"In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art."

If, according to Malraux, the museum guarantees the status of art and photographic reproduction permits the affinities of style, what might a digital recording underwrite? Art as image-text, as info-pixel? An archive without museums? If so, will this database be more than a base of data, a repository of the given?

"'It rained in Oxford every day this week,' carries little information, because the receiver is not surprised by it. On the other hand, 'It rained in the Sahara desert every day this week' would be a message with high information content. . . . Shannon wanted to capture this sense of information content as 'surprise value.' It is related to the other sense-'that which is not duplicated in other parts of the message'-because repetitions lose their power to surprise."

"'Arr JFK Fri pm pls mt BA Cncrd flt' carries the same information as the much longer, but more redundant, 'I'll be arriving at John F. Kennedy airport on Friday evening, please meet the British Airways Concorde flight.' Obviously, the brief telegraphic message is cheaper to send (although the recipient may have to work harder to decipher it-redundancy has its virtues if we forget economics.)"

"In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source. These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy for facsimile), etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise."

"Several different maps of information have been put on the block for our inspection: frontier, castle, real estate, rhizome, hive, matrix, virus, network,"

"Net art. The name is equivocal. A good name. It leaves open all the questions and asks them anyway. Is this an art form, a new genre? An anthology of valued activity conducted in a particular arena defined by display on a computer monitor? The kind of net activity made by a special class of people--artists--whose works are exhibited primarily in what is called "the art world"--ARTISTS' NET ACTIVITY? An inspection of the names in the online catalog gives the easy and not quite sufficient answer that it is this last we are considering, ARTISTS' NET ACTIVITY. But is this a class apart? Artists have been making net pieces for scarcely ten years--if we disregard one or two flimsy hacker jobs and Ivan Sutherland's 1962 "Sketchpad"--and net activity has been a fact of gallery life for barely 5 years Yet we've already had group exhibitions, panels, symposia, magazine issues devoted to this phenomenon, for the very good reasons that more and more artists are using the net and some of the best work being done in the art world is being done on the net. Which is why a discourse has already arisen to greet it. Actually two discourses: one, a kind of enthusiastic welcoming prose peppered with fragments of communication theory and McLuhanesque media talk; the other, a rather nervous attempt to locate the "unique properties of the medium." Discourse 1 could be called "cyberscat" [!] and Discourse 2, because it engages the issues that pass for "formalism" in the art world, could be called "the formalist rap." [emphasized words are substitutions]

"Information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. . . . If all choices are equally likely, the more choices there are, the larger H will be. There is more 'information' if you select freely out of a set of fifty standard messages, than if you select freely out of a set of twenty-five."

"These archival photographs expose the museum's use of didactic material to persuade the public of its liberal point of view as well as its aesthetic ideas."

"The hardest thing talking about computers is that things aren't always what they seem. You can do things with a computer for a long time without actually touching their essence, because they are such chameleons: they spend most of their time imitating other media, like paper, television, cartoons, movies. Most people who have used the computer have never touched what it is actually about. What's inside it is not esotric in the way quantum mechanics is esoteric. Almost everyone can learn to drive a car, to some extent, in about half an hour. But I have never found a way of explaining in a satisfactory manner what the music of a computer is in about half an hour. So I have to make an analogy. The most important thing to understand about the computer is that if it were a book, then it is a book that can dynamically read and write itself. Its static content is the same as paper. The computer contains just abstract markings, from which you can fashion anything--the symbols for language, any mathematics, any pictures. But that's too atomic a way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that much of its dynamic content is descriptions of media. It is a language machine that deals with things that are like sentences, and can not only move those sentences around and write them, but also read and write them. In a fairly open-ended way. It's a whole new way to deal with relationships between ideas."

"In this essay, we will explore the idea of emergence. We will examine how objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive. We will present examples with simple squares that turn on and off, but the underlying ideas will provide you with a new perspective for thinking about many phenomena in the everyday world."

"In the telematization of the creative process, the roles of artist and viewer, designer and consumer, become diffused; the polarities of maker and user become destabilized. This will lead ultimately, no doubt, to changes in status, description, and use of cultural institutions: a redescription (and revitalization, perhaps) of the academy, museum, gallery, archive, workshop, and studio. A fusion of art, science, technology, education, and entertainment into a telematic fabric of learning and creativity can be foreseen."