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Peter Weibel, pioneering Austrian media artist,
curator and theorist, joined ZKM (Center for Art and Media)
as its Chairman in 1999. As a longtime exponent of political
manifestations in his earlier artistic and curatorial work,
Weibel was determined to further his activist position towards
art and culture through the emerging medium of Net art. As a
result, Weibel conceived Net_Condition,
and in the fall of 1999 – on the threshold of the new century
– mounted an exhibition of over 100 projects that represented
he says, "an introduction to the political-economical ideas,
social practices and artistic applications of online communication
in a Net society."
Weibel uses the exhibition to build a theoretical
position on the state of Net Art, its function and properties
as agency for aesthetic and social transformation. In his curatorial
essay, Art/Politics in the On-line Universe, Weibel goes
on to proclaim that, "The global Net is the driving force behind
a radical economical, social and cultural revolution at the
beginning of the next millennium." This utopian proposal mirrors
the ideologies of such media theorists as Pierre
Lévy and Roy Ascott, in
which the collective, participatory nature of telematic art
represents a new catalyst for the realization of socially and
philosophically motivated aspirations. As Weibel concludes,
"Net art has become the forum in which many of the liberating
hopes of the historic avant-garde are expressed in new terms."
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