It is a common thing that new informational technologies develop new means for the self-expression of an artist. Of course, each piece of art is made with the help of certain tools and materials. It is clear what we have in mind if we say oil and canvas or pencil and paper. But in our epoch this classification has lost its meaning. It is quite unimportant with what means modern artists produce their products. However, if we ask which material is the most congenial for modern art, it is certainly information. Consequently, we can expect that media art is the field in which the most interesting art works will be produced.

On the other hand, we have learned that the technological approach prevails in net art. As a rule, it is more important by what means these works were produced than in what environment and with what ideas. In general the scene of net art looks very primitive. As a rule, it is something like disco-acid snot. Technological aesthetics predominate over everything else. The so-called ASCII ART and use of the graphic elements of Internet browsers, and HTML code itself as a means of self-expression and the outstanding concept of "zero content" -- all this as a whole presents a picture of a children's hobby group where young boys construct models and young girls embroider in silk. So let's leave technological experiments aside, and see instead whether it is possible to make something adequate to the modern situation. A modern human being exists under the influence of great number of illusions. Here is one of them - if I am associating with another person and say to him A, then he will hear exactly this A, and if he answers B, I will understand him clearly. If we hold this opinion, then of course we should believe that the means of modern communication offer fantastic possibilities for intercourse and a long life for technical progress! But I will try to doubt this.

I'd like to call your attention to the point that information is not a simple linear material with which one can do everything that is in one's power. The matter is not the simple resistance of material but some fundamental character of information itself. I could give many examples of what happens with notorious information when it streams on modern, superfast, communicative channels. But I don't want to loose time with meaningless texts from the gutter press. Everybody can recall a good ridiculous example of distortion of information, which took place due to the incompetence of a reporter or the idiocy of an editor. Perhaps only an old Russian anecdote can provide a good example of the messages in the media. One hussar says to another -- have you heard what happened yesterday? Our captain played over 100 thousand in the officer clubhouse. Oh yes, answers another, but it's not quite right -- not yesterday but two weeks ago, not in the clubhouse but at the ball of the governor-general, not played over but got drunk as a pig, not the captain but the lieutenant, and the rest is correct.

Nevertheless it's not a prerogative only of the yellow editions. Very refined and intellectual media could give us wonderful burlesques. My beloved example is a phrase from the translation of Foucault (from Russian into English) in one of the Moscow art magazines. The very simple English word "juxtaposition" turned into "position of Juxta" as though this Juxta was a great thinker and his portrait should hang somewhere between the portraits of Plato and Aristotle.

The subject is not factual mistakes or incorrect translations, the subject is that information itself begins to live according to own laws. It streams on those superfast channels toward a tremendous ocean, on which waves and waterspouts fly independent of concrete human beings or powerful institutions. It's possible here to remember the thinking ocean by Stanislav Lem or the artificial intellect from the serial "X-files." But I would offer another model. Permanently, from birth to death, we are situated in this ocean. We are permanently exposed to its influence. And if we open our mouth to say A to our interlocutor then can we trust that the information ether will bring to him exactly this A? And what will be if a couple of news- or PR-agencies are somewhere in the chain between a correspondent and an addressee? And then, if our interlocutor says B, and we, as it were, are sure that we can listen well and make no mistake, can we be sure that it is really he who says it, or perhaps that he has simply opened his mouth and the words of the great primordial text have flown from it? So if the thing is so complex, polysemantic and indirect, then the appropriate question arises -- how should an artist behave in this situation?

Let have a look, which possibilities exist. Formerly art was impersonal, theocentric and occupied itself with the imitation of the world, created by the Supreme Being. The personality of an author did not matter. To create something beautiful meant to approach God, but the ideal was, of course, unattainable. Then as a result of the natural development of philosophical ideas, there arose the ideology of modernism, according to which an author is a genius, not equal to God but a substitute for him, who is able to form and rebuild the world according to his own conception. But there are too many ingenious authors and they, of course, enter into competition. Only a single metanarration is impossible in the postmodernism, but there are a lot of equitable conceptions that can enter into the struggle. If we try to consider the subject on an economic level, we can say that modernism is a period of creation of values, and that postmodernism is a market period, a period of the change of commodities. And in the period of religious art everything was free, gratis, simply from God. The artist's idea of himself corresponds to each of these periods. And the main fact of the matter is that an artist necessarily had his own position. It could be principle of revolt or of worship, but the principle itself had to be necessary. [...]