internally optimized for better business solutions. The project was included in a traveling exhibit called "Paradise Now, Picturing the Genetic Revolution" in NY this past fall. As it turned out, the show had a range of biotechnology corporate sponsorship, backing an unusually extensive amount of promotion, included full page ads in the NY Times and a panel discussion featuring no artists, but instead biotechnology industry luminaries such as Craig Venter. (CEO of Celera).

This show is not unique. As I mentioned, there are currently underway a number of other such well funded shows and grants to artists to produce work in this area. Regardless of the good intentions of the curators, the bill is being partially footed by biotech companies and their PR firms. And in Europe, Ars Electronica has had biotechnology as its theme for the last 2 years. One of its main sponsors is none other than the Swiss biotech giant, Novartis.

Although corporate sponsored shows on biotechnology are by now nothing new, (see Yvonne Volkart's essay "Art Strategies of the New World Order, or, What do resistant art works look like?") this new burst of sponsorship for "gene-art" coincides with a major PR campaign begun last year by a consortium of the world's seven top biotechnology companies called "Good Ideas are Growing". The industry saw it as a critical time to push for public acceptance of genetic research and development, particularly in the States. While there had been general complacency on the part of Americans in the past in regards to genetically modified foods and research, the mood was starting to change. The aim was thus to avoid a public relations disaster such as the one that had taken place in Europe over the past few years, where biotechnology was met with fierce public resistance. The campaign consists of so called educational science exhibitions, ads, and the sponsorship of genetics-theme based cultural programs such as art exhibitions, conferences and art commissions.

The question was then what do these corporations want from artists, and how can we possibly avoid giving it to them?

Corporate sponsors are pretty certain that artists will serve as a comfortable buffer offering the public non-threatening points of entry into these otherwise threatening industries. With artists making biotechnology and genetics the subject of aesthetic contemplation and creative visual representation, what might have seemed disturbing becomes engaging, accessible and easier to accept as our present reality. Colorful and so called "open discussions" on the complex ethical dilemmas are likely to assuage public anxieties, conveying the impression that democratic discussion is taking place. The very question of whether biotechnology or genetics should continue in their present tracks is not even broached. This instead becomes a given - an inevitability. Less aesthetic questions concerning economic interests are generally not discussed. And by keeping these discussions in the safe spaces delegated to art, even the most critical of questions will not threaten the industry.

In developing a project, it has been essential for me to think tactically about how to negate the instant neutralization of this highly politicized subject. All the issues discussed above - context, distribution, and form - have been essential considerations. For this reason, I realized that I need to make a project that can function autonomously - and move easily in or outside of the sphere of "art". Second, it is critical to make central to the project the issues of economic and corporate interests and how they shape and define the science. Thirdly because images are always easier to co-opt than action, I will set up a structure that will encourage participants to become both invested in and involved with politicized and socially charged actions.

I decided to make an on-line game-called Superpetz (also with Jin Lee) modeled on a virtual Tamagotchi game, where the virtual pet is a human worker and you, the player, become a manager. You begin the game by selecting traits that you think are most desirable for your worker/pet. Next you must run your pet through a genetic screening test, which although unreliable and costly, will determine whether he or she qualifies for health insurance or is employable, and at what level. The test results of course may affect your pet's happiness, anxiety and energy levels. Knowing the potential risks may motivate you to make certain lifestyle choices, should you have enough points to afford to do so.

The game takes place in a virtual work place, where you must earn points to feed, replenish and manipulate your pet. Feeding keeps up energy and happiness levels so that your pet can work efficiently and earn more points. Working your pet depletes its energy and food levels and overwork or over supervision can lower efficiency, happiness and health levels.

There are numerous options for modifying your pet's body and mood to potentially affect its value, performance and job ranking, but these modifications entail costly and at times risky procedures. Overmodification or an abuse of rejuvenators can lead to inefficiency, job demotion, job or insurance loss, and an untimely death.

If you don't have enough money - for example in the case of a pet that has not been given a job or health insurance as a result of the genetic screening test - or if you simply want to earn more points, you can leave the workplace and temporarily enter another game environment where you have other options for earning points. There, you can play a "knowledge game" on the subject of work, science, health or reproduction. Or you can venture into the thrills and challenges of real life actions and participate in a variety of on or off line interventions or subversive projects on the subject, thus earning mega-points for your pet.

One final word in on the net: the net is the only site where we could realistically develop such a project that could function with ease either as a real game, as an investigation into the interests of corporate biotechnology and genetics industries and as an art project, and that in its different faces could potentially attract a broad and not always prepared audience. Using the format of a game puts players inside the story, implicating them in this political narrative, and the net allows me to subsequently direct these same audiences/players to an extensive database of information and to activities on the subject, and potentially propel them towards various actions -all under the same umbrella. To close, I don't think it is time to either celebrate or bemoan art on the net as simply a new genre in the museums, nor is it time for artists interested in productive critical strategies to close the book (turn off the switch) on net art.

See also
Jackie Stevens, "The Industry Behind the Curtain"
http://rtmark.com/rockwell.html

Natalie Jeremijenko ,
PARADISE NOW/INVEST NOW
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/investnow/

Yvonne Volkart, "Art Strategies of the New World Order, or, What do resistant art works look like?"