Pamphlet for a new and cultural resistent art by a resistant culture:

Hand over that media! Now!

Century +1.

After the desillusion of the discourse that never-ended, the dialog that never-existed , and the history that never-started , the postmodernists slowly faded away in the millennium bug that never-happened. So, done and over with the nineties, 2000 is like starting civilisation in the desert amidst the carcasses of a bovine culture: yes, ill-literacy is everywhere. That means that the happy haydays of netart, media-art, net-activism and web-art, are over. If there ever was a hope that new artists and media-activists would mix, mingle and create a new context, build a new infrastructure for a new kind of future art, it is certainly forgotten and abandoned now. Push that escape button to get elsewhere, quick.

So much.

So much for the individual original web-media-artist-activist, who happily continues to compromise him/herself with setting up high-art competitions, living from official grants to talk and have a jet-kick in global abundance. In the meanwhile selling a glossy image of carefully rehearsed revolutionary avantgardism. More and more, formerly alternative and virtual networks are taking part in officially supported initiatives set up by universities, governments and super-governmental organisms. The danger of "subsumption" is immanent: any part taking into the former and ineffective structures, will be punished by loss of memory, identity, and bodyweight. Voila!

The stop-start.

So, we should stop looking at the past for anything else than the past, and we should stop looking for explosives since no one ever hotwired anything. Next to selling the future in reverse, and giving webart to the museums, webinstruction to the schools, there are more urgent things to handle. We should turn over current power and skills to totally 'informal' organisations. Back to the young and inexperienced, back to the noise - digital noise - and let it develop by itself. No involvement by the ministries of culture, education, family, playground, television, computers, internet, whatever... Give it a chance, start! Even if it all ends in "outcome uncertain", stay tuned for the blank screen, the silence.ra, the failure:hooray! And know that there are worse things to come.

[hromlegnkainn@dbonanzah.org, 2001-1]