From the outset, the title chosen for this Magazine suggests the dual, troubled and troubling nature, the inherent duality, of Web art; its outline — often unanticipated — fleetingly appears and disappears on our screens, for the sake of pure enjoyment, or for that of the exploit itself, as confrontation, or by political or social conviction, as critique, among other things, of what the Web is fast becoming: less a space for encounter and exchange than simply a reflection of commercial globalization.

The post war period, extending to the present, represents an advanced, "organizational" phase of capitalism (cf. Lucien Goldmann, La création culturelle dans la société moderne, Gonthier, Médiations, 1971), characterized by a thorough integration of society by means of ever-increasing quality of life and the weakening of traditional opposition. Socialism's hope of opposing contemporary capitalism through the development of a revolutionary proletariat seems to have received its death blow: yet, while the soviet block may have been far removed from Marxist utopia, its disintegration has nevertheless left the world an object of unbridled and unhindered capitalist globalization. Another significant phenomenon is the concentration of power within a limited group of technocrats, while technicians, even the most competent, merely carry out orders. As a result, the mental life of individuals is considerably diminished. Traditionally, human beings have defined themselves according to two fundamental dimensions in which they have developed their behaviour and mental life: the tendency to adapt to the real, and the tendency to go beyond the real toward the virtual, that is, toward something situated elsewhere and that human beings must create through their actions. However, social evolution in the technocratic society tends to reduce human beings to the first dimension, that of adaptation to the real, and to turn then into agents, technicians of limited awareness, what German philosopher Herbert Marcuse called "unidimensional man", preventing individuals from concerning themselves with problems of economic, political and social organization, and leading them to be increasingly and solely preoccupied with problems of consumption and social status.

This situation also affects questions of communication and culture: the ever more staggering quantity of information disseminated by the mass media requires for its assimilation a powerful effort of synthesis at the very time when social evolution is diminishing this activity, the increasing reification leading the people toward passive reception rather than to inventive integration. Now centred on the mental life of the individual (rather than on brute physical repression, now become needless, at least in advanced societies) — cf. on this subject, the works of American thinker, Noam Chomsky —, the insidious oppression of the dominant strata has acquired a global, circular character: for, from both a social and a cultural perspective, the mass production of "illiterate" specialists and academics (competent in their field, though completely passive and consumer-minded in others) renders problematic the question of expression, understanding, and action, whether critical or creative, at the level of reality, the present, virtuality, becoming. One must conclude that the human being becomes reified as the world becomes more virtual. The solution? (Re)virtualize the human being, and reaffirm subjectivity, that is to say, accentuate, encourage and reinforce the second of the human being's two innate tendencies as outlined by Goldmann and Marcuse: the tendency to go beyond reality in favour of the virtual, of the creation and invention of "something else" and an "elsewhere". The works of the artivists at net.art testify to this at once critical and utopian aspect of virtualization. For the Web has the potential, as the privileged domain of virtual powers, of being a new place, rather than a servile copy of the actual world: this is the potential that Bunting and the others seek to explore, thus proving themselves worthy heirs of the Web's "hacker" pioneers.

First, the digital sphere forms a privileged space for the virtual, not, as one tends to believe, because it is in itself virtual: one in fact hears just about everywhere that the digital revolution has opened a window from our world into that of virtuality. But such an expression is misleading, as it assimilates the virtual with the possible. The real is; the possible is not, but could be. So, what of the virtual? The possible is a logical modality: just as a modal proposition P may be certain or not, contingent or necessary, it can also be possible or impossible. Thus, the possible, in some sense, is predictable, since it is uttered, designated, described by this proposition P, which will be confirmed, or not, by the accession to existence of that which it serves to announce, designate, describe.

The virtual, for its part, is not a logical category. It calls for interaction: the virtual is not simply a proposition the confirmation of which is left to the future, but rather a complex issue demanding resolution, the result of which will depend on an investment. Contingencies, context, individual differences will all "have their say" in the resolution of the virtual, that is, in its actualization. For: "The virtual blooms only with the entry of human subjectivity." (cf. Pierre Lévy, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?, p:38) The digital just allows the combinatory and display of potential data: but, in facilitating access to this data (texts, images, etc.), it favours interactivity, and thus, the "entry of human subjectivity" into the process of reading and writing, in the to and fro between virtualization and actualization.

Which is to say that the emergence of the digital world — the opening of a virtual window in our own — does not imply, as is all too often thought, that the virtual "remains" virtual; nor that the virtual may shift into reality. Rather, every interaction in cyberspace is an actualization of the virtual. Each occurrence of this actualization is an event. Yet, at the same time, this inter-subjective interaction finds itself displaced, "deterritorialized": in other words, this interaction — this reading, this encounter — is redistributed and dispersed in the non-place, non-temporality of cyberspace, the ex-istence of the virtual. A back and forth movement therefore occurs between actualization and virtualization, as it does in language itself, where every utterance always refers, for its very comprehension, to the whole of language as a virtual system while also referring to the context of its occurrence. Thus, as summed up by Pierre Lévy, who follows the explication formulated by Gilles Deleuze (in Différence et répétition) of the different categories in classical logic: "the real resembles the possible while the actual responds to the virtual," the real is substance, persistence; the possible, the form of a substance, a still hidden but "insistent" determination, a becoming; whereas the virtual "is not here, its essence is in the exit: it exists" (in the strictly etymological sense of the Latin term, ex = "out of" + sistere = "to be place"); "as manifestation of an event, the actual finally arrives, its operation is occurrence." (cf. Lévy, p:135)

The back-and-forth between virtualization and actualization, subjectivity and objectivity, here and elsewhere, now and the past/future, therefore constitutes the essence of the humanization of humanity, humanization that occurs thanks to the "three great means of virtualization and hominization": language, first; technique, second; and finally, social, legal and ethical codification. World of signs, world of things, world of beings: each of these is virtualized — questioned (again) and transformed —, the virtualizing effort being effected each time according to a triple structure analogous to the operation of language: (1) the analytical breakdown of the world into a system of signs, (2) the application of which will enable expression and action, (3) which, in turn, will have an effect or result. Such is the nonstatic structure of virtualization: process, actualization and interactivity. The actualization of the virtual will then never exhaust the latter: on the contrary, it revitalizes it.

In this context, art is "at the confluence [of these] three great currents" (Pierre Lévy, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?, p:76): indeed, art (artworks) is (are) at once discourse, technique and transcendence (that is, carrier(s) of values). Given its privileged position, art as such (and Web art as much as any other), corresponds to a "virtualization of virtualization" (Pierre Lévy, pp:76-77). In other words, the essence of art is to question the questioning, to emphasize at once the quest for an elsewhere and the insistence of the here and now, the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, evanescence and permanence, etc., so as to express and exalt, while also problematizing, the situation. To summarize, we may then hypothesize that Web art is doubly armed for the virtual war, for resistance to the contemporary economic world's reification: first, as art, that is, as a "virtualization of virtualization"; secondly, given its particular medium (digital), which maximizes the potential of the virtual. It is now a question of seeing what forms, methods and modes of action these works use.

The Internet is still young; yet, patterns are already taking shape, tending toward regulating, regularizing, and, especially, commercializing it, toward transform it, at worse, into "the greatest shopping mall in the world." Battles and manoeuvres are well underway to insure monopoly over it: the AOL-Time-Warner merger (which has also just acquired EMI, the major music production/distribution company) is the most striking recent example — probably because of media attention.

It is "natural" then, one might say, for "Web" artists to target such patterns, try to counterattack, and rebuff these maneuvers to further the young "tradition" of limitless liberty and openness on the Internet. The creators themselves — originators, thinkers, engineers, variously called "hackers" — have largely implemented their creations according to a libertarian ethic inseparable from their common passion for the application and development of burgeoning technologies, their efforts based on free access to products and services, on exchange, independence and resourcefulness. This ethic arose mainly from the sixties yippie movement in the US (the leading figure of which was well known activist Abbie Hoffmann, who died in 19989), promoting freedom and DIY ("do it yourself"). Its enemies of choice: the military-industrial complex; its weapon of choice: humour and hoaxes (Hoffmann made himself known as a prankster while mounting a "coup" at the Wall Street stock exchange). The DIY cause has been taken up, as we know, by the punk movement, which have chosen not only an attitude, but also an aesthetic, one and the other being "in your face", raw, forceful, low tech and unadorned; no need to "know" how to play an instrument to play real rock 'n' roll, nor to "know" how to paint to produce graffiti with an aerosol can or make tags. This aesthetic and attitude have had an obvious influence on Web artists such as Heath Bunting, Alexei Shulgin … recall JODI's "ugly commercial sons of bitches" on receiving the "Web Award" that reeked too much of marketing and packaging to their taste, or "Mystress" Sheila Urbanoski's willfully aggressive, "in your face" provocation, appropriating pornographic images "borrowed" from "real" porn sites to set up her own and break the (tacit) promise of anonymity taken as a given on the Web.

Such aestheticizing of politics has certainly existed since the beginning of the modern era (that is, since the second half of the nineteenth century). Social and political movements and artistic schools have joined in a critical stance against capitalist industrial and post-industrial society from which they emerged. Dada and Surrealism claimed to follow Marxism; Guy Debord's situationnisme influenced May '68, in France. Already in the last century, figures of Romanticism maintained links with the socialist movements of their day, got politically involved (Lord Byron, Georges Sand), and often spoke of these movements in their work. Yet one must see that what is typical of modernity, from about 1850 and then throughout the 20th century, is the interpenetration of art and life. Thus, post-romantics, such as Baudelaire (the first poet of modernity), aim to turn their life into a work of art; thus, the surrealists' imperative to "change life".

Whoever intends to take stock of contemporary political art must consider this evolution. It is a consequence of the advance of the post-capitalist industrial world into private life, of the resulting reification, and of the necessary attempts to combat this invasion by relying on the three tenets of modern and post-modern art: (1) self-referentiality; (2) intentionality; (3) performance.