________________________________________________________________________________ Josephine Berry "Another Orwellian Misnomer"? Tactical Art in Virtual Space Self-conscious tactics in an unstable space In the wake of Michel Foucault's discussions of the discrete, invisible and all pervasive 'microphysics of power' at work within technocratic society, Michel de Certeau was moved to write an alternative account in which the 'network of an antidiscipline' is uncovered; a category of largely invisible, improvised and ephemeral practices which comprise 'everyday life'. This heterogeneous set of practices, de Certeau claims, exists outside discourse and has no proper name, belongs to no ideology, acts heterogeneously and by virtue of its evasiveness comprises an ongoing and pervasive resistance to an optical and panoptic regime of power. The exteriority of these practices to discourse is also, ironically enough, seen by Foucault to have characterised the advent of panoptic power , which emerged in a similarly 'mute' manner. The panopticon's articulation in discourse happened after the decentralised historical growth of a panoply of observational techniques resulted in a coherent disciplinary regime.This, argues de Certeau, is a mode of power almost necessarily in decline because it has ceased to operate at an unconscious level; it has become distinct. If the panoptic mode of power gained ascendancy in silence, de Certeau spectulates, what other silent forms of power are coming into being? In his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life, he asks: "If it is true that the grid of 'discipline' is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also 'miniscule' and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what 'ways of operating' form the counterpart on the consumer's (or 'dominee's'?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order." In what was not only a riposte to Foucault's uni-directional discussion of the discrete mechanisms of panoptic power but also an analysis of the all-too visible phenotypes of technocratic rationality, de Certeau mobilises two modes of operation: strategy and tactics. The former describes force-relationships "that can be circumscribed as proper (propre)" and which are brought to bear on objects or targets distinct and external to themselves. Strategy is the mode by which legitimated power operates from within a designated field; through language, political structures of representation, the assignation of gender roles, the regulation of space, discourses of the body and so on. In short, it is the productive mode of hegemonic power. Tactics, by contrast, has no proper site, discourse or language, of its own - it "insinuates itself into the other's place" , it adorns itself in the other's garb, speaks through the other's language, and, because it has no fixed address or permanent mode, never consolidates its own achievements or preserves its conquests. Tactics comes out of the encounter with the rigid geometry of urban planning, the syntax and vocabularies of languages, the regulated flows of television, the choreography of the supermarket. In de Certeau's terms, tactics is the practice produced by 'making do' with the oppressive conditions of modernity and common people are "unrecognised producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist rationality" . It is a mode of production based in the heart of consumption, a production that feeds on the desire provoked by the commodity but which is used in the creation of an own language rather than the singular conformity to the libidinal economy of the commodity's 'promissory note'. But if Foucault and de Certeau can claim the desublimation of the panopticon, then we can also claim a similar coming to consciousness of tactics. And just as the discourse and the techniques of the disciplinary society are split, so too are the goings on of the everyday and their discursive integration into politics and aesthetics. In 1992, the term 'tactical media' was coined by the Amsterdam based organisors of the first Next5Minutes conference Geert Lovink, David Garcia and Caroline Nevejan in 1992 . This term soon found its way onto media theoretical mailinglists such as nettime , and the term gained common currency in the virtual communities, working groups and social circles in which net artists participate. By the third Next5Minutes conference on net culture in March 1999, 'tactical media' had become the organising subject, with activists, media theorists, artists and technologists debating a new context and mode of political and cultural resistance. In the post-68 political envirnoment in which the notion of a united front of resistance as questionable as its erstwhile target, imperial power, is anachronistic, the vagrant hybridity of tactics provides an important model for conceptualising and organising resistance. The structure of the Internet, which mirrors and fuels the decentralisation and hybridity of the global market economy and its geo-political correlatives, becomes an obvious and important site for resistance. In the analysis of net artist's involvement in the cultural logic of tactical media which follows, the discussion will be framed by the problematic of virtual space. Although a closer enquiry into the phantasmatic quality of space on the Net will be presented in chapter 3, for the present the discussion will hinge on the friction between the idea of real and virtual space. Although tactics, as theorised by de Certeau, are by no means limited to spatial practices, I have selected this framework partly because it is the existence of an evasive but irreducible difference between real and virutal space that gives the Net it's distinctive identity. It is within the context of a contested splitting of real and informational space that the phase shift of power pointed to by Foucault and de Certeau (the shift from disciplinary power to what Negri and Hardt have recently termed the 'biopower' of 'Empire' ) begins to emerge: a world in which power has become as deterritorialised as capital. Out of the four artworks discussed in this chapter, only Heath Bunting's X Project addresses this spatial splitting directly but, as I will argue, the ontology of virtual space and its impact on behaviour are crucial concerns and points of leverage for all the artworks considered. While some net critics argue the danger of the libertarian rhetoric of dual worlds in which cyberspace is cast as the zone of borderless and unfettered freedom , others see their disjuncture as promising a radical potential. I will be using the widely diverging theories of the spatial and environmental production of the subject offered by Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé and Slavoj Zizek to think through 'the practice of everyday life online' which the artworks of Jodi, Etoy, Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting present. In these works, the positing of 'typical' kinds of behaviour by net artists presupposes a definition of the nature of space and place, and vice versa. It is through the exploration of everyday behaviour. which is the concern of tactical net art, that the radical potential and oppressive flattening of cyberspatiality is brought into focus. In a more limited respect, and as we have seen in chapter one, artists were drawn to the Internet because it offered them the possibility of a different kind of 'professional' practice; indeed a chance to ellude the professionalisatin of their own practice. In this sense, the Net offered them a 'tactical' space in which to evade the strategies of the art market. But if the Net seemed to offer such a tactical topology , it also imposes a new set of conditions which can be seen as belonging to strategic power within which art must operate. The establishment of technical protocols and languages such as the Domain Name System (DNS), TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CGI and so forth impose a language or architecture from 'above'. But, beyond the expansion and ellaboration of tactics and strategy along older lines, the Net participates in a broader development of mutual imitation that occurs within both dominant cultural strategy (the 'Prada Meinhoff' mode of advertising) and cultural resistance (the adoption of corporate identities ). In other words, strategy and tactics are becoming harder to distinguish or require a new set of conceptual tools with which to decode them. An important aspect of this development for the online environment is the mutability of the Internet's distributed networks and digital modalities which complicate the production/consumption binary. The ease, for example, with which a digital file can be copied, parsed, mirrored, linked to and endlessly redeployed makes it, in some senses, extraordinarily vulnerable to tactical use. However, this malleability is also harnessed by the strategic forces of power at work in the Net; we begin to lose the distinction between the 'properness' of strategy and the vagrancy of tactics. Where de Certeau describes tactical action as a slow, erosive force, the "overfow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks" , in the new media age tactics are operating under more mutable conditions in which strategy no longer resembles anything so static as rocks. To grasp this more concretely, we have only to consider the intensification of market research carried out within the Net - based on the increased ease with which individuals' movements and patterns of behaviour can be tracked through inventions such as 'cookies' - to get an idea of how responsive the system has become. This is not yet the technological dystopia imagined by Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein in Data Trash, where the subject has become totally assimilated into the instrumental operations of virtual reality. But, to a great extent, the user does provide the 'encrypted flesh' or behavioural data-set required by the market to continuously reinvent itself in the putative image of the user- consumer who, in turn, reflects the conditions of consumption - the series of choices on offer - in a recursive loop. Media theorists and activists David Garcia and Geert Lovink identify the shifting, mutating and transferable quality of digital data on the Net as 'media hybridity' and discuss the mobility it produces in their influential manifesto The ABC of Tactical Media written in 1997. The first passages of the manifesto synopsise the ideas set out in de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life thereby explicitly revealing the indebtedness of the concept of 'tactical media' to his work. In their text, which was posted on community-building mailing lists such as nettime , Garcia and Lovink update de Certeau's tactics for the New Media environment, and ellucidate on the centrality of mobility and hybridity for this newly instrumentalisd 'practice of everyday life': "But it is above all mobility that most characterises the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross borders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty." We should not forget that this manifesto of tactical media was written at a time in which governments were still in a state of relative confusion over how to regulate the activities taking place over the Net as well as the Net's own technical administration. Although 1996 saw the first serious piece of U.S. Interent legislation in the form of the Communications Decency Act , international governments were still in a state of confusion as to which existing laws could be stretched to deal with the network, what new legislation was required and how, if at all, it could be enforced. This was a symptom of the Net's awkward transformation from a U.S. government owned and academically administered research and communications tool, to a commercially open, privately financed space of international exchange. In the period between 1996 and 2000, a flurry of legislation has taken place regarding encryption, public surveillance of private communications, the liability of ISPs for the content stored on their servers, and a 'purely technical' body has been appointed by the U.S. government to regulate and administer the DNS system -the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). These are just some of the areas in which the Internet's once 'wild frontier' is being tamed, and strategy is extends itself legislatively and bureaucratically into this formerly disregarded zone. Returning to tactics, the marriage of the terms 'tactical' and 'media' has come to signify something more than the new terrain of everyday practice. 'Tactical media' belongs to a whole cultural turn in which what might be described as the old 'strategies' of art and politics are abandoned in favour of a parasitic, fast mutating and non-originary practice . The modernist belief in conceptual and aesthic originality or the political belief in the aggregative basis of opposition such as class and trade unions cede to a postmodern refusal of such 'essentialist' individual and collective definitions of subjectivity. Once entities such as authenticity and origniality are invalidated by contemporary thought and the belief in the plausibility of global revolution retracts into the limited struggles of the 'new social movements', the modest contingency of tactical practices come to the fore; a form of culture and politics as far beyond metaphysics as the virtualised environment (both on and off the Net) in which they unfolds. The predominance of parasitism and vagrancy in net art as such, clearly owes much to the precursive experiments of minimalist and site specific art which began in the 1960s; the threshold of the information (post-disciplinary?) age. By this I mean site specific art's location within a pre-existing network of spatial, social, economic and political relations as against the artwork's creation of a series of separate and internally constituted 'internal relations' - the zenith of modernist practics as theorised by Clement Greenberg. Although not necessarily adopting practices of the everyday, the expansion of the artwork's limit beyond its physical 'pretext' to include a self-constituting network of forces and relations is an important anticipatory development. Michael Fried discusses this new turn in 'literalist' or minimalist art thus: "There is nothing within [the beholder's] field of vision - nothing that he takes note of in any way - that, as it were, declares its irrelevance to the situation, and therefore to the experience, in question. On the contrary, for something to be perceived at all is for it to be perceived as part of that situation. Everything counts - not as part of the object, but as part of the situation in which its objecthood is established and on which that objecthood at least partly depends." This art in which 'everything counts' is a phenomenological conception of the artwork's meaning occurring in dynamic relationship between work, viewer and world. In Frederic Jameson's description of the awesome scope of a Hans Haacke artwork, the circumference of the 'situation' and the intricacy of its phenomenology extends far beyond those immediate elements which comprise the artwork's situation to encompass a global situation. This scope is also the scope of the 'situation' articulated by net art: "in the work of Hans Haacke, for example, [conceptual art] redirects the deconstruction of perceptual categories specifically onto the framing institutions themselves. Here the paralogisms of the 'work' include the museum, by drawing its space back into the material pretext and making a mental circuit through the artistic infrastructure unavoidable. Indeed, in Haacke it is not merely with museum space that we come to rest, but rather the museum itself, as an institution, opens up into its network of trustees, their affiliations with multinational corporations, and finally the global system of late capitalism proper (with all its specific representational contradictions)." Here the artwork is understood as creating a self-consciousness in the viewer which operates on their own unarticulated and/or unreflexive behaviour (looking at art in public space) and the seemingly remote and silent functionings of the world order. If we consider how the collective and largely undirected construction of Net gives the many activities which compose 'the practice of everyday life' a greater emphasis, while the emphatically global scale of the Net creates a very different scale for these activities, we can imagine how the self- reflexivity of the viewer gains a seemingly more affective quality - hence the sharp focus laid on the relationship between behaviour and global 'situation' in net art. The artwork's animation of the intersubjective relationship between the user and situation can also, in Hegelian terms, be said to have effected a shift from a quotidian use of tactics 'in themselves to a practice of tactics 'for themselves. The tactical mode has become an explicitly self-conscious way for net artists, activists and media workers to act in cyberspace, lifting the small scale countervailing practices of the everyday (the repurposing, circumventing, jamming, connecting, reversing etc. of disciplinary powers) to the level of programmatic cultural resistance. This tactical self-consciousness in net art can sometimes exceed that possessed of site specific art because its self-reflexivity invites the viewer not only to see their (physical, ideological, economic etc.) relationship to the work and the world as part of the work's circumference and vice versa, but also because it often invites them to participate in its morphology. This invitation, although not unprecedented, has an easiness based in the contiguity of the space of art and the everyday in the Net, which comprises a (relatively) unhierarchical organisation and materially homogeneous consistency of space. Art ceases to be perceived as the site at which 'the practices of everyday life' grind to a halt and a different kind of behavioral logic takes hold. Some critics have optimistically formulated this development as 'the art of involvement' and designate preceding experiments in interactive art 'open works'. In contrast to the viewer's role within 'open work', where the viewer is solicited to "fill in the blanks, to choose between possible directions, to confront the differences in their interpretationsŠ[to explore] the possibilities of an unfinished monument"," the 'art of involvement' no longer constitutes an anterior work at all but rather, "causes processes to emerge, it seeks to open up a career to autonomous lives, it invites one to grow and inhabit a world. It places us in a creative cycle, in a living environment in which we are always already co-authors." But where does such a programmatic reading leave tactics? Are tactics simply another name for the productive capacity of countless individuals which can be massified into a coherent aesthetico-political project? Are they the behaviours preyed upon by marketers in their search for the true identity of the consumer or are they that which necessarily eludes this form of systematic reincorporation? Do tactics become available to strategists when they reach the level of self-consciousness revealed in the term 'tactical media' and therefore cease to be tactical? In net art, as with the coming to self-consciousness of tactics within tactical media, it is possible to see the elevation of this everyday practice of resistance (for example la perruque - the use by factory workers of their employers' resources for their own private ends) to the order of dominant cultural strategy . If tactics no longer solely constitute ways of 'making do' under the oppressive conditions of society, but begin to attain the legitimation of artistic value or political modus operandi, do they still remain the 'antidiscipline' to the dominant order? By investigating this question, we must necessarily ask the question of how tactics themselves change in virtual space, which in turn poses questions over the nature of that space. But it is imporant to bear in mind that no matter how self-consciously net artists are adopting tactics, their mutating nature is as hard to fix down as the changeability of the material and semiotic terrain in which they unfold. A Place Made of Space De Certeau's distinction between place and space - one importantly adopted by the anthropologist of 'supermodernity' Marc Augé - will be helpful when determining the nature of the tactical mode in net art. Place, for de Certeau, describes the coexistence of things determined by their respective occupation of an exclusive location. And conversely, that location is reciprocally defined by a thing's occupation of it. In short, "the law of the 'proper' rules in the place." (This 'properness' is partly responsible for Augé's positing of 'place' as a form of resistance to the deterritorialised disorientation of supermodernity). Space, by contrast, is "composed of intersections of mobile elements" it "occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalise it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs of contractual proximities." De Certeau essentialises this difference by drawing an analogy to the difference between langue and parole. Tactics is then, nearly by defninition, a spatial mode, and one through which place is practiced and experienced. But what could be said to constitute a place on the Internet? The word 'site', which in ordinary speech would designate a precise location in space, doubles as the technical term used to indicate a particular digital file or 'information object' which is only ever viewed in the form of a reassemblage. That is to say, what we view in our browser window is the software's interpretation of a set of instructions - a string of 0s and1s. On the Internet, although things can be designated a coordinate (an IP number or URL) nothing can ever be said to occupy a unique location. But even if we accept the distinction made by de Certeau and Marc Augé regarding place and space, and even though a website no longer occupies a singular location in the manner of a physical object, it is still possible to see its equivalence to place. As with place, we know what we have to do to get there, as with place we can compare the experience of having been there with others, as with place our knowledge of it is always existential, dynamised by our passage across it, inflected with our intentions towards it, coloured by our encounters within it. But crucially, unlike place, we cannot build a sense of identity around a site on the Internet, we cannot belong to it and least of all attach foundation narratives to it. We cannot feel within it the echo of what Augé describes as 'anthropological place'. Quoting from the ethnologist Marcel Mauss, Augé discusses the part-fictional character of anthropological place in terms of the relationship of what the former terms 'average man' to the territory he inhabits. This man is born into a closed world, founded 'for once and all' and inscribed so deeply upon him that it does not have to be consciously understood. The 'total social fact' subsumes within itself any interpretation of it that its indiginous members may have: "The 'average' man resembles 'almost all men in archaic or backward societies' in the sense that, like them, he displays a vulnerability and permeability to his immediate surroundings that specifically enable him to be defined as 'total'" . As we shall see presently, the connection between environmental permeability and a particular kind of identity are important subjects for the tactical practice of net art. The level of imperviousness which characterise the 'average' user's relation to the Net is a point of investigation for these self-conscious tacticians attempting to create a more bruising encounter between the space of the Net and its subject. In order to become the producer of an idiolect (the personal/tactical mode of enunciation formed within imposed stricutures), the subject must become sensible to the particularities of their environment and confident of their ability to find their own passage through it. In 1996, the Swiss net art group cum spoof 'corporation' Etoy targeted the supposedly neutral zone of the search engine with their artwork Digital Hijack . Search engines are some of the most frequently 'visited' sites on the Net with Altavista already drawing 32 million users per day by September 98. They act as huge centres of traffic convergence in the supposedly decentralised structure of the Net, but notably - similarly to airports -cannot be described as places of gathering. Although visitors frequently return, it is not in order to find something rooted in a singular location or to meet other visitors, but rather to use a service that spatialises the rest of the Net through the production of a set of URLs. Hartmut Winkler attributes their popularity to their perceived neutrality: "Offering a service as opposed to content, they appear as neutral mediators." It is precisely because the search engine serves as a portal to elsewhere that it becomes a heavily frequented site. For this reason we can see the search engine as the quintessence of the transformation of place into space, or the predication of place on space in the Net. The fact that a site's centrality is directly related to its distributive capacity tells us a great deal about the way in which spatial practices on the Net are characterised by passage rather than settlement . Nothing could be further from the permeability of the subject to anthropological place than the indifference of the Net user to the putative neutrality of the search engine website. And it is precisely this neutrality that Etoy singled out for attack in their Digital Hijack. In tune with Winkler's criticisms, Etoy created a mechanism for alerting people to their passive acceptance of the search engine's mode of selecting and hierachising URLs. The actual method of aggregating and organising websites in accordance with the user's keyword is, in reality, anything but exhaustive or disinterested. In the early days of search engines, some companies (such as Yahoo) paid employees to categorise websites 'by hand', thus making available only a tiny proportion of the total number of websites on the Net. Of course what was made available was the final result of a series of subjective choices and corporate categorisations made by a team of coders. The subsequent automation of this process has not, however, resulted in any fundamental increase in accuracy, comprehensiveness or compatibility between the keyword and the list of URLs displayed in response . Unable to master complex linguistic issues such as syntax, and therefore unable to interpret the meaning of strings of search terms, many search algorithms will simply prioritise URLs according to the number of times the search terms are mentioned. This is just one example of how the map of the the WWW produced by the search engine is deficient and, more importantly for us, how the system is vulnerable to manipulation. Realising this point of leverage, Etoy began to analyse the top 20 sites returned by search engines in response to some of the most popular search terms such as 'porsche, penthouse, madonna, fassbinder' . Essentially, Etoy found a way to manipulate the system by updating an older practice called spamdexing. This is a simple 'hacker's' trick by which a keyword is inserted repeatedly into an HTML document to ensure that a website is featured high up in the search engine display hierarchy . Etoy used their 'Ivana bot' (probably an algorithm) to analyse the particular combination of keywords embedded in the top 20 websites returned to a keyword such as 'porsche' and then mimicked it. They then generated thousands of 'dummy trap' pages each of which contained combinations of thousands of popular keywords, thus ensuring that the pages would be returned in the top 20 category of myriad word searches. For a short period after March 1996, surfers using search engines were regularly 'hijacked' by dummy trap pages which, far from displaying information about a desirable car or popstar would harass hostages with the message: "Don't fucking move - this is a digital hijack by etoy.com". If the hostage/viewer decided to follow the links through the website, they would first discover what number hostage of the Etoy 'organisation' they were, then view an animated graphic image file (GIF) of a shaven-headed Etoy member in dark glasses and ambiguously plugged into a cable at the navel , and finally receive a blunt mission statement: "It is definitely time to blast action into the Net! Smashing the boring style of established electronic traffic channels. Welcome to the Internet Underground". Today, after the search engines succeeded in terminating Etoy's action, the statement posted on a sample site concludes: "Although officially stopped, we cannot protect you from getting hijacked. We lost control. PIRATES FIGHTING FOR A WILDER NET!" Shock and the Order of Experience in Modernity and the Net Walter Benjamin's discussion of the relationship between memory and experience is a useful text to draw on at this stage, because it provides an excellent way of thinking about the shock tactics used by Etoy, their role in the practice of place as well as a means of contrasting the space of modernity with Augé's discussion of anthropological place - a crucial way of entering a discussion on place in 'supermodernity' and on the Net. In his essay "Some Motifs in Baudelaire", Benjamin splits experience into two terms: Erlebnis and Erfahrung. By Erlebnis, Benjamin means an experience for which we are psychologically prepared, against which we have developed a protective shield to parry the impact of a stimulus. Referencing Freud, Benjamin argues that experiences absorbed in such a way can pass instantly into our conscious experience (Erlebnis) because they do not produce any traumatic effects - traumatic stimulation being understood here as the basis for (involuntary) memory, a function of the unconscious. Erfahrung, on the other hand, is the order of experience attributed to a stimulus for which we are unprepared. Our lack of anticipatory shielding means that this experience cannot immediately enter our consciousness, but instead plants a memory trace that will then be worked through retroactively, through the act of involuntary memories or dreams. Erfahrung, therefore, is the order of experience which entails a dissolution of shock through the psychological relay of revisitations; the integration of an experience into a deeper level of identity. One that cannot be casually and voluntarily recalled, and equally cannot be so easily disposed with. Benjamin understands Baudelaire's lyrical relationship to the modern metropolis as the, perhaps paradoxical, endeavour to preserve its series of shocks in the conscious act of writing poetry. And asks how "lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm." Benjamin, along with other modernist theorists of the metropolis such as Georg Simmel, makes the observation that as we grow accustomed to the battery of shocks afforded by the crush of population density, the chaos of crowds, the din and danger of traffic so too do our protective shields become more efficient and total. In the modern city, Erfahrung diminishes under the callousinig of Erlebnis. Benjamin, quoting from Baudelaire, figures this shift in the disappearance of the daydreamer's unfocused look and the advent of the prostitute's wary and shifting glance: "'Her eyes, like those of a wild animal, are fixed on the distant horizon; they have the restlessness of a wild animalŠbut sometimes also the animal's sudden tense vigilance.'" Let us then compare this condition to the permeability of the 'average man' in anthropological place. Here we can examine how collective social symbolisations work upon the irregular topography of place as an index of Erfahrung and Erlebnis. In Augé's characterisation of anthropological place (as constructed by the ethnologist Mauss) he discusses how, despite the indigenous inhabitants' knowledge of the relativity of their home territory, they confer upon it the mythical status of a singular origin. A way of naturalising the contingent. Each new occurrence, such as a birth or death, however well 'known', has to be incorporated into a discourse and thereby naturalised into the mythological syntax. In other words, the specificity of place is constantly demarcated and thereby reaffirmed through its inscription in the foundation narrative. By contrast, in de Certeau's discussion of the 'concept-city' - the modern city of enlightenment rationality and the urban planner, the city whose origins Baudelaire witnessed and the precursor of cyberspace - the specificity of place and its subjects is flattened through the imposition of the universalising, self-constituting and dehistoricising myth of rationality . A myth which excludes those stubborn particularities which cannot be assimilated into its system: "a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the 'waste products' of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.)." Occuring then at the same time as the increased violence of the modern city and its concurrent defensive psychological mechanisms is the invalidation of the specificity of places and their inhabitants, their histories and contradictions. We can view the concept-city as a utopian/dystopian fantasy existing in advance of (and at odds with) its actual construction, operating in tandem with the order of experience which Benjamin terms Erlebnis. But what is the order of 'shock' manufactured for Etoy's digital hostages? The search engine itself can certainly be seen as a kind of concept-city imposing the template of universality and rationality - through its promise of categorisation and inclusiveness - onto the specificity of the Net's myriad layers, aggregations and networks. The user's God-like view over this map of the Net involves the same fantasy of legibility that transfixes the beholder of a city from above . Perhaps in this sense, the production of the dummy trap page causes the user to tumble from their vantage point into the sticky illegibility of the Net's tangled and undecipherable networks - the tactical point of view. These self-conscious tacticians have wrested the stunned subject from the alienating universality of the spectacle and returned them to the everyday practice of the walker who "write(s) without being able to read" . Or rather, who reads a single page without knowing what else they might be able to read. But has this really shocked the viewer? Has the hoax managed to slip in under the guard of the viewer's sensory shield and produce Erfahrung in the place of Erlebnis? Or we could ask the question thus: has the viewer's divestment of the fantasy of legibility and the universalising myth of the Net's inherent rationality produced a bruising encounter with environmental specificity and in some sense converted the search engine into an actual place? This question contains within it the presumption that the 'view from above', the construction of legibility is a means by which the subject defends against the shock which is nothing other than a glitch in the symbolic tissue through which the Real is momentarily glimpsed. (I will return to this psychoanalytic line of enquiry below). But there is an incompatibility between these questions and the Net because here we are dealing with a simulacral system par excellence. Within such a system, and in particular one that operates on the principles of its digital mutability, it is harder to perceive the distinction between an actual breakdown and its simulation or the occurrence of the unexpected within a programmatic field of novelty production. Furthermore we are also dealing with a zone of naturalised hybridity. The search engine applies the logic of library categorisation to a networked computer file system which, in turn, adopts the imagery of geographical space as evidenced in words such as 'website', 'site map' and 'portal' and the browser softwares' adoption of the terms 'navigator' and 'explorer'. The ease with which these categories can be successfully combined reveals a great deal about the malleability of the Net's symbolic economy. So long as equivalences can be found between semantic systems and an appropriate representational language assigned, then their combination is permissable. This environment then is neither the originary site of the indigenous fantasy nor the concept-city with its disjuncture between rationalist myth and specificity. When Etoy engineer the shock of a dummy trap page, they may educate the viewer as to the workings of the system but they do not create any fundamentally new relationship or fantasy between the viewer and the site. In effect the dummy trap page is just a further augmentation of the constantly shifting simulatory panorama that is the the Net. In this respect the Net does not possess the metaphysics of place where things reside in an exclusive location and around which or against which systems of meaning operate. It is, rather, a differential system without, to borrow a term from Baudrillard, 'limit'. Self- conscious tactics, if they do not rupture the simulacral texture of the Web and remain instead within the play of difference, are unlikely to produce the experience of shock through which place might be felt. X marks the Spot: Portals to Place When Josephine Bosma entitled her 1997 interview with Heath Bunting "Street Artist, Political Net Artist or Playful Trickster?" she linked together some of the key issues at work in Bunting's tactical use of the Net. Were the word 'or' to be replaced with 'and', dispensing with the false problem of choosing between three not incommensurate identity types, we would have a description of the artist which hits upon the crucial attribute of his art: the creation of friction between real and virtual space through the indeterminacy of play. In the same interview Bunting discusses a work that he would later title CCTV - World Wide Watch. His deadpan tone conveys very well the essence of the tactical mode; at once ironic, throw-away and serious: "At the moment I am working on a closed circuit television camera project across the Internet whereby you can watch various city centres in various countries of the world, for instance Tokyo, Dublin, LA and London. Each of these cameras is linked to a webpage and on that webpage you are encouraged to watch these street locations for various crimes. If you see anything, you can type the details into the text box, click a button and this information will be sent directly via fax to the local police station, for instance at Leicester Square. So it's somehow encouraging people to police themselves and save the police some labour, so they don't have to watch other people." In the final version of the project, Bunting confronts the viewer with a sequence of near-aerial CCTV views of 5th Avenue, New York; Broadgate, Coventry; the Marktplatz, Guetersloh, Germany and Oviedo, Spain. But the viewer's giddy sense of voyeuristic power, derived from the ability to view four city scenes simultaneously, laid out in their unconscious legibility for our scopophilic gratification, is undercut by the invitation to intervene. The viewer is confronted with the choice of converting the implicit power of the gaze into its explicit enactment (I am choosing to believe that the fax numbers are what Bunting says they are); a choice which splits the viewer's subject position between an occupation of the legible space of strategy and the tactical and partial space of everyday life. The contradictory nature of the spaces conflated in this work (both God-like and on-the-ground) - a spatial multiplicity which the Internet's networked expanse and digital mutability indifferently accommodates - becomes unbearable when the viewer's potential affectiveness looms into view. In contrast to the Digital Hijack where the hoped for moment of awakening is instantaneously neutralised by virtue of its inability to step outside the dominant simulacral economy, Bunting shocks the viewer awake with the unsettling possibility of cutting through the simulacral field of equivalences and precipitating an intervention into the particularities of place and its inhabitants. The viewer is accustomed to occupying both subject positions independently of each other; it is also usual to forego agency when occupying the God-like vantage point (perhaps a precondition of the fantasy of legibility?) and legibility when occupying the 'writerly' position of Wandersmann. In short, the shock delivered here is the shock of occupying the position of power where legibility and agency are combined. This dual position of legibility and involvement is not dissimilar to that occupied by the flâneur, as explored by Benjamin in his discussion of Baudelaire and the Paris of the Second Empire, who is at once enthralled by the crowd but aloof, whose fascination with this fleeting, polymorphous spectacle is a writerly one, whose style it is "to go botanizing on the asphalt" . But if CCTV - World Wide Watch playfully and critically insinuates the look of power, it also implies the reciprocal gaze of its subject. Next to the form which, in its generic simplicity, invites the viewer to reflexively dash off a note to the ever attentive forces of law and order, are set the words: "Improve self policing with further absented police force." This exhortation to internalise the burden of policing and thus further atomise and virtualise the forces of discipline until no external display of power remains, ironically articulates the ultimate Foucauldian dystopia; a dystopian order against which de Certeau's antidiscipline of tactics is practiced. Here the viewer, who can perhaps be cast as unconsciously assisting the spread and perfection of Foucault's 'political technologies of the body' by incorporating them seamlessly into the fabric of his/her life, is confronted not merely with those technologies but their articulated discourse. As with the conflation of spaces and gazes, CCTV also conflates the normally silent functioning of the technology with its explicit enunciation. Here we have a concise example of the self-conscious adoption of tactics which differs significantly from those tactics described by de Certeau. As already stated, de Certeau's point of departure is Foucault's analysis of the historical development of a diffuse set of disciplinary techniques (an overwhelmingly optical and panoptic mode of observational discipline) whose development he traces back to the advent of the rationalist discourses of the Enlightenment. An origin from which, Foucault argues, the technical modalities increasingly diverge: "Foucault thus distinguishes two heterogeneous systems. He outlines the advantages won by a political technology of the body over the elaboration of a body of doctrine. But he is not content merely to separate two forms of power. By following the establishment and victorious multiplication of this 'minor instrumentality,' he tries to bring to light the springs of this opaque power that has no possessor, no privileged place, no superiors or inferiors, no repressive activity or dogmatism, that is almost autonomously effective through its technological ability to distribute, classify, analyse and spatially individualise the object dealt with. (All the while, ideology babbles on!)ŠThis gallery of diagrams has the twin functions of delimiting a social stratum of practices that have no discourse and of founding a discourse on these practices." So as the techniques of power lock tight, so too does their ubiquitous hold over society grow silent. But, ponders de Certeau, once their silent history has been uncovered and their primary (panoptic) technique articulated, have they then fallen into decline? Was their successful ascendance not a consequence of their silent technical advances and lack of dogma? This questioning causes de Certeau to cast around for other 'technological practices', which lack the coherence of the panopticon, which may be scattered, heterogeneous and 'polytheist' but whose silence or existence outside dicourse endows them with the potential to "produce a fundamental diversion within the institutions of order and knowledge." And herein lies the paradox of de Certeau's undertaking, namely to articulate a practice of resistance whose very status as such, not to mention efficacy, relies on its resistance to articulation. But for de Certeau, it seems, the guarantor of their survival is their imbrication in the very heart of regulatory disciplines such as consumption. They constitute the ineradicable indexes of alternative techniques and practices which return, like the repressed, in the disciplinary regime which attempts to dispel them. A project by Bunting that seems to lie closer to this understanding of tactics, and yet perhaps exemplifies the difference of tactical media all the more, is his X Project begun in 1996. Combining his predilection for wandering about city streets and the semi-legal practice of tagging in chalk with his interest in the emergent social space of the Net , Bunting began a systematic programme of tagging the URL 'www.irational.org/x' in strategic places, primarily in London but also in other sites such as Bath, Amsterdam and Berlin (one presumes he simply tagged in the cities he happened to visit). If a passer by, on observing the URL, felt inclined to look it up on the Net they found a white page with minimal information on it. Underneath a JPEG derived from the chalked tag are the following three questions: "Where did you see this chalked? (Please include city and country)"; "Why do you think it was done?" and "Who do you think did it?" On filling out and submitting the questionnaire, a page which collates all the answers is downloaded. Today there are several hundred entries. The specific sites that the artist chose to tag were by no means random; in London Bunting primarily chose bridges (Hungerford and Waterloo) as well as international sites of significance to new media culture such as Clink St. (the site of an independent media laboratory Backspace where Bunting and Rachel Baker often worked), The Hub in Bath and De Waag in Amsterdam. It is likely that the bridges indicate the notion of crossing between zones - the central activity of X Project - and that the media centres also intimate concerted initiatives to depart local geography and enter into series of remote collaborations. By means of the chalk tag, Bunting has created a semiotic and functional portal between virtual and physical space. In contrast to Digital Hijack, X Project taps into the contingencies of wandering. Rather than manufacturing a shock for the viewer, caught unawares in the midst of their impervious passage through the regularised space of the search engine, Bunting positions his tag to be caught by the corner of the eye in the midst of an awkward climb up the steep steps of a bridge or in the nooks and crannies of back streets - a mode in which awareness of place is heightened. The chalked tag catches the walker in the midst of a tactical traversal and the project's completion relies upon the viewer's alertness and curiosity to pursue this index of virtual space in the midst of an actual place. Rather than reinforcing the sense of the homogeneous order of virtual space, Bunting hybridises physical and virtual space and creates a tear not only in the latter but also in the former . Interestingly, it is by making this incision in the self-containment of each - or rather making explicit the impossibility of such self-containment - that the contingent and self-erasing nature of wandering can be mapped, recorded and co- ordinated. This suggests the potential of a view from above that is created from below and a reversal of the power implied in this same reversal. Rather than the fantasy of legibility implying a disengagement from the everyday, here legibility is created by and for the walker, the subject of the gaze. Perhaps this text is written blind, but it promises the eventual possibility of being read. The series of correspondences which 'emerge' on the website brings into being the consciousness of the cumulative potential of individual wandering. Tactical media art is here shown to be not only the coming to self- consciousness of those silently resistant ways of operating, but also the power resident in this coming to consciousness. A recognition that precipitates an aggregation, and hence the realisation of the power which these myriad movements compose. The first in a long series of answers to the question "Why do you think it was done?" encapsulates this notion very well: "to collide the known with the emergent." Has VR really killed desire? Tactics and 'Post-Oedipal' Space Bunting's interplay of 'real' space and 'virtual space', their ability to interrupt each other, poses an interesting question to a popular formulation of Slavoy Zizek's. In a series of writings on cyberspace and the functioning of desire , Zizek proposes that virtualisation reveals the always-already virtual nature of reality - the role of the symbolic order - at the same time as bringing about a 'psychotic' suspension of the symbolic order that structures this same reality. In the beginning of his essay "Quantum Physics with Lacan" , Zizek illustrates this point by referencing Lacan's discussion of courtly love. For Lacan, courtly love is not a means of intensifying desire by creating more obstacles between its subject and object, but rather of concealing the fact that the possibility of satisfying desire per se does not exist; an impossibility that is concealed by its very prohibition. In Lacan's own formulation courtly love is: "A very refined manner of supplanting the absence of the sexual relationship by feigning that it is us who put the obstacle in its way." Desire, explains Zizek, is a short circuiting between the 'primordially lost Thing' and an empirical object which is elevated to the order of the former: "this object thus fills out the 'transcendental' void of the Thing, it becomes prohibited and thereby starts to function as the cause of desire." In cyberspace, however, (and for Zizek, it is important to remember, his definition of cyberspace hangs somewhere between its actual and projective forms in the absence of specific, concrete examples), when 'every' empirical object can be immediately obtained without the ordinary frustrations such as the need to cross physical space or the unavailability of the desired item, "the absence of the prohibition necessarily gives rise to anxiety." The question that is posed here is how desire can be sustained let alone function when its paradoxical nature - "the fact that desire is sustained by lack and therefore shuns its satisfaction, that is, the very thing for which it officially strives" - is lain bare. Zizek answers this by describing a trend in which the computer generation becomes increasingly unable to tolerate the look of desire in others, and are wont to forget about a possible sexual liason because, for example, they are too engrossed in playing computer games or interacting in chatrooms. As prohibition is lifted and desire declines, last ditch attempts to preserve the dignity of the sexual object are mounted such as PC and religious fundamentalism. But the real effect of these prohibitive discourses is a phobic reaction to 'normal' sexual enjoyment which is everywhere cast as perverted. This, argues Zizek, develops the subject as pathological Narcissus who prefers 'interaction' with the computer over sexual engagement with another. Both VR and 'interactivity' are in Zizek's terms 'Orwellian misnomers', covering up in the former the demise of the already virtual structuration of reality and in the latter the increasing isolation of the individual who no longer interacts properly with others. At the root of the individual's primordial envelopment in virtual space is "the dream of a language which no longer acts upon the subject merely through the intermediate sphere of meaning, but has direct effects in the real." Yoked to this dream of profound involvement, is the radical disengagement of the post-oedipal subject. The psychotic's relation to the symbolic (one which Zizek compares to the subject of cyberspace) is defined by externality and overproximity. On the one hand he/she is not interpellated into the symbolic order (the signifying chain is 'inert') and remains outside it, and on the other the gap between 'things' and 'words' is collapsed and he/she starts to treat words as things or things start to speak themselves. In cyberspace, the space between word and thing which sustains sense is collapsed, as is 'symbolic engagement' which operates in this space, resulting in radical disengagement: "I can pour out all my dirty dreams, precisely because my word no longer obliges me, is not 'subjectivised'." Interestingly, however, Zizek shies away from describing a total collapse of the symbolic economy in cyberspace or virtual reality (interchangeable terms it seems here). Instead, he sees the agreement between users to suspend the usual performativity of the symbolic order as analagous to the agreement between analyst and analysand in which the normal performativity of the speech is also suspended; the analysand can hurl verbal abuse at the analyst and it won't be taken personally. Likewise, in cyberspace, the participant consents to 'play the game' in which, despite words having little or no performative value, they are nonetheless bound by the symbolic pact of the 'act of faith' in which intersubjective relations in cyberspace are contained. One of the main difficulties with Zizek's analysis is his characterisation of cyberspace itself as the context in which this new order of subjecthood finds its perfect conditions. Although Zizek does not imply that the disappearance of prohibition is a consequence of cyberspace itself, he certainly sees cyberspace as producing no internal resistance to its unbridled advance. His homogeneous description of the typical cyber subject and his mode of activity betrays the limitation of Zizek's model; he seems invariably to be talking about a cliché of the anti-social, well-healed, masculine, avidly consuming and games playing computer geek. Cyberspace itself is cast as the ultimate consumption machine whose success lies in its ability to collapse the sign into the thing itself; the immateriality of the commodity. However, as we have seen above in the example of Bunting's work, although the Net entails this radical mutability that undoubtedly vehiculates Zizek's collapse of the word into the thing, or by which the word becomes the thing, and the thing thereby becomes as malleable as words, the collision of virtual and real space can and does occur revealing that the Net's consistency is far from simple. That is to say, the leakage between these two spheres reveals not only a resistance to the pyschotic collapse that Zizek himself ultimately denies through his recourse to the symbolic pact, but also the possibility of using virtual space to enunciate the practices of everyday life - practices which remain outside 'the proper' - into a shared language which might entail performativity. There are numerous mundane examples in which individuals feel obliged to be as good as the word they give via the Internet, but here we are also interested in the opportunity cyberspace gives for co-ordinating the confused multiplicity of inidividual idiolects, of converting tactics into something close to strategies. An exceptional example of this are the protests against the WTO which occurred in Seattle in late November/early December 1999 which serve as an example of this tranformative potential of cyberspace. Here a multiplicity of political ideologies and actors were coordinated via the Net into a formidably performative display of resistance against a powerful agent of globalisation. But without the entry of another spatial, symbolic and atom- based system of 'words and things', is Zizek's notion of our unimpeded access to the (albeit nonexistant) object of desire in cyberspace quite accurate? Does the erasure of distance between our desire for the object and the object itself, the immediacy of delivery which can be figured as the subsumption of space by time in computer networks, really guarantee receipt? Rachel Baker's work Dot2Dot reveals the very skillful capacity of the Net to frustrate desire. In this work, Baker takes her cue from the Net porn industry which typically lures the viewer/consumer deeper and deeper into a site with free 'thumbnail' GIFs promising the full scale image but which ultimately delivers the image either at a price or, if free, only on an illegibly small scale . Far from the theoretical end of scarcity which the Net promises and Zizek assumes has been achieved, digital scarcity is imposed in order to intensify desire and thus increase the monetary value of the digital object. In Dot2Dot Baker picks up on this Net porn technique and exaggerates its manipulations to reveal the powerful hold that (pornographic) commodity fetishism still has in the Net. The art website's homepage is a dot 2 dot drawing of a copulating man and woman against a deep blue background whose subject matter, although largely composed of dots and numbers, is not difficult to make out. As is usual with these childrens' games, certain areas of the final drawing are already filled in. In Dot2Dot, these parts are the woman's eye and hands, and the man's mouth, penis tip, and fingers. Here the peek-a-boo suggestiveness of certain pornographic images is undercut by the delineation rather than concealment of the sexually 'significant' parts. Each dot in the drawing also doubles as a link to another page on the site where a predictably salacious GIF is offered (e.g. "fist inserted fully into pussy") but only on condition that the viewer/consumer enters personal details such as their name and company details. Having submitted these, the viewer is brought straight to the irational.org homepage and the promise is never honoured. Through this frustrated libidinal circuit, Baker not only intimates how the traditional commodity's never-honoured 'promissory note' is still operative, but also how the consumer is willing to submit more and more personal data in its pursuit. The exchange of one real data body for the unkept promise of another. Baker's hoax can in some ways be compared with Etoy's Digital Hijack; as with the hijack, Baker is playing on the notional conformity of the viewer. The level of cooperation that individuals will countenance, their willingness to exchange valuable personal data on the vague promise of some form of libidinal gratification is at issue in this work. But unlike the hijack, the viewer has sought out this confrontation by keying in the work's URL, finding it through a search engine or entering it through the irational.org homepage. In most cases, we can surmise, the viewer's acquiescence is unusually self- conscious because it is given within the differently signifying context of an artwork. This might for instance result in the input of totally false information which, unlike with other commercial websites, would not effect the user's further passage in any adverse way. A more important difference, however, is that where Etoy attempts to alert viewers to the compromised nature of the search engine's 'neutrality' through hacking its system, Dot 2 Dot merely replicates the porn industry's production, manipulation and frustration of desire. Here, no radical alternative is even mooted. In contrast to Etoy who create an interruption and in so doing point to the manipulability of the status quo (an instance of Zizek's symbolic suspension?), Baker foregrounds the extra-technical limitations to digital malleability exerted by the intersection of symbolic and economic forces. If Baker and Bunting's works both point to the outside of an endlessly differential and simulacral field of play which challenge Zizek's reading of cyberspace, his primary discussion of prohibition and desire are confirmed rather than challenged by their work. The need to point to the stoppages, tears, leaks and limits to the virtual sphere is a central part of their work which can be seen as a way of of maintaining the function of desire which in turn produces action. The short circuiting mentioned above between the 'primordial Thing' and the empirical object, the construction of desire's object, can be seen at play within the construction of place where empirical objects are similarly invested and so animated. This is demonstrated by the promise of belonging that place exerts on the subject but can never wholely fulfill. I would like to propose that the pull exerted by place and by the things out of which place is composed, together with the subject's desire to consume these things in their quest for belonging or of jouissance, is essential to the practice of tactics which, as de Certeau points out, can be found at the heart of consumption. But hasn't place also been described here as ceding to space? And is it not more accurate to talk about the total disappearance of limit in the simulacral economy in which, if we follow Baudrillard's argument, the invasion of exchange value into all aspects of life becomes the locus of the radical equivalence of things; the end of the metaphysics to which place and desire belong? Is not the callousing of Erlebnis touched on above not also a sign, both on and offline, that this is becoming the case? Are we not so inured to the shocks of our environment that they too become merely differential? By turning finally to a work by Jodi - certainly not a categorically tactical net artwork in the manner of Heath Bunting - I will attempt to answer this problem through the trope of estrangement. An analysis of this work helps formulate the question: is it necessary to feel the exertion of place, with all the vicissitudes of desire that it might imply, in order to practice a tactics? Does the putative equivalence of things, the conversion of place into space, cancel the possibility of Erfahrung out of which, paradoxically place is created? Jodi's piece whose title, as is usual for them, is also its URL, http://sod.jodi.org is based on the source code of a 'shoot 'em up' style computer game called Wolfenstein. In the spirit of the 'open source' movement - based in part on the belief that 'software should be free', but more consistently on the belief that the best software is the product of a whole community's programming efforts rather than the isolated and secretive programming methods of commercial companies - the games company ID Software published the Wolfenstein source code in 1999(??) . This cult, multi-player game has subsequently become the raw material of several Jodi artworks . In Jodi's Web piece, the look of a programming shell interface has been simulated. That is to say, the viewer is confronted with the garishly coloured field of text boxes in which programmers write code, but which also recall early or lower order computer interfaces. This interface has the nostalgic quality of a once 'transparent' computing age in which the apparent legibility of the computer's operating system and file structures found its analogue in the rudimentary visual range (for example, pixel size and colour distribution). In this piece, Jodi have taken various sequences within the Wolfenstein source code and hyperlinked them together. This means that the utility of the original code has been rendered not only the obsolete object of aesthetic contemplation but has also been repurposed as a set of Internet hyperlinks. This would be analagous to using an old wagon wheel as the support for a coffee table. This repurposing of code is one example of the estrangement at work in http://sod.jodi.org; as with a shard from an absent lifeworld preserved in a museum, Jodi's autopsy of code and its transposition to the different programming environment of the WWW endows it with a ghostly quality. The lifeworld from which it has been severed clings to it as a negativity or absence making its existence in its new environment only a partial one. It is perhaps no coincidence then that, on actually reading the code, one notices that the coincidence of death - a typical subject of computer games - and the instrumental nautre of programming language begin to produce a macabre and amusing quasi poetry. For example, one sequence runs: "// Test if death sequence is done if (death sequence is done) { // change state to death player-state = DEAD } //end if death is done } // end if dying else // player must be death { // the player is dead, so clean up the mess" The lines 'change state to death' and 'player must be death' certainly resonate with the notion of the 'post-oedipal' state gestured to by Zizek which would, in its eternally deferred realisation, be premised on the passing out of the symbolic order into an unimaginable beyond; a place in which the old signifying chain has become 'inert'. Could we see the non- functionality of this code, accordingly, as equivalent to the non-performativity of words in cyberspace? Or does the importation of one programming language into another programming environment and its subsequent obsolescence provides us with another example of a 'limit'? Is this not an instance of how words and things are not commensurate in computer space, even if those things are made up of words or signs and how words or code can guarantee a certain set of operations in one environment which do not translate to another. Through its deconstruction into an object of contemplation, Wolfenstein allows itself to be read again as a commentary on its own casual instrumentalisation of death: "end if death is done". An inversion occurs which allows the normally buried linguistic underpinning of the game's interface to speak over and even against the very spectacle which they engender. This then would appear to be an example of how the mutability of the digital object and limit can be seen operating at the same time but not univocally. As with collage, the repurposed data object will always drag with it its former signifying context thus throwing into doubt the degree to which Baudrillard's radical equivalence of things can really be said to exist. The locus of exchange has not completely subsumed the loci of meaning, exchange value has not completely eclipsed use value (even in cyberspace), nor have words necessarily lost their performativity, especially if we allow that the instrumentality of programming language constitutes a new kind of performative utterance. Conclusion Even though data objects on the Net, or in virtual space, may not reside in their own exclusive locations in the same way that they do in real places, we have seen that they are nonetheless capable of being estranged. This estrangement, conversely, suggests a rightful place which here I have considered through functionality. The location of information objects, as with things in 'real' places to a degree, cannot be read simply from their co-existence with other things as de Certeau has suggested, but also through their functionality which might or might not be transplantable. In this respect, what we might term 'place' on the Internet, is much closer to a practice than an occupation, which is de Certeau's definition of space: "space is a place practiced" . Indeed virtual space, as with physical place, can only ever be experienced through practice; when the possibility of certain practices is rendered obsolete (the transference of a piece of code), the sense of being out of place draws our attention to its very existence in the computer network. The recognition of this heterogenous consistency of the Net provokes, in turn, the consideration that virtual space itself might well be another 'Orwellian misnomer'. Not only does the Net span the real space of its sprawling infrastructure and the representational space of the screen image (spatial categories hardly without precedent before the advent of the Net), but its totality is also filled with the material and symbolic limits common to real space evidenced, for example, in malfunctions. However where this space is radically different from either physical or representational space is the immense capacity of the digital to combine heterogenia and thus to create mutations; a capacity which becomes the leverage point of tactical net art and media. What makes the medium of the Net so interesting to net artists is the ease with which discrete functions (search engines, source codes, networked CCTV cameras etc.) can be repurposed and re-embedded into separate contexts or operations. Far from making these functionalities all equivalent, their availablity for hybridisation contains the possibility of a clash of new and old contexts or utilities. In this sense the tactics dispalyed in net art or tactical media differ from the tactics displayed by the walker in the city in which the environment is relatively fixed, and come closer to the tactics at work within language. As with language there are rules of syntax, but the mobility of its constituent parts is far greater than within the built environment. It is somewhere between the resistance of syntax and the hybridity and mobility of the online world that the tactics of net art are situated. In this respect, their work can be said to occur in an indeterminate stage between the recession of certain limits (here read in both a material and symbolic sense) and the creation of new ones. Without wishing to ignore the very real sense in which the Net courts the deadening quality of equivalence, the flattened experiential order of Erlebnis, it seems that an important realisation of tactical net art is the possibility for interrupting equivalence with hybridity. Not all spaces in the Net refelct the same degree of deterritorialisation, for example or effect the same non- performativity of language. But conversely, the deterritorialisation of the Net and its capacity for the endless reproduction of equivalent data has been seen to provide the basis upon which the scattered multiplicity of 'walkers' and idiolects can be formed into a totality which hints at the paradox of a heterogeneous yet coherent form of power emerging within the (now post?) disciplinary society. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive