This is your dread manager speaking:Does virtual art lead to virtual audiences?
Can the wish for an area of shared reflection sit with the distanced nature of web audience?
Can a series of propositions on identity and place work on its own terms in an arena where the dominant metaphor is the vr arcade game and the advert?

"…There is no need to dwell on silly notions such as the digital medias’ alleged development of some form of non-linear narrative: narrative constantly loops back and branches out, condenses and proliferates uncontrollably, which is precisely why the "meaning" of a story can never be fixed once and for all. Narrative never was linear, so to proclaim the discovery of non-linear narrative is absurd. In the same vein, interactivity has always been a feature of any representational media, from religious rituals to painting, novels and cinema.
…At most, one could argue that interactivity previously operating via telephony and the post office has been speeded up. To refer to interactivity as a new feature characteristic of ‘new tech’ discursive forms is, again, nonsense. Indeed, in many respects, the digitisation of information has rendered interaction between reader/viewer and text-production more restricted in that the protocols governing interactivity have become tighter, narrower, more inflexible and more policed…. These include a trivialisation of the fields where interaction is encouraged, such as games and bulletin boards, and by the increased isolation of the allegedly interacting individuals as kids lock themselves into separate spaces to play with their computers, just as office workers are separated from their sociable places of work or are reduced to the condition of ciphers in call-centres reminiscent of the surveilled spaces of 1920s typing pools.
…. Whereas Fordism allowed for the intensification of the exploitation of the physical energy stored in the body’s’ musculature, digitalisation is the Fordism of mental labour, of thought work. Computers are to mental labour what the conveyor belt was to physical labour.
… By way of postscript to this argument, I would like to add that, of course, there are some positive aspects to computers and digitalisation as well: it is nice, at times, to be able to afford electronic servants to take some of the drudgery out of some activities involved in mental labour. But that is a trivial benefit. The real benefit, perhaps, of the proletarianisation of the intellectual is that computers may well enable us to distinguish more clearly between intellectuals and the kind of cut-and-paste people still far too often described-and employed- as intellectuals. Take any catalogue issued by an academic publisher, not to mention essays in magazines or newspapers or radio or television broadcasts, and you will see that the vast bulk of what passes for intellectual production is, in fact, simply cutting and pasting, recycling selected bits of existing texts according to a limited number of ideological protocols…"

So argues Paul Willemin in two ninetwo...

The ultimate aim: to replace the original with the sequel. To make the idea of the unique unthinkable.Origin 2 beats Origin.

" I was watching "This is your life" when the plane crashed through the ceiling and knocked me headfirst into the TV."

"The good news is that I can chat with distant strangers. The bad news is that while I'm on the Internet, I'm not chatting to my next-door neighbour. I'm not going to any neighbourhood rallies, I'm not throwing parties for local friends, and I’m not babysitting other people's kids. It may be that I'm not even talking to my own children, who are off in the living room being raised by Nintendo. Sure, I can trade digital video clips with hackers in Borneo over World Wide Web, but for all I know my next-door neighbour is a serial killer with an icebox full of his acquaintances."

The web exists to provide access to information, not a community.