Let us try to understand online space not as virtual, transcendent, and discrete, but as material, immanent, and interconnected. To demonstrate how online media live in material space, I've chosen a number of low-tech and parodic artists' web sites that assert their own materiality and the economic and social relationships in which they are embedded. Iíll suggest six levels, from the quantum to the social, at which online works can be an index of material existence. These works offer alternatives to the discourse of transcendentalism that animates corporate-futurist understandings of digital media. They insist that electronic media occupy not a "virtual" space but a physical, global socioeconomic space. Reality is interconnected in multiple ways, and it is valuable to restore the complexity of these interconnections to the false transparency attributed to digital media. It all comes down to bodies: subatomic bodies, the linked bodies of our computers, our own bodies that act in sympathy with them, and the social body in which we all partake. The web works I'll visit invite us to relate to online media in terms of our shared fragility, corporeality, and mortality.

The problem with transcendentalist understandings of cyberspace can be understood in the good old terms of dialectical materialism. The recent stock market crash/"adjustment" to the overrrating of dot.coms, for example, indicates a misplaced faith in a virtual superstructure, at the expense of understanding that e-businesses are material enterprises like any other. More profoundly, and underlining the basic mistake of capitalism as well, is the belief that virtual "value" can be created independently of the material world. The transcendental discourse around digital media is based on a desire for immortality that comes only at the expense of severing ties with the material world. Life is analog. The abstraction of communication into information is an attempt to hold mortality at bay, but it takes place at the expense of our own dematerialization.

The Web and other computer-based media rely, of course, on a material substrate. They are not "virtual" media; the images they produce are not immaterial. They are subject to breakdowns and failures, anomalies of low and obsolete technologies, the absurd constraints of commercial software and the cost of software. Thus we might look for materialism on the web in digital artworks that refer to the social circumstances in which they were produced, that draw attention to the physical platforms on which they were built, or that index their economic means and ends. In the following I will examine some of these works and five levels of materiality that they index. These are, from micro to macro: quantum; electronic; hardware; software; and social levels.

The quantum level
Permit me just to assert that we are in fact all interconnected physically and immanently at the quantum-physical level. If you're curious how this might be, please see my essay "How Electrons Remember." The question of materialism becomes more politically pointed when we move up from quantum to classical states, and to the crude level of organic, human life.

The electronic level
At this level we encounter unpredictability: errors, breakdowns, true randomness. The myth of transparency would have us believe electrons behave the way they do in diagrams. Toronto robotics artist Norm White points out that electrical engineering imagines digital media to produce a square wave, its two poles reflecting 1 and 0. But in reality, those square waves are very wobbly, as the electrons can never be fully tamed by the electronic circuits that herd them around. At a micro level, then, our digital media are actually analog media: errors occur analogously with these tiny declarations of electronic independence, and it is the errors that remind us of the physical existence of the medium.

The hardware level
A well-running platform, for those who have the cash, has a false transparency that makes it quite easy to believe we are operating in a virtual realm. Software, hardware, and server corporations have a deeply vested interest in this myth of transparency and the dependency on their services it creates. But anyone who has a less-than-perfect system, who is working with low bandwidth and obsolete machines, is likely to be reminded often that all this stuff exists at a material level. When our computers fail us we are most forcibly reminded of "virtual" images' physical being. Many artists fall into the hardware upgrade trap, making works that require fast computers with lots of RAM. Others, however, make virtue of necessity by exploiting the aesthetic and communicative potentials of "obsolete" hardware and slow modems.

Redundant Technology Initiative is a British activist organization devoted to recycling computer hardware that corporations deem "obsolete." In 1998 the organization revealed a memo circulated by Microsoft to its subscribers, encouraging them to stop using the amateurish and unpredictable ASCII art and instead use Microsoftís clip art. Microsoftís goal is to ensure dependency at every level and to eradicate individual, creative, and unauthorized uses of its software.

The software level
The materiality of software asserts itself through viruses, program incompatibility, obsolescence, lack of money for upgrades, and software cost. The myth of transparency would have us believe everybodyís working with optimal softwareóand using it for instrumental, often commercial purposes. Here too, many makers of digital media fall into the upgrade trap. Those who can afford to, use the newest technologies to produce on-line works that are inaccessible to audiences who lack the necessary bandwith, memory, servers and plug-ins. In contrast, works that use low and obsolete electronic technologies may be considered an act of corporate refusal and an insistence on the materiality of the medium.

First among these are works that are intentionally low-tech or that mimic a low-tech interface, in a nostalgic reference to obsolete platforms. What deserves to be considered the folk art of the digital age, ASCII art, exploits the text-based interface that graphical interfaces have superseded. ASCII art uses the limited technical means of keyboard characters to produce a great creative variety. For a single example, Veronika Carlsson uses ASCII to render beautifully modeled naked men, their angularity recalling the drawings of Egon Schiele, in a sort of digital chiaroscuro. We may consider ASCII art to be an electronic variant of traditional art forms identified with women, such as textiles and embroidery. In their amateur status and private circulation among friends, ASCII sites function as another form of community-based, rather than professional, art practice. Rather than invoke a hierarchy between "low" and "high" arts, I'd like to suggest ASCII art is not only a legitimate artform outside the professional art world, but a political refusal of the upgrade trap.

People operating within the art world also make reference to the low aesthetics of ASCII art. As well as Vuk Cosic's well-known ASCII Music Videos, proudly created on an old 386DX, there is Juliet Martin's ASCII-style web site "oooxxxooo." Martin achieves a sensuous tension between the limitations of the text-based interface, its characters formed into ribbons and teardrops in the style of concrete poetry, and the expressions of longing of the words. "Why can't I find love on my hard drive?", one page asks.

A certain woozy materialism characterizes interface nostalgia, and programmers are its best archivists: see programmer Nathan Lineback's extensive archive of obsolete graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Artist/programmers follow suit: recently, some quite sophisticated artists' web sites have begun to reject the graphical interface in favor of what appears to be an old-style text-based interface, right down to the use of green or orange text on black screens. They include the celebrated jodi, programmed by Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk, and the mysterious m9ndfukc, programmed by the pseudonymous Netochka Nezvanova. These sites make it appear that weíve run into the source code. In modernist style, they index the structure on which they are based. We might say that the graphical interface is the superstructure, where source code is the material base; though of course there are several levels of materiality below this one. Theirs is a knowing nostalgia for a cruder interface, for in fact these are some of the most densely coded sites on the web. On m9ndfukc in particular, the minimalist green-on-black graphics animate into hypnotic images unthinkable in the early days of the text-based interface. This programming is materialist in its acknowledgement of the history of interfaces, and the military applications for which they were developed. However, as I'll discuss later, it is important to distinguish between formal transparency and economic transparency.

Scores of interfaces meet their come-uppance every year as the software companies encourage us to upgrade. Outdated software suddenly calls attention to itself as a physical entity. Losing currency, old software gains a body. (Currency, or cash, equals the ability to translate objects into information; currency is transcendental, while obsolescence is material.) Hence Vivian Sobchack's nostalgia for the wobbly forms and poor resolution of Quicktime 1.0, whose refusal to be "quick" reminds us of the fragility of the interface. A number of artists' web sites now employ primitive graphics reminiscent of early NASA and the computer games derived from its applications. The Tron-style figures in David Crawford's "Here and Now," for example, evoke the history of the medium, from its military development to the first commercial applications of shootíníkill software. Similarly, Yael Kanarek's "World of Awe 1.0" employs a nostalgic, bug-ridden Windows interface, for an interactive mystery story. Appropriately, it's set in Silicon Canyon, a landfill of obsolete computers. Like the Redundant Technology Initiative, "World of Awe" asks what happens to all that hardware that (like the characters in the '70s science-fiction movie Logan's Run) obediently dies upon meeting its obsolescence date. Like other sites mentioned above, "World of Awe" only appears to be low tech: it's a nostalgic, but not a transparent interface. The site uses Flash as a plug-in, a program that normally hides all its code and links.

Many sites use software for purposes for which it was not intended, in the political practice of "appropriate technology." These sites comment in structuralist style on the commercialized form of off-the-shelf web-authoring software like Adobe PageMaker, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash, Shockwave, etc. Commercial software colludes in the corporate attempts to turn the two-way medium of the Web into a one-way medium, as occurred with television in the 1930s. In place of the equal exchange of early days of the web, a supplier-consumer relationship has been set up, and web authoring software is complicit in this unilaterization of the exchange. I've identified a few ways in which web artists subvert the commercial purpose of web authoring software: the radio button/click box, confirmation window, the hotlink, the warning, the pop-up window, and the survey. While these works do not draw attention to the materiality of the interface as ASCII art does, they do point out the commercial purposes built into seemingly innocent software.

Online forms help marketers gather information from consumers, such as credit card numbers. Radio buttons (whose name itself is nostalgic for an analog technology) and click boxes automate the "interactive" process into a series of consumerist choices. Alexei Shulgin claims credit for the invention of Form Art, and sponsored a Form Art contest on easylife.org in 1997. What the genre of "Form Art" does is de-instrumentalize the form and check box, by reconceiving the consumer web page template as an aesthetic medium. Commercial web pages' "content," which is basically a medium for online shopping, is rendered all form, as a random click yields a clattering display of blinking dotsóaesthetically pleasing but useless for shopping. Clicking "you and me" on Michael Samyn's entry, "1001 checkboxes," eroticizes the options of a paired button and box. As they flash in alternating states of arousal, the radio button becomes a vaginal concentric circle, the check box an amusingly alert phallic symbol.

The hotlink is perhaps the defining form of the graphical user interface. The competition for choice domain names means that a hotlink is already a form of advertising, whether one follows it to the linked page or not. Easylife.org, for example, in 1997 built poems of hot links to sites with suggestive names--"birth.com--life.org--sex.com--death.org," etc., hijacking their commercial and informative intentions for aesthetic purpose.

Confirmation windows, those little boxes we must click in assent before we can proceed, remind us of the commercial guts of the "free" space of the WWW, as they often index expiry of licenses, encryption programs, and other commercial software. Similarly, warnings (recognizable by the yellow triangle containing a !) can be a powerful reminder that all these graphics come to us courtesy of programmers with varying degrees of time and experience. As you know, some sites become inaccessible because they have so many errors; to me this creates a material link to the harried programmer working late at night and making mistakes. Both well-running sites and frequently crashing sites index how much time and money they cost to make. As Godard said, "Money is the film within the film," so we may say that money is the true source code of the web. Warnings become found poems in sites such as the crypto-fascist "eusocial" section of m9ndfukc, where we must assent to a series of messages that go, "juzt 1 clik"; "juzt 1 clik"; "bizt du gluchl!ch?+" "ja?+", before dumping us onto the mysterious e-commerce site "Kagi."

John Hudak's "Short Work," on turbulence.org, combines Form Art and the Warning poem, making these impoverished forms the indexes for sensuous experiences one cannot have online. A tiled image of wintry bare branches and a repeated sample of birdsong ironically invoke the distance from nature. When you click one of the matrix of radio buttons, the warning comes up in the form of a little haiku: "Coughing in the wind"; "the dog's hind legs"; "My son imitates the ferry horn"; "nose in peat and ivy." Here Form Art rejects verisimilitude in order to point past the sensuous limitations of the interface, asking us to imaginatively call up a multisensory narrative.

Like the confirmation window and the warning, the pop-up window, so maddeningly familiar to users of "free" servers like Yahoo!, reminds us of the inexorable limits of the interactive medium, in this case its commercial constraints. Commercial GUIs use these "sticky windows" to prolong a visitorís exposure to advertising; artists' sites use them to critique the ideology of interactivity. In some art sites pop-up windows fill the screen faster than you can click them closed, until your computer runs out of memory and shuts down. Examples include Alexei Shulgin's "This morning" -- in which windows pop up announcing "I want to eat", I want to smoke," "I want to fuck," "All at Once!", faster than we can click them shut -- and the unruly "1.000.000" by Antoni Abad. Clicking on the innocent box in the center of the page elicits a pop-up window with a little movie of the artistís stubbleclad lips forming a kiss. Another pops up, and another, threatening to fill the computer screen with a million osculating mouths. "1.000.000" renders the commercial form of the pop-up window useless and even dangerous, draining our computers' memory reserves to the point of shutdown unless we reject all these virtual kisses by quitting the program. A final example, Emmanuel Lamotte's "ep_140300" (keywords: violence; browser) on his e_rational site, fills the screen with tidy, Mondrianesque pop-up windows that seem relatively benign, until my computer issues the warning: "Memory is getting full, please try to alleviate by closing unnecessary documents."

These sites critique the commercialization of the web in a formal manner, by making "inappropriate" uses of commercial software. Yet a more radical critique lies in making software available to other users, harkening to the days when work on the web was a radical exchange of information without regard to its status as intellectual property. Here m9ndfukc, for example, reveals its commercial stripes on an embedded sales page, kagi.com, in which its proprietary software is for sale in U.S. dollar amounts prohibitive to many non-commercial users.

Certainly it makes sense for artists to profit from their work, and selling your code is a more pro-active way to do so than fighting for sponsorship from organizations like the Walker Arts Center, the Banff Centre for the Arts, or turbulence.org. But other artists argue that a truly transparent interface not only historicizes its software but makes the software available to others. Transparency on the web also involves passing on the tools of production, including non-proprietary software, to other users. An excellent example of non-proprietary, free software is GNU, a free, UNIX-compatible software system (reflexive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!"). Launched in 1984 by Richard M. Stallman (see an interview by J.J. King on Telepolis), and involving the donated time of scores of programmers, GNU offers a radical alternative to copyrighted software. GNUís online mission statement asserts the importance of social connectivity over digital-style fragmentation. "Society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is ``piracy'', they pollute our society's civic spirit." GNUís developers encourage users to take and develop its free software and to make donations of time, money, programs and equipment. With GNU, sociality is built into the software.

The social level
Beyond the quantum, electronic, hardware, and software levels, a fifth level at which the materiality of the WWW can assert itself is the broadly social. Artists' web sites dealing with this level are too numerous to mention, as their material for parody, subversion, and sabotage is so broad. But to mention a few: The survey accumulates information about consumers in order better to market products and services to them. Amazon.com, for example, greets repeat visitors with "Hello, [Laura]! We have new suggestions for you in books, videos, and music." This format has been most famously subverted in the grandfather of survey web art, Komar and Melamid's "The Most Wanted Paintings." Their meticulously accumulated and charted information results in outlandishly undesirable "favorite paintings" for each of the fifteen countries they survey. Komar and Melamid are basically critiquing digital thinking, which attempts to quantify and categorize subjective desires and beliefs. "Hello, Kenya! You prefer outdoor scenes, wild animals, and the color blue? We have a painting for you!"

Faux-commercial sites criticize the commercialization of what was once an interactive medium by delivering useless or impossible products. The faux-commercial web site has the potential to draw unsuspecting surfers into what looks like just another chance to shop but really is designed to critique the commercial usurpation of the WWW. As with many actual e-commerce sites, it is near-impossible to divine, through the fog of sales rhetoric, what products these sites are selling. For example, pavu.com appears to be a commercial site selling designer soap, with the same breezy rhetoric and ad-cluttered front page, but itís really an art distributor. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy program Airworld to search the web on buzzwords and download images and text from corporate web sites into their own, changing all company names to Airworld, so indeed it looks like you could join the Airworld company, invest in Airworld stock, fly Airworld airlines, and purchase Airworld hair products. And the fearless ®TMark savages corporate capitalism and the institutions that support it in sites mimicking the World Trade Organization and the George W. Bush campaign; while Alex Rivera's Cybraceros site straight-facedly suggests that Mexican workers could use tele-robotics to harvest California fruit without crossing the border.

At the faux-commercial level, sites like Airworld are noophagic; i.e., they eat information. These sites suck information off other sites and reprocess it. They include some of the most sophisticatedly programmed sites: jodi, Mark Napier's "Shredder" and "Composter," Marek Wisniewski's Internet "slotmachine" Jackpot, easylife, and m9ndfukc. Jackpot downloads three randomly selected web sites and displays them in the browser's window along with their top level domain names (.com, .org, .gov, etc.). Visitors use a remote control to try to match any of the top level domains. Nebula_m81, the software that powers m9ndfukc, "makes it possible to simultaneously process several data channels connected to selected URLs. The system allows one to generate a hybrid signal out of heterogeneous Internet raw material, writes Mark Rudolph. The Shredder and Composter are death and resting places for web pages whose time has come. Napier thoughtfully suggests the Microsoft and Lotus home pages as good candidates for shredding, and if you enter their URLs the program cogitates for a moment and returns the home pages in useless but beautiful form, images stuttering and HTML code floating in scraps. These vampiric sites live off the commercial activity on the web and recirculate it in monstrous forms, rather than permit the free circulation necessary to the web as shopping mall. They make information that normally would have a limited lifespan Undead. These and other works for the Web insist that electronic media occupy not a "virtual" space but a physical, global socioeconomic space.

Some programming is so sophisticated that it begins to approximate the random nature of analog life. Lamotte's delicate "less is" interacts intimately with the visitor. A straight line across a white screen engages in an angular chase when you move the cursor close, subsides into quiescence when you move far away; it's like playing with a cat. Watching the pixels dance on m9ndfukc can be as entrancing as watching a bag caught on currents of wind--the index of reality's infinite mystery in the movie American Beauty. Describing the nebula_m81 software, "Nezvanova" points out that "the majority of processes are stochastic hence operator mind activity is stimulated not by the imposition of decision making--rather by an invitation to observe and analyze data transformations--to be distracted--and ultimately to select. this constitutes true interactivity and is the singularity." It is hard to determine whether these digital approximations of life forms are replacements for the thick world of analog reality or form a continuity with it.

Let me return to the longing for some index of, some pointer to, material life, that animated the beginning of this essay. Digital media are indeed indexical, if we keep in mind what level of materiality they are indexing. They may index the imperfect flow of electrons that constitute them, or of the platforms on which they were built. They may index what they cost to make, or the social networks in which they exist. Iíll briefly conclude by arguing that when we read the materiality of the web, we replace the discourse of transcendence with a discourse of immanence.

You'll notice that many of the works we've visited have user-unfriendly interfaces--freezing our screen, making it impossible to exit the site, draining our computer's memory. In their nastiness, they remind us that interfaces are "friendly" in the service of corporate interests. By refusing to let us make the usual choice from a limited "interactive" menu, materialist sites invite us to refuse the pathetic "choices" consumerist culture offers us. Our paralysis in front of the spasmodic screen embodies our paralysis as active agents in the commercialized space of the web.

We can read an online artwork for bodily existence just as Walter Benjamin sought to divine the hand of the painter in the form of brushstrokes. Here the bodies indexed are the material bodies of subatomic particles; the physical bodies of platforms and servers; the bodies of software that are dematerialized into commodities or rematerialized as social goods; the tired bodies of programmers. These bodies are all immanent in the pages that flash on our screens: we only need to be able to read them. What is actualized on the screen is the tip of a virtual iceberg. What is virtual within the web is bodies, organic and nonorganic, all interconnected. It is easier to be aware of these many bodies when transparency is not perfect.

The truth is that technologies age and die just as people do--they even remind us of our common mortality--and this is another fact that the myth of virtuality would like to elide. Digital aesthetics thus invites a phenomenological understanding, in which we can understand media in terms of our shared corporeality. M9ndfukc fucks with our minds, but maybe it also wrenches our stomachs in its exploration of the guts of its own code. When your computer jitters and crashes, do you not bleed too? Does the aborted connection remind you of your tenuous hold on this world? When your computer sprouts a rash of warnings and mindless confirmation messages on its face, do you similarly grow hot and bothered? I know I do. When they us to feel along with our machines, materialist web sites remind us that we humans continue to inhabit a common, physical, social space. It is immanent, just waiting to be actualized, in the seemingly virtual world of cyberspace.

thanks