So, another thought...about this "telematic embrace".....

What makes the net experience any different than, say, TV, viewing a painting, reading a book? No doubt, the medium offers some alterations in the way we discourse: email offers a literary whimsy absent from the phone --and yet it's not as engaged, thorough, as a letter.

But what about net art? How precisely does it differ from any installation? Composing/creating seems quite different: the tools of the web are primitive, crass, and abstract: there's no intoxication of chemical smells (but there is the glaze of light infused corneas). And distribution is obviously quite different: the exclusivity of the museum (not in the sense of class but rather in terms of space: there's only one museum housing a painting at a time) no longer pertains to net art.

But what of the viewer/user/experiencer? How does it differ from, say, watching a movie? The fact that it's interactive? How does it differ, then, from a game? Games, it seems to me, exploit the artistic possibilities of the medium: they can engage the user in such intimate, different ways.

As per this distributed self, using guises, trans-gendering (assuming diverse identities in cyber space), again: are these issues any different now than they were 200 years ago? Isn't the self always – and already, yes – distributed according to multiple and differing paths? My feelings for my mother, for instance, are always complex, contradictory, indifferent all at once: desire is itself a complexly distributed force which spreads the self out this way and that.

Of course, the web offers a different experience: sitting in front of a machine and making identities up. This seems to have the odd effect of reifying the identity of the user because s/he is alone with these identities, alone at the computer: the distribution now runs through a center point, without the seduction of scent and touch (which efficiently distributes identity by literally blurring boundaries).

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– Daniel Coffeen