OF(F) THE W. W. WEB
NETZKULTUR – KULTURNETZWERKE
European Media Art Festival, 1996
This is another hybrid CD-ROM but not of the "be-an-artist-yourself" kind. It presents extracts of the netculture by the means of the net, which is in accordance with the highly self-reflective character of the netculture, and its basic drive to explore its own possibilities. The Internet as a new art medium, in contrast to the CD-ROM as a space for data storage, covers a wide range of activities, such as, film/video/media art, hypertext, netcritics, hyperpolitics, and Internet society – and in fact, these are the topics offered by Of(f) the w. w. web. The motivation lying beneath the creation of this complexity is the desire to store the entire knowledge of mankind at a single place where everyone can have an access to it. Although access for all still seems to be an utopistic idea, this CD-ROM, foreshadowing its realization, contains the most interesting and up-to-date materials from the net and starts from Netscape. Thus we open html documents, gif animations, audio and video files, browsers, and utilities on a CD-ROM, yet, indeed, we are on the net.
