Alan Schechner and Alessandro Imperato, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA 31401, USA. a_imperato@hotmail.com

This session will consider a range of issues relating to the digital arts and power, such as the 'ideology of cyberspace'; the institutional production, reception and circulation of computer art, particularly in relation to the Internet as a site of exhibition and proliferation. Other issues that may be discussed include the power of institutions and corporations to shape the future of web art; does the 'Internet Gallery' constitute a newly emerging digital 'white cube' that continues to privilege and promote existing structures and processes of power and control? What relation does web art and the 'world wide' web have to mass access and privilege in the context of newly forming information classes, analogue and digital nations, internationalism, race, as well as gender politics? What are the manifest and potential effects of patronage via the corporate sphere on art and freedom of expression and how does this relate to previous utopian dreams of the Internet as a site of democratic participation and communication?

Net Art, the White Cube, and the 'World Wide Web'
Alessandro Imperato

This paper will examine assumptions concerning the Internet as a site of exhibition and circulation of net art, and will question the myth of the Internet as a utopian space able to transcend the access limitations and real politic of the artworld and its institutions. I will be considering the role of the art gallery as a temple for cultic objects, or the 'white cube', and as cultural gate-keepers. These issues will be related to Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and his concept of the 'aura'. Benjamin's essay has particular importance concerning issues in digital culture, originality, valuation and curatorial selection, as can be seen in recent attempts by established art galleries to use the Internet as a forum for exhibition, such as the Whitney Museum of Modern Art as well as well as other art institutions.

Collective Sites for Remembering: Imagining Slavery in Virtual Space
Sarah Parsons (York University, Canada)

What are we to make of the fact that the memorializing and visualization of slavery in Internet exhibitions stands in stark contrast to the way slavery is usually addressed in site specific institutions? In his recent study of visual representations of slavery, Marcus Wood levied a strong critique against the paucity and simplicity of British memorials to the history of slavery. Wood points to public memorials of sympathetic Britons like William Wilberforce and in the disturbing models and artifacts of the Transatlantic Slavery gallery of the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool. Slavery is a more tangible presence in American and African institutions, but Internet exhibitions seem to be unique in that they consist primarily of photographic portraits of former slaves. Alongside other sources of historical knowledge, these sites employ visual representations of slavery to interpret the history of colonialism for a contemporary public. Therefore, I am interested in considering the origins and implications of these exhibitions. How do particular images limit, shape, and focus our knowledge about slavery? In the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argued that the crucial historical relevance of slavery lies beyond national histories. How useful might it be to consider cyber space as constitutive of the 'Black Atlantic'?

Packets of Resistance: Net.Art as Political Activism
Alan Schechner

Discourse addressing the implications of computer technology tends either to extreme pessimism or utopian optimism. Part of that utopianism has manifested itself in ideas that technological development will lead to social and political justice. This paper will address the ways in which ideologically specific net.artists are using the Internet as a tool for political art. How do we locate this work in an (art) historical context? What strategies have been developed by artists using the web? How successful have they been and, given both the rate of technological development and the increasing influence of corporate and institutional culture on the web, what may the future hold for net activism? By addressing contemporary practice and analyzing it's successes and failures a clearer and more relevant picture of the role of technology can begin to emerge.

Fluidity and Fixing: Digital Obstacles or Immaterial Commodities?
Salomi Voegelin (Goldsmiths College University of London)

This paper examines art practice with respect to notions of 'Fluidity and Fixing' as they appear in current contentions of the network age. I am juxtaposing euphoric notions of network-fluidity, presented as a strategy for artistic practice to work against fixed normative values, with more critical views on the 'actual fluidity' of the network. The notion of web based work, as artistic dematerializations, constructing fluid 'obstacles' to the object based actuality of a 'real', objective, world, related to concurrent issues of representation and subjectivity is under consideration: Is the immaterial artwork on the net a 'fluid obstacle' to existing modes of production and perception challenging their aesthetic valuation and its ideological investment? Or is the material art object a better 'obstacle', challenging meaning based on fluid networks of power and control? The understanding here is, that issues of materialisation or dematerialisation of the artwork on the net or in 'real' space are critically linked to issues of power, in as much as they are related to notions of a producing subjectivity and a collective sensitivity, and also, and more importantly maybe, in that such questions are linked to notions of control over the 'space' and 'knowledge' of production and perception.

Apocalypse Then: Cybersublime and the work of Chris Cunningham
John Byrne (John Moores University, England)

The shift from analogue to digital forms of production, reproduction, distribution and display have, more often than not, been accompanied by a polarisation of utopian/distopian responses to technological developments. Whilst many of these issues are key to a critical re-assessment of art, the nature of the digital art object and the conditions of its virtual display I wish, in this paper, to offer an analysis of the impact and challenge that digital media have had on the practice of contemporary art production itself. Key to this will be a critical examination of Chris Cunningham's hybrid 'Cyberpractice' and the inclusion of his 'Trapeze' installation in the 'Apocalypse' show held at the Royal Academy in 2000. Though this piece itself offers no fundamental challenge to our common understandings of the experience of 'art in the gallery space', his work as a Hollywood special effects 'artist', the production of 'Fifi' (the Nintendo Cyberpixi), his work with 'Bjork' and the 'Aphex Twin' to his inclusion in the 'Apocalypse' show itself act, I would argue, as a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of 'art', 'artist' and 'art work' that environments such as the Whitney and Guggenheim virtual gallery spaces would try to re-impose