One of the readings for several of the classes listed in Randall Packer's Course Information is Margot Lovejoy's "Art as Interactive Communications : Networking a Global Culture", chapter 6 (pages 212-247) in Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media. (Prentice Hall, 1997, 2nd ed. ISBN 0131587595). I'll leave it to you to buy or borrow it if you'd like to read it, but I would like to list some of the websites which are mentioned there and are still findable on the Web. The fluidity of the Web is such that links can disappear overnight (or be redirected in odd and usual ways) but some really interesting sites have been relocated or still exist. Of course, there is still the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive if you want to find the original thing and you know the original URL. This is a bad site to go to if you are easily distracted - there are links to archives of old recordings and old movies. I've seen a film from 1906 San Francisco there. I've also used the Wayback machine to find a copy of a webpage I had in 2002. Sort of like a Web ghost since I know that the web pages have been totally erased from the server.

But I digress -

According to Lovejoy, "one of the first art works on the World Wide Web" was Antonio Muntadas' "The File Room". It has been at its new site, since 2001. Basically, it is a project having to do with censorship of all types. Incidentally, if you want to read books that have been banned over the years, go to Banned Books Online.

I've been an admirer of Jenny Holzer's work for some time so I'm pleased to see that her "Please Change Beliefs" web installation is still on äda 'web. Julia Scher's "Security Land" is there as well. I found that Scher's installation was better visited after Holzer's, since it is then more obvious that she has 're-arranged' the other artists exhibits.