Net.Porn.Art

A couple of days after tooling around on an Internet sex site, downloading things that ended up being not very interesting or not what I expected, I received an e-mail from a stranger. This chummy letter referred to one of the photos I had retrieved, and, among other things, asked if I wanted more. After some nervous checking around (by reading the urgent postings of other subscribers to alt.pictures.binary.erotica - the equivalent of shouting 'Narc!' in a smoke-filled room), I learned that this unsolicited missive was from the FBI: an invitation to become entrapped in a round up of paedophiles on the Internet. Intrigued and a bit panicky, I rescued the photo in question from my computer's trash folder, and waited for it to open up (as all downloaded pictures do, stripper-style: top to bottom, in tantalising increments, the 'male gaze' defined). And sure enough, despite the dropped pixels and grainy focus, there she was: a bare-assed nymphet, maybe 21, maybe 12. The only reason I'm not in jail right now, I suppose, is because I didn't take the Feds' bait.

In addition to the shock of something I already knew being made concrete - that someone, somewhere, was keeping a record of all the places I 'anonymously' visit - this narrow escape finally illuminated to me the quicksilver nature of the Internet. Beyond the hype about how it brings the world together, what the Internet has really accomplished is to bring our concept of action significantly closer to our previous concept of thought. Just as we'll say on the telephone words we won't say on the street, we'll type into our computer thoughts we don't dare speak: and in the strange writing/saying/doing language of the Internet, those thoughts become real. As I plucked anything that seemed interesting down off the net's porn-laden arbor, I gave no conscious heed to whether I really needed or wanted these things - or to the real-life consequences of my electronic gluttony.

Now, the notion of doing something public and portentous via a tiny, private act is nothing new; its Orwellian implications go back to, well, Orwell. But press the nuclear button, pull a gun's trigger, have unsafe sex, or just make an obscene gesture or sound and you're bound to get caught, or at least develop a reputation. On the net, however, with only the barest bit of care, you can be as lewd or vicious as you want, as often as you want, with scant fear of serious recrimination or shame.

For some, this state of affairs does not equal social ruin, but blessed liberation. Freedom from the mores of puritanical society and the accidents of history allows ideas to flow unencumbered by prejudice or handicap - the Internet as the right to free speech in its purest, most equitable form. But all the multilateral optimism about the wonderfully genderless, bodiless, supermodel-less world of the Internet is functionally no different from the libertarian rationales proffered by online porn-mongers. Abdicating responsibility is abdicating responsibility: while anonymity on the Internet allows us to reject social roles, it also denies us the opportunity to revise those roles - whether you're a person of colour with a complex opinion on the O.J. case or a suburban dad with a secret penchant for little boys.

Currently, there are only two classes of persons who openly operate with the same slippery impunity as can be found on the Internet: those who are already social pariahs, and artists. For a multitude of reasons, historical and psychological, artists can be considered respectable people and still regularly perform actions considered antisocial without damage (often with augmentation) to their good names. So along with the sinking feeling that I could now never become an elected official, my brush with infamy was heartening in that I could at least remain in the art world. And at the same time, I was alerted to the artistic ramifications of the paradigm shift I had experienced. For the Internet's bringing together of thought and action is the same fusion that conceptual art, from its inception, has struggled to produce.

A good conceptual artwork makes a case for the power of ideas to affect the world to which they are applied. It would seem, then, that the Internet should be among the foremost concerns of such art; oddly, however, art on or about the net assiduously avoids just this aspect. Look at the various online art sites and you will see instead reproductions of static artworks, discourses about static artworks, or presentations that make use only of the entertaining technical advances of the Internet - the same things fetishised in other, non-art promotions of its super-telephonic, super-televisual capabilities.

This is a shame, since art and the Internet could learn a lot from each other. In its 30-year history, conceptual art has dealt with issues of identity and access, problems the young Net is only beginning to acknowledge. Then again, art has chosen not to deal seriously with its own potential for illegality and harm, which would threaten, or at least lay bare its protected dual status as an academic discipline and a speculative commodity. These latter are also definitions for the Internet; it may therefore be a mistake to be looking for art to occur on the Internet at all. Perhaps the Net itself is the ultimate conceptual artwork, democratically bestowing upon its users the power of mind over matter. The Internet's pornography problem may only be the most visible manifestation of its paradigmatic undercurrent: a freedom of thought and elegant conservation of action that rivals conceptualism - or makes it obsolete.