In the most significant shift in art production since video, the Internet's complex language and systems of organizing information has spawned distinctly artistic creations, interventions, and operations online. A symbiosis is emerging between "aesthetic" procedures and online and offline systems and institutions in the fields of business, education, and communication. This presents the opportunities for new strategies to shape how the Internet and it's multiple networks and languages can be used artistically. Perhaps the biggest constraint on the emergence of an Internet aesthetic and an online culture in general comes not only from technical protocols, limits, rules, or conventions, but from social and organizational protocol expectations from the mainstream art world and corporate marketplace.

Protocol Prone explores of how Net artists, along with curators and institutions, working within the set of conditions particular to "Net art" negotiate "the aesthetic" online. The activist organization ®™ark, programmer and former painter Mark Napier, and M. River & T. Whid Art Associates (MTAA) present scenarios utilizing the Internet's structural and organizational grammar in unexpected ways to confound artistic, commercial, institutional, and ultimately, curatorial imperatives.

The artists and I entered into a self-reflexive exchange for the creation new projects or furthering of artistic practice and engagement in artistic production against the backdrop of an institutional position. The goal of this project is not merely to produce an "art object," but to reveal the production, distribution, and collaboration as specific to an online practice. If, in the process, curatorial or artistic authority and control over eventual outcomes are yielded, this reflects the necessary conditions of production and distribution online that allow for these specific projects to come about in the first place.

The term "Net art" has been used to describe "art for which the Net is a necessary condition for viewing, experiencing, and participating." I would like to expand this definition to include the terms "producing" and "distributing" as necessary conditions of any networked space, the Internet being the specific web of networks being discussed here and in the works featured.

For artists who utilize the Internet to showcase their work, usually in the more traditional, two-dimensional media like photography or painting, the Internet is a vehicle amongst others that distributes images of their work created for an offline, physical context. Going far beyond promotional use, some artists, for whom the Internet is one context, often amongst others, harness aspects of Internet presentation and the navigational potential that some Internet structures and software applications, like Flash or Shockwave, provide for screen-specific experimentation. These works of art merely exist online and are not a result of a productive process online.

The artists in this exhibition utilize the distributive mechanism that the Internet provides, but specifically in the process making the work. Much of what I consider to be works of "Net art" are often collaborative, process oriented in execution, more or less non-object-based, and ultimately conceptual in nature. The technologies used to make ideas visual on the computer screen do not determine the artistic practice. Rather, the Internet is the tool with which the artists set up situations exchange occurs between the artists and users, users and other users, and users and groups outside of the field of art and the field of Net art as a specialization.

The word "site" is unavoidable when speaking of a website where and around which an online artistic practice develops. That "website" contains the word "site" within it is not just an etymological coincidence. The Internet is another outlet where a site-oriented or site-specific artistic practice can manifest itself and is a place for the active generation of discourse.

Is the Net a site in itself? The Net can be a place where a negotiation between sites occurs, but it is not limited to those contacts that occur between a user, the computer, and an ambiguous network of other websites that are experienced via hypertext or links. Rather, the negotiation between sites is entirely active and goes beyond the one-to-one relationship between actual websites, that hypertext, for example, appears to set up. The spatial experience on the computer screen is not as a sequence of movements and passages, a navigation, nor it is it a "durational occupation" of a particular "site." Rather, the projects represented in this exhibition, occupy and promote a site-relativist position. Mark Napier, MTAA, and ®™ark all rely heavily on notions of exchange that utilize the Internet as a locus for activity whether it be their activity in particular or not.the Internet is a place in which to set up a situation where users and viewers ultimately to become an active part of the production of the project. The "art" does not occur entirely within the frame of the screen, but between people and organizations. The website is not a place to navigate, but a place to where the generation of discourse is active.

The place where the vast majority of discourse about how the Internet has become artistic happens in critical spaces like Rhizome, Nettime, and The Thing far removed from the structures of museums. Only recently have museums begun to take a critical look at practices that have emerged separately from traditional art circles, that of galleries and museums, as well as been distributed and circulated completely outside those systems, via online critical spaces that also function, albeit differently, as spaces of exhibition. The "sites" and location of where value can be created online are therefore multiple.

Institutional norms and values are, therefore, very significant when Net art projects, produced and created outside of the "brick and mortar" institution, are brought in under the auspices of those institutions. Rather than the art marching off the gallery walls, museums and galleries are reeling in Net art as part of their exhibition repertoire and presenting it according to former methods appropriate to other very different electronic mediums, like video. Large format wall projection and static non-networked terminals in gallery spaces are all ways that museums have attempted to integrate Net art into their exhibition structures.