Date sent: Sun, 04 Aug 1996 21:36:06 -0700
From: Alexei Shulgin
Organization: Moscow WWWArt Centre
To: nettime-l@Desk.nl, list@rhizome.com
Subject: nettime: indexes.html or Multiple Identity

indexes.html
or Multiple Identity

right at http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart

Homepage is one's identity in the Net. The first impression of a homepage often crucially affects our wish to go deeper into it. A human being can't have different faces at a discretion, a book can't have different covers simultaneously, a song or film can't have few beginnings. A homepage on the contrary can easily be multiple. You don't like that one? - Switch to another!

Making choices is an unresolvable problem. Why this or that? Why do you think you like black pants and Macintosh? Choosing something definite we immediately limit ourselves. The necessity of making choices offends me. Karl Marx said that freedom is realised necessity. I would say that freedom is above all freedom from necessity of making choices. We should not forget that people that new very well what to choose gave us fascism, bolshevism and postmodernism.

Thinking about Moscow WWWArt Centre's homepage I found out that: 1. I am not able to give a proper face to it because I don't know what is "proper".
2. I don't have to - it can have multiple face created by different artists.
3. I can shift off at least one choice to others (viewers).
4. It's a good and natural (unlike many clumsy attempts to bring different egos together in the Net) chance to make a collaborative project with other people and create a multi-site piece spread through the Net with a collective author.

I see it like this.
Once switched to Moscow WWWArt Centre's URL a viewer will see a list of available Moscow WWWArt Centre's homepages - all created by different artists. Each homepage is completely it's author's creature and intellectual property. It may contain a link to (and from) it's creator pages. The only limitation from Moscow WWWArt Centre is that this page must contain three links - to three groups (and sublists) that you can find at it's present state: Information, Communication and Self-expression (winf.htm, wcom.htm and wart.htm respectively). These links can appear as words, GIFs, maps, forms etc. I would welcome if artists create Moscow WWWArt Centre's homepages as parts of their current projects and make links to it from within their sites. I hope that Moscow WWWArt Centre's project will stimulate artists to develop it or/and give impulses to new projects.

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.....moscow wwwart centre......
http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart
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