+ Impossiblity of NetArt-The End of NetArt

If we can improve that the condition to interpret for Net Art became worse, we can also insist on the crisis of Net Art. This is based on two reasons. The one isaudience's experiences have structural changes, corresponding to the rapid change of internet configuration. The other is Net Art is keeping contact with audience only inseveral exceptional cases.

The work exhibited here has the purpose to contact with audience's experience in such exceptional cases.
The structural change of audience's experiences and memories corresponding to the change of media condition, and the possibility of their contacts and experiences only in exceptional cases is already mentioned by Walter Benjamin in the early 20C. In his thesis released in 1939, "On some motifs on Baudelaire", from Charles Baudelaire's lyric, Benjamin stated experiencing modernity by city life and technological duplication production. He made technological and informational Erinnerung from technology civilization in technology duplication epoch contrast to synthetic Gedachtnis.

This is about the questions of difference between original Erfahrung discussed in philosophy and degenerated standard Erlebnis. In other words, the former is the not degenerated experience that is showed to Baudelaire as his audience.And the later is the technological experience in the huge industrial society that is inhuman and makes people's eyes dazzled.
This argument is important, because it is the difference of various memories and experiences that is enable to evolve by itself in the history of Net Art. In other words,
As Media Art and Net Art have presented different experience from 'original experience' by the difference of dissimilar experiences and memories, it's important. And it is also momentous, because it has been evolved through the process to get media specific.

In the history of media, new experience was born when media was specific. That is to say that new sense can be generated when new media produces new experience that can not be obtained throughout the media. This is the evolutional archetype in the history of media. In the case of photograph, Pictorialism is a pertinent instance to get
its peculiarity throughout documentary image. And also, in the history of video or TV, we can see the node that was in the process of pursuing their peculiarity. Here is a premise to make media art possible.

However, the premise seems to face to crisis, because present media condition does not depend on only technological and informational memories, but it also intervene our original experiences and synthetic memories.
It takes other all experiences including technological experiences. From this fact, the crisis of Net Art becomes to
occur. The distinction spot of experiences and memories premised by Net Art is from the fact that the difference between them can not be kept anymore, and that the evolution of Net Art sees reversely its premise condition.
Now, technology duplication becomes the principle to consist of the world, therefore previous original
experiences and synthetic memories can not keep their primary aspects.

The media experiences and memories brought by technological duplication image production since 19c is under the condition including not only technological and informational memories but also synthetic memories modified by internet. And it reveals 'impossibility", melting into profound experience part or technological memories.
Here, the term 'impossibility' must be understood in such synthetic memories and the frame occurred by internet. In such point of view, the several exceptional cases to understand web art can be accomplished when it reveals the impossibility of Net Art.
These remind us of "impossibility of Baudelarie`s lyric" mentioned by Benjamin. Now what we can do is we become witnesses of the collapse of web art, as Baudelarie became a witness of the collapse of aura.


+About work

Through this project, I am not trying to repeat the boring phase of art for art's sake through the media or the Internet. Rather, I am trying to say that art and the media should critically respond to the fact they are restriction by capital and technology. Net Art must start from that point.
This is very important because Net Art is the only area left in the Internet that can attempt to break down the boundaries being imposed on by the current conditions of the Internet. Therefore, the reason I chose the Internet as a media was not for its inherent Utopian hope, humanistic usefulness, or collective unconsciousness like Fascism, but to participate in the process of producing meaning by reading the preferences of the present day and step deep inside it to get involved in both the truth and illusions of life to find and perceive how the two relate to each other.

'Impossibility of Net Art' is a work about the 'Rarity of Navigation'. In other words, this project is based on the navigation of the smallest visual unit on the Internet, a pixel.
In the first index page, a pixel is used as a graphic image, but in the next page, the ASCII (American Standard Cord for International Interchange) is used. That is to say the navigation of every page is based on the same visual image stemming from one particular point, but structurally, they are very different. By showing how an image transforms into a letter, this strategy ultimately shows that an image can actually be erased.

By going through pages connected by from a single point, we look at not only the visible pages, but also the source code behind them. Furthermore, by looking at the HTML code of an entire website, we can see that the next page provides proof for the existence of the previous page.

The whole structure of this work is about self-indication of media. In that each is the html tag, they are used to emphasize self-indication of the Internet web.
Self-indication in the way it is introduced here is very important because it becomes the core strategy to prove Net Art is impossible. This is from the fact that when media proves itself uniqueness when it tries to prove itself without referring to others.

That is to say, the more avidly Net Art tries to utilize its characteristics, the more likely it becomes to develop into an independent field. For Net Art to do that, the difference between life experience gained via the Internet and experiences from other channels must be premised. Unfortunately, all of experiences gained through the Internet are on the verge of breaking up their own inner boundaries. And the media's uniqueness that Net Art premises is already reached quite an unstable stage.

The problem is that most forms of Net Art fail to realize their inner instability by deceiving themselves.
Therefore, the important thing for us not a Utopian idea about the possibilities of Net Art, but discovering points that Net Art fails to represent.