Mattew Fuller - Alexei Shulgin - Michail Donskoy - Tatyana Goryucheva ART'N'SOFT Soft ware as an art project

Ideological, political, economic, technological mutations of art are obviously reflected in evolution of terminology. Not so much time has passed since the work of art was turned into the art project. Though we can already firmly witness another transformation stage that is art activism. And to look forward to art programming. On par with spontaneous subversial behaviour strategies rooting in futurism and da-da the 20th-century avant-garde beared quite an opposite tendency. In the 20s, as a result of discussions and conflicts between Russian constructivists, functionalists and rationalists on problem of logics and formation expediency the creative and pragmatic approach to transformation of reality developed. Then the idea of abolishing the old world (agrarian monarchal power) and constructing on its remnants the new world (of abstract communism, and industrialized and electrified socialism for a start) was straight-headily implicated into architecture. Impossible architecture projects, different volume-space constructions were not only theoretical child of social and formal Utopia. It was an experiment, its aim was defined by the necessity of searching the means of overcoming the stability of the objects' characteristics attributed to them during the process of perception. Fixing of strict relations between different constituents of the act of creative objecting of the reality is the base characteristic of traditional, anthropocentric by its content, classical method. Avant-garde project is orientated on innovation, on its aspiration to avoid stability of predetermined properties. Its para-image is an industrial mass production, where permanent modernization, rhetorically determined by the evolution of forms of relations with reality, is in fact an immanent principle of any machine work, turned into an instrument of ruling the dynamic of goods reproduction (offer-demand), which is in qualitative transformation of energy. Different constituents are being involved in this reorganizing process, which sets the terms of development, i.e. ingrowth in social body. These constituents are considered potentially projected by the control system, i.e. they are violently being changed, not structurally, but with the help of renavigation. Market is the field of exerting efforts on activating violent, false innovative exchange. Dialectic conception of 'negation of negation' is at the heart of innovation exchange. Antithesis set against thesis brings to restructurisation of original position and within this dynamize history, importing in its passage destabilizing element of refusal, sabotage, conflict. Architipical scheme is the following: rapprochement of two binary oppositions, then struggle in which the one destroy another, then regeneration in a new quality properties of the destructed in the renewed one. Within this, if the ideal logic of direct causal-consecutive correlation was the unique in the world, there would not be necessity of cognition in the least. All answers would be easily programmed. At the same time, constructing of artificial systems based on ideal logic (law, natural sciences) becomes possible due to potential existence of destabilizing element of casual. The latter plays the role of generator of the sense production process. There is no sense in describing the obvious by principle of stating facts, if there is no communication aspect in it, namely there should be information, i.e. the moment of finding out the unknown ('done - must be found' principle). The unknown is possible if there is casual, due to which the fate (faith in preset) and adventure (waiting for casual collisions as functional elements of fate) exist. The intrigue, i.e. quality transformation, is taken place on the base of these fate and adventure. Otherwise there would be only static signs and preset meanings, i.e. axioms, and we wouldn't have the very idea of method of prove and results. There wouldn't be any necessity in the formers and the ideas of the latters would coincide with the aim. The watershed is somewhere between projecting and programming as different logic of process managing. Project is a sort of realization, programme is realizator. Realization includes: the origin idea, the idea of its realization (modus operandi), the object (incarnate or materialized idea), where the result is determined by the aim and at the same time is formed while transforming the origin meanings or views as a qualitative achievement. Functioning of the project is conditioned by the necessity of overcoming objective conditions, that preset stable or stereotype, i.e. by default, logic results. The realizator - to be more precise, instrument of programme realization - is pure order of actions, which is determined by presence of some concrete aims though it exists absolutely autonomously from real aims and possible results. The programme, being an instrument of machine exploitation of technological system, already intercontains n-number of opportunities. It is possible to change them only by creating another programme or its version. The programme is absolutely indifferent to casual, which can angle or anul the result (error) but it will never change the programme. With every new attempt we will have to take the same road in searching not means of quality transformation but the limit satisfactory recombination of origin meanings set by strait case and consequence algorhythmic logic 'if-then', where the role of each option comes to significance of logical 'it means'. Here nothing is not indicated but imperatively and procedurally "means", reducing function to a symbol-icon as non-structural but design menu element. In this case transformation of a programme to a project brings to changing of functional importance of the product on the consumer level and on the level of its cultural appropriation i.e. justifying real opportunity of its existence within the system of relations, abstracted in the following notions: social, politics, economy, art, science, ideology, etc. The paradox or dismatch, or to be more precise divergence of programming and projecting logic becomes the main determinant of new functional importance. This divergence takes place on the level of three main structuring elements of the process of realization. Here is realization of sense of a programme art product existing, namely: original meanings, method of their converting and result demands. Besides, dynamism of sense production is determined by collision of different criteria of quality. If the quality of the project is determined by degree and character of its inner innovation as the main strategic method, then the quality of the programme is set by its practical testing on adaptation for users methods, that have been already a conditioned reflex. Supertask of Art'n'Soft project is a productive destabilization of stereotype ideas of system of relations between the subject and the object (for example: standard logic of creating programme interface) through using method of quasi parody, which is very effective. The former is based on refusal of serious acceptation (as an imperative guidance to action enforcing adequate answer) of standard by default system of expedience reasoning. Parody means nothing by itself, it explains nothing, it is not productive as a positive sense production. Parasitizing on stable system relations it turns them into absurd. But the use of parody element as method, here is transformation of operational pragmatic functions into aesthetic ones based on art irrationality, brings qualitatively new plane of contents into the process of interrelations between subject (spectator, user) and object (art soft ware). 


Remedy for Infofobia. "Web Stalker" by I/O/D group.

Abstracts from the article of Matthew Fuller "A Means of Mutation"  and parts of discussion between Alexei Shulgin and Mikhail Donskoy are used here.
Matthew Fuller is member of London group I/O/D, having created an alternative conception of browser, which is at the same time an art project.
Alexei Shulgin is a web-artist from Moscow. Mikhail Donskoy is a programmer, explorer of computer's interface problems, chief of firm "Disco", which produces software http://www.disco.ru


* A file is dropped into the unstuffer. The projector is opened. The hard drive grinds. The screen goes black. The blacked out screen is a reverse nihilist moment. Suddenly everything is there. Starting from an empty plane of colour, (black is just the default mode - others are chosen using a pop-up menu) the user begins by marqueeing a rectangle. Using a contextual menu, a function is applied to the box. The box, a generic object, is specialized into one of the following functions. For each function put into play, one or more box is created and specialised Crawler: The Crawler is the part of the Web Stalker that actually links to the World Wide Web. It is used to start up, and to show the current status of the session. It appears as a window containing a bar split into three. A dot moving across the bar shows what stage the Crawler is at. The first section of the bar shows the progress of the Net connection. Once connection is made and a URL is found, the dot jumps to the next section of the bar. The second section displays the progress of the Web Stalker as it reads through the found HTML document looking for links to other URLs. The third section of the bar monitors the Web Stalker as it logs all the links that it has found so far. Thus, instead of the user being informed that connection to the net is vaguely 'there' by movement on the geographic TV-style icon in the top right hand corner the user has access to specific information about processes and speeds. Map: Displays references to individual HTML documents as circles and the links from one to another as lines. The URL of each document can be read by clicking on the circle it is represented by. Once a Web session has been started at the first URL opened by the Crawler, Map moves through all the links from that site, then through the links from those sites, and so on. The mapping is dynamic - 'Map' is a verb rather than a noun. Dismantle: The Dismantle window is used to work on specific URLs within HTML documents. URLs at this level will be specific resources such as images, email addresses, sound files, downloadable documents, etc. Clicking and dragging a circle into the Dismantle window will display all URLs referenced within the HTML document you have chosen, again in the form of circles and lines. Stash: The Stash provides a document format that can be used to make records of web use. Saved as an HTML file it can also be read by 'Browsers' and circulated as a separate document. Sites or files are included by dragging and dropping URL circles into a Stash. HTML Stream: Shows all of the HTML as it is read by the Web Stalker in a separate window. Because as each link is followed by the crawler the HTML appears precisely as a stream, the feed from separate sites is effectively mixed. Extract: Dragging a URL circle into an extract window strips all the text from a URL. It can be read on screen in this way or saved as a text file.

Any statement of function, whilst satisfactorily acting as a notice of concrete reality which functions to attract and displace energies and dynamics of many sorts, is never of course (self)sufficient. If they work, such constructions are always spilling over and mobilising more. The Web Stalker performs an inextricably technical, aesthetic and ethical operation on the HTML stream that at once refines it, produces new methods of use, ignores much of the data linked to or embedded within it, and provides a
mechanism through which the deeper structure of the web can be explored and used. This is not to say much. It is immediately obvious that the Stalker is incapable of using images and some of the more complex functions available on the web. These include for instance: gifs, forms, Java, VRML, frames, etc. Some of these are deliberately ignored as a way of trashing the dependence on the page and producing a device that is more suited to the propensities of the network. Some are left out simply because of the conditions of the production of the software - we had to decide what was most important for us to achieve with available resources and time. This is not to say that if methods of accessing this data were to be incorporated into the Stalker that they would have been done so 'on their own terms'. It is likely that at the very least they would have been dismantled, dissected, opened up for use in some way.*

*It is the technical opportunity of finding other ways of developing and using this stream of data that provides a starting point for I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker. I/O/D is a three-person collective based in London. As an acronym, the name stands for everything it is possible for it to stand for.*

* Whilst for many, the internet simply is what is visible with a browser, at the same time it is apparent that there is a widespread desire for new non-formulaic software. One of the questions that the Stalker poses is how program design is taken forward.*

*There are a number of threads that continue through the group's output. A concern in practice with an expanded definition of the techniques / aesthetics of computer interface. Speculative approaches to hooking these up to other formations that can be characterised as political, literary, musical, etc. The production of stand-alone publications/applications that can fit on one high-density disk and are distributed without charge over various networks. The material context of the web for this group is viewed mainly as an opportunity rather than as a history.*

A.Sh. As a browser "Web Stalker" is not functional, but as an art product it is very important. It drew a line under the romantic age of Net art development. As a matter of fact, artists fought with browsers, trying to adapt them to their aims. But very few of them won, because browsers were changing, and projects made for definite browsers quickly become obsolete. That's why we needed to create our own browser, which would be independent on...
M.D. ...time
A.Sh. …underhand plotting of commercial software creators.

*On connecting to a URL, HTML appears to the user's computer as a stream of data. This data could be formatted for use in any of a wide variety of configurations. As a current, given mediation by some interpretative device, it could even be used as a flowing pattern to determine the behaviour of a device completely unrelated to its purpose. (Work it with tags? Every HREF could switch something on, every P could switch something off, for instance). Most commonly it is fed straight into a Browser. What are the conditions that produce this particular sort of reception facility? Three fields that are key amongst those currently conjoining to form what is actualised as the Browser: economics, design, and the material. By material is meant the propensities of the various languages, protocols, and data-types of the web.

If we ask, "What produces and reinforces Browsing?" There is no suprise in finding the same word being used to describe recreational shopping, ruminant digestion and the use of the World Wide Web. The Browser Wars form one level of consistency in the assembly of various forms of economy on the web. Web sites are increasingly written for specific softwares, and some elements of them are unreadable by other packages. You get Netscape sites, Explorer sites, sites that avoid making that split and stay at a level that both could use - and therefore consign the 'innovations' of these programs to irrelevance. This situation looks like being considerably compounded with the introduction of customisable (and hence unusable by web-use software not correctly configured) Extensible Mark-up Language tags. What determines the development of this software? Demand? There is no means for it to be mobilised. Rather more likely, an arms race between on the one hand the software companies and the development of passivity, gullibility, and curiosity as a culture of use of software.*

Ì.D. Where is art, then?
À.Sh. Firstly, this is a multimedia programme made for Internet users. And besides there is a definite ideology.

* Within the discourse networks of art (that is networks which work on meaning as well as which it moves through), including critical technique; license to irresponsibility; compositions-in-progress of taste stratification and breaks; institutions; finance; individual survival strategies; media; social networks; legitimation devices; at least potential openness to new forms; and avowed attentiveness to manifestations of beauty, there were dynamics that were useful to mobilise in order to open up possibilities of circulation and effect for the Web Stalker. However, at the same time as the project was situated within contemporary art, it is also widely operative outside of it. Most obviously it is at the very least, a piece of software. How can this multiple position be understood by an art-world that is still effectively in thrall to the notion of the autonomy of the object? Anti-art is always captured by its purposeful self-placement within a subordinate position to that which it simply opposes. Alternately, the deliberate production of non-art is always an option but not necessary in this context (let those crumbs fall off the table, they look starved). Instead, this project produces a relationship to art that at times works on a basis of infiltration or alliance, and at others simply refuses to be excluded by it and thus threatens to reconfigure entirely what it is part of. The Web Stalker is art. Another possibility therefore emerges. Alongside the categories art, anti-art and non-art, something else spills over: not-just-art. Of course, once this ploy is opened and proliferates it becomes apparent that it quickly colonises all of what sees itself as art and nothing but simply by virtue of acknowledging its integration into other systems - of valorization, decoration, sociality etc. By the same token it also opens up what is categorised as non-art to the descriptive, critical, de-responsibilizing and other potentially less fruitful qualities and operations of art. Tormented by wanna-be-loved negativism, anti-art as a category subsumed within art just about retains its desk at the Ministry of Culture. 
Just as the Stalker is not-just-art, it can only come into occurrence by being not just itself. It has to be used. Assimilation into possible circuits of distribution and effect in this case means something approaching a media strategy. "For modernist intellectuals, cultural capital or distinction in Bourdieau's sense varies inversely with one's contact with the media". Operating at another level to the Web Stalker's engagement within art were two other forms of media which were integral to the project: stickers (bearing a slogan and the I/O/D URL) and Freeware. Both are good contenders for being the lowest, most despised grade of media. That the Web Stalker is Freeware has been essential in developing its engagement with various cultures of computing. The Stalker is currently being downloaded at a rate of about a thousand copies per week. Responses have ranged from intensely detailed mathematical denunciations of the Map and a total affront that anyone should try anything different; to evil glee, and a superb and generous understanding of the project's techniques and ramifications.*

Ì.D. I'd like to draw attention that the ideology itself turns into a work of art.
À.Sh. Naturally. Web Stalker is at the same time ideological and visually aesthetical. It has an unusual interface: a black screen without any tool bar, with unusual navigation, and it is absolutely useless for a user.

Ì.D. Our company produces a downloader which demonstrates a catalogue tree. The interface of its first version was also very unusual and the reaction of the market was negative. There are conservative meanings and if you don't conform to them, even if you are genius, you are not accepted. That's why everybody tries to conform.
À.Sh. There are many conformists in art too. They produce things that more meet needs of the client (different art institutions), ignoring taste of the consumer. The most exciting thing happens when an artist tries to act against these expectations, and he has enough willpower and self-confidence to assure others. But situation at the art market is more flexible than that of the traditional one.
M.D. I'm not speaking about the market now. Half of the software creators stand far from the market, they even don't try to deal with it. Could we suggest them a conception which is appliable for creating a of work of art?
À.Sh. We can. It is very difficult to assure this type kind of people in intellectual rationality of what they do.

* As all HTML is received by the computer as a stream of data, there is nothing to force adherence to the design instructions written into it. These instructions are only followed by a device obedient to them. Once you become unfaithful to page-description, HTML is taken as a semantic mark up rather than physical mark-up language. Its appearance on your screen is as dependent upon the interpreting device you use to receive it as much as its 'original' state. The actual 'commands' in HTML become loci for the negotiation of other potential behaviours or processes. Several possibilities become apparent. This data stream becomes a phase space, a realm of possibility outside of the browser. It combines with another: there are thousands of other software devices for using the world wide web, waiting in the phase space of code. Since the languages are pre-existing, everything that can possibly be said in them, every program that could possibly be constructed in them is already inherently pre-existent within them. Programming is a question of teasing out the permutations within the dimensions of specific languages or their combinations. That it is never only this opens up programming to its true power - that of synthesis. In natural language that this text is not just a contemplation of the various potential combinations of the 26 letters of the alphabet is indicative of two things: the immediate problem of contracting the wild fecundating dynamism of natural languages into a form in which it becomes interpretable to code (contracting in both senses, the legalistic one of construction of fixed determinate relationships, and that of making something smaller) - both artificial and natural languages share a characteristic: abundance - their respective and convergent phase spaces. It is what is done with this abundance and potential for it - in literature, everyday speech, command strings, that makes things what they are and what they might become.
It is the challenge and seduction of abundance that draws many people into what has been broadly framed as technoculture. Within this phase space, perhaps one thing we are proposing is that one of the most pressing political, technical and aesthetic urgencies of the moment is something that subsumes both the modern struggle for the control of production (that is of energies), and the putative post-modern struggle for the means of promotion (that is of circulation) within the dynamics of something that also goes beyond them and that encompasses the political continuum developing between the gene and the electron that most radically marks our age: the struggle for the means of mutation.*

Ì.D. Is it possible to judge by the programme code if this is an art work?
À.Sh. Nobody looks at codes, they see visualized result only.
Ì.D. If these guys from I/O/D have generated just a beautiful black screen and what we call 'story board', could we say that 'story board' is an art work?
À.S. In principle, whatever can be called a work of art. There're people that call "Photoshop" a work of art. Though it is rather more a design.

* The actuality of the networks were thus subordinated to the disciplines of graphic design and of Graphical User Interface simply because of their ability to deal with flatness, the screen. (Though there are conflicts between them based around their respective idealisations of functionality). Currently of course this is a situation that is already edging towards collapse as other data types make incursions onto, through and beyond the page - but it is a situation that needs to be totalled, and done so consciously and speculatively. Another metaphor is that of geographical references. Where do you want to go today? This echo of location is presumably designed to suggest to the user that they are not in fact sitting in front of a computer calling up files, but hurtling round an earth embedded into a gigantic trademark 'N' or 'e' with the power of some voracious cosmological force. The World Wide Web is a global medium in the approximately the same way that The World Series is a global event. With book design papering over the monitor the real processes of networks can be left to the experts in Computer Science...*

À.Sh. From my point of view the ideological aspect is very important as it feeds artist's activity. In this case they look for an alternative strategy of commercial capture of Internet.
Ì.D. Wait a minute. Web Stalker won't do for 90% of users interested in exact information.
À.Sh. Right.
Ì.D. So it is not an alternative at all. What does it demonstrate then?
À.Sh. It shows the possibility of different interfaces, different approaches to information. It visualizes the streams of information and this is the most important thing. This is a vital thing, cause nowadays people consume information differently. Information is self-valuable, and today it is much more important to be able to navigate amidst information streams. These new forms of relations between a person and an data are of great problem for artists and software creators.

*Software forges modalities of experience - sensoriums through which the world is made and known. As a product of 'immaterial labour' software is a social, technical and aesthetic relation that is embodied - and that is at once productive of more relations. That the production of value has moved so firmly into the terrain of immaterial labour, machine embodied intelligence, style as factory, the production of subjectivity, makes the evolution of what was previously sectioned as 'culture' so much more valuable to play for - potentially always as sabotage - but, as a development of the means of mutation, most compellingly as synthesis.
Synthesis is explicitly not constitutive of a universe of synchronization and equivalence where everything connects to everything. Promising nothing but reconstitutive obliteration to 'worlds' where everything means only one thing: virtual office, virtual pub, virtual gallery, virtual night-club, however many more sonic gulags passing as virtual mixing decks. What is so repulsive about this nailed-down faithfulness is not so much that its darkside is about as disturbing as a black-light lightbulb, or that it presents a social terrain which has been bounced clean by the most voracious of doormen - the miserable consciousnesses of its producers - but that it is continually dragging this space of composition, network, computer, user, software, socius, program production, back into the realm of representation, the dogged circular churning of avatars through the palace of mundane signs, stiffs reduced if at all possible to univocal sprites, rather than putting things into play, rather than making something happen. Synthesis incorporates representation as a modality. Representation is not replaced but subsumed by the actualization of ideas and the dynamism of material through which, literally 'in the realm of possibility', it becomes contingent. But this is not to trap synthesis within the 'inherent' qualities of materials. 'Truth to materials' functions at once as both a form of transcendence through which by the purest of imputations interpretative schema can pluck out essences and as a form of repressively arch earnestness. This is a process of overflowing all ideal categories.*

Ì.D. At a time we designed an interface in the form of a fish eye. There was no scroll bar, objects were small in the corners and twice larger in the middle. Mouse clicking placed the object in the middle of the screen. We were going to sell our product with this interface. 'Borland' cleared out that such interface had been made 10 years before our work. It is not sufficient to create a new interface. It must be used by many people to become a consumer good. This is the difference between an a work of art and a software.
A.Sh. The same is in art. There are popular art works and those that people don't understand because they don't understand their interface. This is the question of aims. What is the role of the software if it is an art work? There might be less pragmatism in it, but the border is more or less washed out.
Ì.D. Initially HTML was created for a concrete aim - to place scientific articles linked with each other. Then the visual structure was added in contradiction with the very idea of HTML. HTML was based on portability, i.e. configured with any screen and any operating system. I'm sure we should estimate the instrument for its work. Microsoft declares a universal conception, i.e. browsers must meet any user's purpose.

*The nature of the proprietary software economy meant that for any side, winning the Browser Wars would be a chance to construct the ways in which the most popular section of the Internet - the World Wide Web - would be used, and to reap the rewards.

The conflict took place in an American court and was marked by the deadeningly tedious super-formalised rituals that mark the abstraction of important decisions away from those in whose name they are made. Though the staging of the conflict was located within the legal and juridical framework of the US it had ramifications wherever software is used. Like all legalised conflicts, this was constructed in the form of a pyramidal focusing of decision. The pyramid reaches its apex with the utterance of one breath: guilty or not guilty. This almost imperceptible mote of dust at the uttermost point of the pyramid is not so important as the fact that the pyramid continues and that power is subsumed within it. The specific nature of the fleck of dust that drops from the lips of the judge has actual importance only insofar as it has the capacity to destabilise the structure. The moment of dust is performed by processes of deletion and accretion. Those that have accreted are readily apparent. They have been documented and to some extents analysed. This is in part because it is their function to be visible - to focus the attention. The pyramid is of course constructed from mixed materials, some are almost incapable of combining, but they cohere to the extent that for that precious moment, and for all its reiterations, everything else is stilled. What is deleted is every other element or dynamic that exists within the phase space of permutation surrounding that moment and that does not hurry to crush itself under the weight of that capstone.

At the same time, other shapes are being made. Other processes are occurring. One and more of these is the truly bastard assemblage that is the Internet. At this point, the pyramid may just look something like a mountain in a cloud. The Internet has been called a rhizome. But if it is one, it is one that is also wracked by organs: by backbones, by hosts, by shells, by thin filaments of cable under the waves; by its mirroring into recording devices that go under such names as ECHELON 2. But it is a shape/process under construction. It is what it is becoming, the many ways it develops in the phase space of all its possible becomings that forms a refrain for this story.*


À.Sh. There are a lot of programmes for artists. But most interesting works were made with the help of other packages. What is the role of an artist in the society? He is a symbol of an absolute freedom. He doesn't care what programme to work with. He can find unexpected ways to apply any of them.
Ì.D. In other words, here we deal with a very important constituent of creative work named overcoming. 
À.Sh. In a way. The artist always needs a strong sincere motivation of what he does, and the overcoming gives it to him. Plus there is an ideological constituent which is expressed in the protest against the negative taking place in contemporary society and politics.
Ò.G. At the same time he doesn't lock himself in an ivory tower. And what is the functional meaning of his activity?
À.Sh. It is great. And, for instance, is expressed an active development of the idea of free ware, share ware and LINUX-movement.

* Within the limitations of the programming language and those of time, the project achieved what it set out to do. As a model of software development outside of the super-invested proprietary one this speculative and interventional mode of production stands alongside two other notable radical models: that of Free Software 14 and that derived from the science shops (wherein software is developed by designers and programmers in collaboration with clients for specifically social uses). Unlike these others it is not so likely to find itself becoming a model that is widely adoptable and sustainable. In a sense then, the web stalker works as a kind of 'tactical software' 15 but it is also deeply implicated within another kind of tacticity - the developing street knowledge of the nets. This is a sense of the flows, consistencies and dynamics of the nets that is most closely associated with hackers, but that is perhaps immanent in different ways in every user. Bringing out and developing this culture however demands attention. In some respects this induction of idiosyncratic knowledges of minute effects ensures only that whilst the Browser Wars will never be won, they are never over. So long as there's the software out there working its temporal distortion effects on 'progress'... So long as there's always some nutter out there in the jungle tooled up with some VT100 web viewer, copies of Mosaic, Macweb, whatever... 
At the same time we need to nurture our sources of this ars metropolitani of the nets. During recent times and most strongly because of the wider effects of specific acts of repression, hacking itself has often become less able to get things going because it has a) been driven more underground, b) been offered more jobs, and c) been less imaginatively willing or able to ally itself with other social currents.*

M.D. Quite often quality and high speed of communication do not allow to watch some of net-artists' works on-line. For instance, when I tried to watch your works the refresh surposed the page uploading. Tell me, why not show your works on hard disc from time to time?
A.Sh. It makes no sense. Not only interactivity but also feeling of joint work with distanced mechanisms and people are vital here, feeling of the on-line pulse.
M.D. Perhaps we have the like situation when not everybody can use a microwave but everybody has a tea-kettle, so we match everything to the kettle.
A.Sh. Nearly so. From the other hand, it reminds me of solving a problem like 'whether a young communist must help a girl on with her coat?'. In our case it's 'whether a net artist can use plug-in?' or, if he uses it he is really not a net artist. Adherents of the tough position say we must use basic functions only because we must think about all users. The answer is 'you're the retrograde, you resist the progress, if we listen to you we would still use a typing machine'.
M.D. There're artists working on canvas and artists making frescos. And here we have artists specializing in particular techniques. So, it's artists that restrict themselves.
A.Sh. Sure, here comes the market as well. Generally, the idea of software as creation of a work of art rather popular at present. But there're a few examples of truly fruitful cooperation of programmers and artists. I think, the problem is in different aims.

M.D. I know that the main part of art projects is realized for grant money. In measures of my production even the $5000 grant is nothing. My project needs not less than a five-figured sum. Its budget includes a long time non-production work connected with testing, fixing to market demands of the moment. To upload a software for net distribution it's necessary to fill in the previewer application list containing practically no questions describing its aesthetical or design quality rather than original specificy. A programme which doesn't have, say, a tool bar gets less points. It's like the figure skating competition - you have to show a number of elements and you must do it anyway. From these positions the I/O/D project can't be estimated as a software product since there's a perpendicular relationship between software as a product and software as a creative project. Software is always something which could be reprinted for broader use to please the user. And that is an anti-art project.
A.Sh. That's right, but what's the importance of the artist's interest to software? It became obvious that social revolutionary changes that took place in the last few years origined from SW development development. Appearance of the browser gave opportunity for free and easy communication, many people just went to the Net and got a new life there. And this new extent of freedom was given not by art but technology, software particularly. That's why artists started get accustomed to the phenomenon. Always being prerogative of their creation, freedom came somewhere it was not expected from.
T.G. So what is it expressed by, and what does it define?
M.D. I'd like to illustrate it on our Russian situation. Up to 1989, I had to get three signed permits including the KGB's to use the e-mail in my Institute. Later on I could go to a small private company called 'Paragraph', sit before a computer and send an e-mail message. With the broad data access, a special sort of people that used to make money on simple retranslating of foreign information that was accessible for them due to business trips abroad disappeared. Now it doesn't mean in what part of the planet you are because you have access to any current events.
A.Sh. And what is more important for an artist is that he is not framed within the local community any more, he could freely communicate with the like-minded persons distanced by thousands of kilometers.

T.G. Euphoria of the very communicative process, news exchange, event retelling and even chat abracadabrers still prevaluates in on-line communication. And too little attention is given to the content problems and its quality.
M.D. It's easy to tell an anecdote, but there're only few people able to make a competent analysis. And this is a real problem today. On my opinion, there's not an efficient web-observer who is able to meet professional demands. I can't lose my time randomly visiting all exhibitions, or visiting a bad exhibition instead of a worthy one. That's why I look forward to reviews of specialists that I can rely on in order to extract maximum effective net content. I live in Moscow, so I know it and can quickly orientate and personally choose place to go. But when I visit Paris for a few days I'd like to be given a tourist programme.
T.G. The places you'd like to visit within the cultural programme are actually a sort of essence of a particular age. It is art. And what does the artist actually do? He produces a reduced metaphoric image passing various data through his spiritual and analytical mechanisms. Nearly similarly the taste is formed which gives way to intuitively define the good and bad in art. But the goal of a critic, analyst, specialist is to create a reflexive communicative channel between an art product and its consumers through competent estimation of its quality.

*Use of metaphor within computer interface design is intended to enable easy operation of a new system by over-laying it or even confining it within the characteristics of a homely-futuristic device found outside of the computer. A metaphor can take several forms. They include emulators where say, the entire workings of a specific synthesizer are mapped over into a computer where it can be used in its 'virtual' form. The computer captures the set of operations of the synthesizer and now the term emulation becomes metaphorical. Allowing other modalities of use and imaginal refrain to operate through the machine, the computer now is that synthesizer - whilst also doubled into always being more. 
Metaphors also include items such as the familiar 'desktop' 'wastebasket'. This is a notorious case of a completely misapplied metaphor. A wastebasket is simply an instruction for the deletion of data. Data does not for instance just sit and rot as things do in an actual wastebasket. That's your back-up disk. Actual operations of the computer are radically obscured by this vision of it as some cosy information appliance always seen through the rear-view mirror of some imagined universal 8. The page metaphor in web design might as well be that of a wastebasket. Whilst things have gone beyond maintaining and re-articulating the mode of address of arcane journals on particle physics the techniques of page layout were ported over directly from graphic design for paper. This meant that HTML had to be contained as a conduit for channelling direct physical representation - integrity to fonts, spacing, inflections and so on.*

À.Sh. I think the necessity of a useful and at the same time art product might inspire artists and programmers to mutual cooperation.
Ì.D. And we need to persuade the investors that the product is worth paying for.
À.Sh. It must be paid off because the project is of vital importance. I'm not interested in artists focused exclusively on their self-expressing, I prefer those trying to solve vital problems.
Ì.D. So the idea of cooperation of artists and engineers will be formulated later.
À.Sh. If only it would not be realized earlier then we formulate it.