Introduction
The information age is upon us, a paradigm with consequences compared to the Industrial Revolution. As land and agriculture products were replaced by energy in the Industrial Revolution, so information seems to replace energy as the basis for economic life in post-industrial societies. The WWW depends on effective telecommunication networks not available to a large part of the world, but it initiates rapid change when introduced. 1
2 The Internet is the fastest growing communication medium in the world today. It is seen as a communication revolution, and as space and time are collapsed individuals across the world interact and communicate to a degree scarcely anticipated.
The Internet is about 35 years old. The first experimental network was created in 1969 3 , but the full advantage to the public and the tremendous growth came with the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1994. Already in 1996 there were around 40 million users on the Internet, and nearly 20 million of them had access to the WWW. 4 . During the last ten years almost everyone in the advanced nations is on the Net: government agencies, universities, artists, museums, small companies, global conglomerates and private citizens.
Predecessors of today’s digital installations were first exhibited in the 1960s, like Michael A. Noll 5 creating some of the earliest computer-generated images, among them Gaussian Quadratic (1963). The works of John Whitney, Charles Csuri and Vera Molnar remain influential today for their investigations of the computer-generated transformations of visuals through mathematical functions. In 1968, the exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London presented works which anticipated many of the important characteristics of the medium today 6 .
Digital technology has revolutionised the way art is created and experienced. Not only have traditional forms of art such as printing, painting, photography and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques and media, but entirely new forms of art such as net art, software art and digital installations have emerged. Some of the vital themes raised by this development are viewer interaction, artificial life and telepresence with multiple identities and personalities. Issues regarding sales and collections, presentation and preservation of digital art are hotly debated.
Paul Valéry 7 predicted in his essay “The conquest of Ubiquity” that the near future would see the reception of artworks transmitted from afar by electricity. If we did not know this was written in 1928, it could be describing contemporary telematic art.
By integrating written, oral and audio-visual human communication, its character changes fundamentally, as well as our culture of systems, beliefs, codes and action.
Even though some digital art concepts date back almost a century, an understanding of Internet art requires knowledge of the age and environment it inhabits. 8
 
1. Internet Art
Digital art 9 developed in the 1960’s based on an alliance between art, technology and science, in a collaboration largely fostered among universities. Nicholas Negroponte 10 declared that the goal was to combine the visual capabilities of film with computer processing. The Internet, WWW and digitalisation provided new conditions for artistic creation, practice, distribution and perception. Those who mastered the new technology were enthusiastic; those who did not argued that art “generated” by a computer cannot be defined as fine art.
Digital technology has given artists possibilities to synthesise traditional art forms and has brought the art of collage to a much higher level than has ever been possible. An image can be completely transformed in multiple ways and re-mixed with different visually interactive layers. Works can be copied without any decrease in quality. Digital media and traditional methods also frequently merge into new unities 11 .  Fine art, music, dance, animation, film, video and robotics can be synthesised, for the first time giving the artist the ability to create art that includes all these elements. Art presented at Internet Web sites has a potential world-wide audience, and works created by traditional methods are presented side-by-side with reproductions of such works. 12   Digital works can be presented either as a print or on a high-resolution flat wall-mounted screen13, as 3-D works, video, animation or any synthesis of known art forms. To some artists and art institutions this fast, seemingly uncontrollable and partly unregulated development is frightening, as it questions the role and values in art. Values regarding originality, authenticity and uniqueness that have been cherished for hundreds of years are not applicable to digital art. However, the technology is here to stay and it won’t go away even if traditional art communities keep ignoring it.
The Internet has allowed participation and collaboration between geographically-dispersed individuals. Among the best known is Douglas Davis’s The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994) where thousands of people have made contributions. Exploding Cell  was created in 1996 by MoMA with artist Peter Halley, and in Generation/Mutation artists world-wide were invited to choose an image, download it to their own computer, modify and return it. Artists in China and Europe are collaborating in Art for the People convened by Marketforces in London. 14  Such cultural exchange is important, not only as new possibilities for artists, but as a mean for broader understanding between people and cultures.
The introduction of networked telecommunication have, however, introduced an art totally different from anything experienced before. Roy Ascott has defined Telematics 15  as “computer-mediated communications networking between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions…and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence and perception”. Telematic emphasises the process of artistic creation and the systematic relationship between artist, network and viewer16. The idea of art as a system capable of transforming behaviour and consciousness was fundamental to Ascott. To achieve this the art must be interactive 17 , allowing the audience to be actively engaged. Control over content, context and time can be shifted to the viewer through interaction, thereby questioning the distinction between artist and viewer.
The Internet also provides for a field of interaction between human and artificial intelligence. Telematic art therefore challenges the traditional notions of realism by facilitating the creation of alternative or simulated forms of reality, or the “hypereal”. In the early 1990’s Demetri Terzopoulos developed a bio-mechanical software model of a fish, and Karl Sims created 3-dimentional images of forest and plants with highly complex structures in Panspermia (1990). In 1994 Christia Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau presented A-Volve 18 , a bright virtual habitat. Other artist-scientists such as Thomas Ray and Jane Prophet (TechnoSphere, 1995) also simulate processes of life. Evolution, breeding and selection have become methods for creating art works with “living” image worlds and viewers “playing God” creating new “life”, manipulating the reproduction system, controlling the simulated biotype and  “killing” by withdrawal of “nourishment”19.  Some virtual-reality environments that completely immerse the audience into an alternative world have been developed within an art context. The Canadian artist Charlotte Davies’s Osmose (1995) and Ephemere (1998) are classic examples.
By the involvement and interaction of the viewer, the artist has no longer control of the final result or even the survival of the work. Besides it seems like art has become a testing ground for scientific theories. With Netlife Thomas Ray predicts that artificial intelligence will form in the Internet and be able to go anywhere on the planet in milliseconds.
Body and identity are subjects with long traditions in art, even more so with the Internet. Online identity allows a simultaneous presence in various spaces and contexts, a constant “reproduction” of the self without body. Subcultures are fostered, with groups existing only on the Internet and group members geographically far apart, possibly only knowing each other as avatars20. Roy Ascott’s vision is “‘a multiplicity of bodies”, and his Aspects of Gaia: Digital pathways across the Whole Earth (1989) combined the disembodied experience of telematics and cyberspace with the corporeal experience of concrete reality in physical space.
Several philosophers, including Jean Baudrillard celebrate what they call the techno-body. 21 In her book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles states: “Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here. Rather the question is what kind of posthumans we will be” 22 .
Since the introduction of photography in art, realism has been hotly debated. Telematics adds a new dimension to this debate with artificial life and multiple identities. Another dimension was added in September 2001. Wolfgang Staehle had a solo show at Postmasters Gallery in New York, where he presented three live views, one of them through a Web camera pointed at downtown Manhattan. The events of the 11th of  September was unfolded live on the gallery walls and created an unexpected, shocking context for the concept of “‘the ultimate realism” in art.
 
2. Digital Art and Theory
Digital art did not develop in an art-historical vacuum, but has connections to previous art movements, among them Dada, Fluxus, and conceptual art. The importance of these movements for digital art resides in their emphasis on formal instructions and in their focus on concept, event and audience participation, as opposed to unified material objects. The Theory of the Avant-Garde, technology as a sequence of creations, adoptions and liquidations, was radically different from the traditional attitude. [...]