MachineMachine /stream

by John Cayley

Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for 'content.' Admittedly, New Media has aged. It has acquired a history or at least some genuine engagement with the reality principle, now that the Net is accepted as a material and cultural given of the developed world, now that the dot.coms have crashed, now that unsolicited marketing email and commercialism dominates network traffic. Nonetheless, artistic practice in digital media is still often driven by youthful, escapist, utopian enthusiasms. Net Art as such pretends to leapfrog this naivety through the wholesale importation of informed, ironic, postmodern conceptualism, offering us the shock of the virtual-visceral banal at every possible juncture. Other, more traditionally delineated arts - literature, music, photography, fine art, architecture, graphics, etc. - struggle to cope with the reconfiguration of their media, or with a