The take-off of the Web Net Museum at Paris during the ISEA 2000
(from the 7th to 10th of December 2000)
by Fred Forest

I think that the moment could not be better selected, in electronic time as in geographical space, to launch an institution such as the Web Net museum !
An institution which differs from any institution.
To tell the truth, it is a kind of infra experimental laboratory which will work the memory, the time and the space as the baker works water, the flour and the leaven, to make bread.
At the precise time where ISEA 2000 joins together in Paris the best international of the thinkers, the theorists, the artists who are prosperous and highly respected, and makes them work on the problems of the Revelation, it was convenient, even eminently necessary, to bring a " different " glance on the flow of appearances in progress.
It is what we endeavoured to do here with the independence of mind, freedom, that the Net offers today to any citizen, to any individual, to any artist.
What gives us the right to affirm and assume, now, fully our choices.
Thus from now, the " Web Net Museum " exists and its first initiative, dynamic, transversal, innovating, will have been to introduce fifteen artists.
Fifteen artists, refused or selected, it does not matter, by the sovereign assembly that constitutes international committee ISEA 2000, in theory qualified under the crook of ART3000. The Web Net Museum is not only a virtual online museum, it's well more than that, because he wants to be, above all, observatory, place of exchange, search, thought, crossing and also (why not?) of revelation ! Its potential network is so considerable that it's impossible to quote all the French and foreign cities which constitute it. A whole life would not be enough. The truth, it's all places of the whole world where there are, at least and at the same time, an electrical connector, a telephone and a computer. It's to say how much our virtual museum, without measurable ending, is to be posed and to proclaim themselves in the ideal : without geographical borders, borders of races, mental and cultural borders, definite style or school !
What distinguishes the Web Net Museum from the traditional museums, known as of contemporary art, is the informational flow that crosses it in real time and any direction, activates and interactives it, eliminating the risks to see a inopportune accumulation of the heteroclite and incongruous objects which can make stopper. The characteristic of the Web Net Museum is (at least in its intentions) to be, not only like evolutionary and with variable geometry, but homothetic of a " memory " of the Net, which it duplicates to some extent, and of which each part, therefore negligible is it, would only contain with it, the whole. A protoplasmic and fractal memory which falls under electronic navigations of the verb and writings. Navigations that we could imagine near to a circulation in the mythical fourth dimension.
In a more commonplace way, will not escape you from it, we will give you also information and scoops concerning the life of the Web Net Museum in real time, as they will occur. In the same way, we will deliver to you his program for the weeks to come, its research topics and, finally, the list of the random and creative telescoping programmed for its first year of existence.
Initially, in this December 2000, we have one objective : to make a success of our introduction on the first market of the virtual cultural and the digital. Logical continuation, if it is, after the public bidding of a virtual online image, Parcelle-Réseau in 96, and of a Internet site, Colour-Network in October 2000. This is why, today, we wish to concentrate on essence : i.e. the responsibility which falls to us from now on, for all that concerns the local and the global, as advanced sentinels on the network, in order not to miss the unexpected one when it emerges and merges with the all.
For the launching of the Web Net Museum fifteen artists were selected according to the following criteria :they are, either experienced artists, or young growths, or a famous unknown, whose potential talent, the motivation, passion, the invention, credit them with whole share with the right, like all the others, of being able today to present their work.
The choice of these names was made and is fully assumed, by Louis José Lestocart philosophical and Fred Forest, multimedia artist, high-skilled professor in Information and Communication Sciences of the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis.

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