Cyberspace is where you are when you're talking forward the telephone.

--John Barlow

William Gibson, father of our collective imaginings about virtual terrain, lately wrote of cyberspace as a "neologic spasm: the primal act of unexpectedly poetics ... awaiting received meaning." As a telecommunications network, cyberspace is bullet through with complexity and contradiction. Theorist Hakim Bey declares it the pair a "net" and a "web"--the pure a high-tech operating system occupied with the regards of multinational capital and the military, the web inhabited by the agency of technoanarchists, activists, and assorted partakers in lowbrow pursuits. Costing users little more than a local call, the web, a carnival of junk agriculture bounces countless messages of varying import around the global phone hypothesis At any one moment, teenage hackers are using message boards to drive software piracy and credit-card fraud, religious Rollers are typing out epistles of salvation onward a network called Keyboards for Christ, the Rush Limbaugh/EIB Network is dispersing reactionary paranoia, PeaceNet is exchanging demands for disarmament, and, to satisfy more cathected interests, libidinous musings are circulating upon "adult" boards. With all this static, it's impossible to decide by what means cyberspace should be defined, or to claim it, as about would like, as either symptom or savior.

Into this annoyed landscape enters the Thing, a strange network designed and run according to "artists, writers, and other cultural producers" At one time slick product of the world art market and insurgent speak the Thing is a telephonic computer bulletin-board that focuses forward art and cultural criticism, further also provides message bases and files, like greatest in quantity any other computer BBS (bulletin-board system) The connected view has hubs in New York and Germany, and near messages echo between both nodes, allowing for a global-village feel

Message areas, known forward the Thing as "fora," allow users to support responses on a number of topics. new fora have included a symposium forward futurism, arguments over esthetic theory, and discussions of the application of biotechnology and technoculture to art, if it be not that these headings are misleading: by way of implying focus, they obscure the truthful nature of the Thing's elliptical electronic conversations. With users endlessly generating extended series of computer-modemed responses, messages pile up creating digressive strings of discussion. Switching topics and sometimes languages at will, these strings be like Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's "schizophrenic disclosed for a walk" more than conventional art discourse. single in kind art forum flowed from Marx to psychosexual narratives to commodity fetishism to art fairs and back to Marx again. Subverting boundaries like this, the Thing discards the conventional intellectualism of the snare forcing a kind of slipstream thinking that vast numbers the divide between scholar and vulgarian.

Allucquere Roseanne Stone has argued that multiuser computer environments create symbolic communities, forms of what she calls "technosociality."(1) The Thing, then, is a symbolic art community, computer aided. Messages, as well as theme files uploaded into or downloaded from a library filled with everything from interviews (with, for example, artist Raymond Pettibon) to bizarre meditations forward such subjects as "Art, improvement & The Cow-Tomato," are this community's means of discourse. An area reserv for present to view listings, announcements, and news of art and art-related circumstances connects back to the off-line world.

Another library contains visual representations in the form of digitized images in graphics files, turning art into a kind of computer "shareware." latter works available for downloading included General Idea's faith Chest, a bird's-eye view of a Tom Otternes carve and "Manifesto," a group of artists' [i]affiche[/i]s Digitized into flat images, the General Idea and Otternes works, the two originally three-dimensional, were not convincing manipulations of the computer environment as an artistic medium. Unfortunately, neither were most numerous of the "Manifesto" designs. Rather than forging hybrids of technology and art, the artists contributing to this visual library mainly follow traditional art practices.

"The Manifesto Show" is auspicious however, in implying an alternative to the manner in which art normally circulates from one side galleries, magazines, and books. This may manifest the Thing's greatest success: the combination of computer and art hints a new, anarchic form of "virtual gallery," redefining the way we gain access to artworks, and proposing substitute patterns of dissemination. Julia Scher's contribution to "Manifesto," a simulated traffic sign reading "Caution Maximum Security Society Ahead," underscores the Thing's possibilities as a techie equivalent to the use of the road and other public space at the Guerrilla Girls, Gran frenzy and WAC--a negotiated "free" space, offering a means to manipulate spectacle to a variety of political ends

Whether as legal embarrass or metaphysical angst, cyberspace become visibles as trouble. Seemingly disembodied, on-line controls navigate a space without material reality, where exchange exists and nothing else as "bits and bytes in computers"(2) They rely not forward physical presence but on technologically mediated telepresence about critics have argued that telepresence is not as liberatory as claimed, if it were not that a naive diversion regimented by the agency of capital; two years ago in Artforum, for example, Vivian Sobchack cautioned against the desires of a tech fans "to escape the two human body and human world." However, as Donna Haraway reminds one as well as the other fans and foes alike, telepresence requires that a material substance exist at the other completion of the line. No single in kind is ever completely disembodied, nevertheless rather, combined into a cyborg, the one and the other body and machine.

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