Section I : BREAKING WITH TRADITION
Chapter 1: Setting the Stage

  Notice this insistence on Motion: We cannot capture, hold a moment (Impressionism), repeat the moment's verbal content (theatre), capture the action itself (Futurism): we intensify the perceptions, the change, flux and release them in juxtapositions which grind into the senses. (qtd. in Sanford 247)  
Three qualities are necessary for artistic endeavour on the networks: a need to connect, a willingness to collaborate, and the ability to embrace the fact that the work may change form and be re-appropriated in the process. In other words, work on the Internet requires letting go of control and moving towards a consciousness of collective intelligence. The Internet provides us with a tool to accomplish these goals, but in order to use this tool effectively, the meaning of "networking" has to extend beyond the physical computer communication infrastructure. Webbing-connection making-long precedes the Internet. In the context of the art world, the emerging field of net art has its roots in the work of conceptualists, performance artists, and those who organised Happenings and strove to expand the closed boundaries of traditional art structures. Interactive work on or off line does not follow the historical genealogy by media, i.e. photography, film, video, but is based on concept and connectionism.

In her catalogue essay for the Out of Actions exhibit, Kristine Stiles foregrounds the emerging tendency of art to be viewed as much in terms of an artist's process as in terms of end product. Quoting Mark Boyle, Stiles describes artists as "antennae of this multicellular organism humanity" and "not so much artists as feelers, not so much transmitters as receivers" (329). Thus, as Stiles attests, the subject/object relation inscribed in traditional art experienced a major reversal in the 1960s and 1970s. Conceptual, Fluxus, and Happening artists are predecessors of contemporary artists working with network technologies as a means of amplifying the receiver/transmitter relationship.

In this context it is interesting to note that the artists who had profound influence on the development of performative and interactive art come from a background of music. This is probably because they are already skilled in working with the invisible realm that the established art world was confronting with what Lucy Lippard describes as the "dematerialization of the art object" (Lippard). John Cage, Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono all studied music and then went on to develop work that had a major impact on the visual art world. In my opinion, this points to an expansion of perception and the experience of vision beyond the visible. When one talks about networks, much that drives the connections is not visible. John Cage, in particular, influenced artists of many genres to start thinking in new ways about the creative act, the process as the final destination of artmaking.