"In 1997, Claude Gosselin, CIAC's director, asked me and my colleague Rossitza Daskilova to set up an electronic magazine. Rossitza and I quickly came to know an original art form, one designed for the Web.

Throughout the 1990s, and in particular in the second half of the decade, a new art came into being in cyberspace. The enthusiasm of artists for this new space gave rise to an impressive range of artistic projects and striking works in the field of new media art, with wide-ranging impact within and beyond this domain.

At the time there was little critical discourse about this art. The mandate of CIAC's Electronic Magazine was to become a part of this vibrant community with a view to contributing ways of thinking about this art. In order to do so, we provided a space for multifaceted approaches: theme issues, critical reports on events and commentary on a very large number of works.

In just a few years, Web-based art took off and grew astonishingly quickly. In their reflections on cyberspace, artists put the Web's tools to expressive and critical use. They examined the medium's technological resources and their meaning while analysing the Internet as a social phenomenon. During this period of exploration, the magazine acted as a committed witness, shedding light on these artists' numerous propositions."



Sylvie Parent,
Editor in Chief from 1997 to 2001

"Unexpectedly, what led me to electronic art was literature. In late 1999, Sylvie Parent suggested I write a series of texts on the literary antecedents to hypertext. This was my first encounter with a new and fascinating art, full of paradoxes: it is an art both technological and artisanal, political and poetic, social and individual, real and virtual. It is not a multimedia art but rather an art form with many genres; not a total art but rather a unified and channelled art within a single medium. And yet it gives rise to all sorts of hybridity, all sorts of contributions, in which works of art are no longer objects which subsist but rather invariably singular materialisations, brought sporadically to life only by the viewer's gaze and touch. A democratic art, beyond the laws of the marketplace, situated between chance encounter and the necessity of the code.

On the Web, one year counts for two or even four. Net art, still in its infancy ten years ago, is today reaching maturity. While the tenth anniversary of CIAC's Electronic Magazine is an opportunity to cast the first gaze back, I wanted with this special issue also to look ahead, beginning with the best of Net art today and also and especially with the specificity of art designed by and for the Web and the way it upsets traditional artistic categories. In this way we can sum up these innovations and imagine, perhaps, what this art will look like in the future."

Anne-Marie Boisvert,
Editor in Chief since 2001

Writers:
Samuel Archibald, Jan Baetens, Shawn Bailey, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Ned Bouhalassa, Evelyne Broudoux, Jean-François Chassay, Réjean-Bernard Cormier, Nina Czegledy, Ernestine Daubner, Ollivier Dyens, Francine Dagenais, Rossitza Daskalova, Patrick Ellis, Isabelle Escolin-Contensou, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Jens Hauser, David 'Jhave' Johnston, Randolph Jordan, Patrick Lafond, Valérie Lamontagne, Katherine Liberovskaya, Aglika Likova, Pascale Malaterre, Xavier Malbreil, Michael Mandiberg, Cécile Petit, Louise Poissant, Virginie Pringuet, Mark Rudolph, Bernard Schütze, Luis Silva, Katarina Soukup, Naomi Spellman, Brad Todd, Magalie Tremblay, Pau Waelder, Jennifer Willet, Karen Wong, Carlo Zanni, Adam Zaretsky.

Translators:
Timothy Barnard, Stephan Bélanger-Gravel, Renée Brisson, Darcy Dunton, Jean-Pierre Fournier, Serge Marcoux, Cécile Petit, Sébastien Poitras, Ron Ross, Colette Tougas.

Proof Readers:
Francine Carbouès, Paul Catanu, Patrick Ellis, Ron Ross.

Webmasters:
Kevin C. Rowdon (issues 1 to 6, 1997-1998, Gilles Thibault (issues 7 to 14, 1999-2001).