maybe someone of you read erik davis' last book, in which he names the great antagonist of our times "hermes", the trickster, god of trade and thiefs, and god of communication. michel serres, also a kind of half-god in the academic sense, made him the hero of his studies. this figure, maybe a data dandy, parasite and prankster, maybe a guy formally called an artist, but certainly out to make fun and profit of all of you who try to get him, was probably the god of net.art too.

let's assume that the 'failure of net.art' was some kind of auto-destructive program inbuilt from the beginning for the purpose of vanishing in the moment of capture. this makes the difficulty more explainable interpretators seem to have, as well as the institutional system or even the art market in making profits with net.art.

the love for crap (the bla project), the somewhat cynical game about the end beeing near (time to remain to go crazy). the utterly sad sound of a computer who is brought to try to sing (386dx), or the formalistic absurdities of artful phpl-form art, just taking one of them, alexei as an example, is *playing tricks* with the context which constructs these works. you could say very similar things for jodi, vuk, heath, olia and many others.

i think we are completly underestimating the complex value of these works, that they were partially constructed by the way they were viewed by 'the community'. their fine intercommunication with their fans and interpretors, replying to texts and ideas, or surfers who randomly came by, curators who were more than clever to call this a kind of self-promotion, a community of friends of the international conference circus before the rather dull dot.com phase, made net.art a more than lucky coincidence of some people doing art which hasn't to be called art anymore. walking through the institutions it revealed often insights in the way these institutions work.

remaining is not an autonomous art form, but a complex but as well precise body of works which represent a certain social time of the net, viewed from a specific angle. net.art therefore could be explained in a second, third, or n-th order, but is itself a kind of thick description of what happened in that time. and the more this time vanishes it becomes clear that net.art reveals and critiques very well the all too human pathos of the radical new, the vanities, desires and dreams of a cyberspace which only happend in our imagniations, but nevertheless happened.

back then in the early nineties, at the same time when other artists diappeared from the field of institutional critique or the so called context art, to start clubs, or record labels, bakeries, do book projects or movies.. when the web took off these loose groups were just ready to use it for their own purposes. it was more then a way to become famous. from the beginning a sense of satyrist critique and scepticism towards technology drove net.art combined with the existential experience that utopia is possible insofar that very unlikly changes can happen. the east-west dialogue is maybe one of the substantial geographical elements of net.art. plus a disrespect for authority and the old and new orders of knowledge, artistic interest to bring the matter of the medium, the code, to its limits within a larger sense then just programming, playing with the echoes of the avant-garde net.art only simulated the existence of a group, it was rather an open aliance, and even today one can continue to work in the spirit of this practise.

laughing about ideologies, the grand ideas, and a calculated anarchic fun of expanding and augmenting vision not just by the means of technology but by manipulating the expextations of people using them, highlighting the limits and errors of the internet myths makes net.art 'human' in a post-humanistic sense.- it describes the complexity of the net.condition exactly without canonizing it but in an open ended narrative. a rather first-hand and therefore rare knowledge about contemporary art and its history *) helped and just gave a explosive package to merge with the nettimers for a little while and along other stations and splittings.

to demand now, why not more artists are put into the heaven of net-dot-art is understandable but neverteless futile. we speak already about the past. of course one can try to overwrite history, by inventing a genre of 'artistic software' and neglect that groups like jodi or iod for example started a whole "do it yourself - school" of understanding code and the visual layers plus its social context as one thing, tactically including bits of programming language. an approach now very viral on the microsound levels of electronic music.

of course you can say net.art is dead, and do your books and catalogues, but chances are high that these efforts are useless and are just feeding a even more vivid zombie. somewhere someone else might understand something, and use the label to do another post-post avant-garde hack, temporary of course, but nevertheless a source of many very constructive misunderstandings. sometimes, one can still hear the laughter.