In the 1950's Andre Malraux had proposed that in the modern age of printed imagery, reproductions of works of art on cards, in magazines and books constituted an imaginary museum. As the archives and collections of the worlds libraries and museums become instantly accessible on-line, the resulting proximity of information from geographically distant sources will bring to virtual fruition Malraux's notion of the 'museum without walls'.
 

On the Internet, hyperlink software allows for the connecting of text and image from distant sources in various linear and non-linear ways[22]. The connectivity of these 'hyper-links' across indefinite and inexhaustible sources can, indeed, be said to constitute a museum like environment to which access is universal, instantaneous and remote. In this multivalent virtual museum, the role of curator belongs to anybody with a home page who cares to set up a few hyper links.

 
The virtual museum goer can, in turn, negotiate or 'surf' his or her own way through and even around these links, interactively reorganising any given narrative. This indifference to authorial function, inherent in the new communications media, confers upon the viewer or reader the power to enact the esoteric postmodern fancy of the 'Death Of The Author' . To paraphrase the text of Peter Steiner's canine cartoon, 'on the Internet, nobody knows you're an author' or a curator even![27].
 

In the 'early days', networked art required some technical understanding of electronic media and was the domain of the committed computer or digital artist. However, just as 'icon and mouse' software transformed the notion of computer literacy, the World Wide Web has simplified and 'democratised' Internet access. As multimedia and video conferencing capabilities go on-line, fluidly articulating image, text, sound and video, the Internet will become the ideal medium for the presentation of yet unimagined hybrid cultural forms.
 

If the Internet was attracting artists even when it was a specialist arena, artists from the 'real' world are now going on-line at a tremendous rate. Some simply use the World Wide Web for presenting 'information' about themselves and their work in other media. Others have begun to treat the Internet as a medium for art on its own terms. What follows is a review, a virtual curation even, of 'sites' that attempt to reveal the technological, aesthetic, social and political parameters of computer mediated communications.
 

In The Failure of Marcel Duchamp/Japanese Fetish Even! Niranjan Rajah (who ever said that the author was DEAD!) locates his critique of European Aesthetics as a 'site' specific 'installation' in the World Wide Web. While interrogating the ontology of the image in Computer Mediated Communication, this work also attempts to mark the problem of cultural constituencies in the Internet.

 
In Performance art, live gestures are employed to take formal and conceptual ideas directly to the audience, outside the confines of museums and galleries. Unlike the conventions of theatre, here the artist is, normally, the performer. In A hypertext Journal, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie performed an on-line interactive travelogue with a 'remote' world wide audience who could make requests regarding the route or content of the tour. Taking with them laptop computers, a digital camera, sound and video equipment and two modems, they re-constructed the Scottish tour made by Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell's in 1773. The travelogue was published daily on the World Wide Web.
 

In the performance of Stellarc's Ping Body [26] the artist's 'body' was wired up to the internet so that a portion of its musculature would be stimulated into involuntary movement by the 'ebb and flow of internet activity'. At the Fractal Flesh event, an internet audience was able to remotely view and actuate the artist's body. Stellarc severs a portion of the body from individual will and extends agency over it, telematically, to other minds or even to the great Mind of minds that is the network. In Para-site, information, in the form of jpg images, is gathered from the Internet by a search engine and projected onto the artist's body, while the image data is translated into bodily stimulation. The body's own nervous system becomes part of a feed back loop. It generates information for the internet, while being automated by information from the Internet. The artist declares that via an 'extended virtual nervous system' the body becomes "enmeshed within an extended symbolic and cyborg system mapped and moved by its search prosthetics"!
 

If the metaphor of the body was initially applied to the organisation of business, in Bodies INCorporated, the metaphor of business organisation  is used to structure a virtual community. This multi-user environment, produced by Victoria Vesna, investigates the social psychology and the group dynamics of virtual bodies interacting in a networked community. 'Bodies', built from pre-determined parts, are given identities and operated by their owners in a public space forged via live internet links. This interaction of cyber 'avatars' is subject to 'corporate' regulation and is said to 'have implications in the material and the symbolic realms'. The bodies can be put on show, put on hold, killed and even altered outside of the owner's control. The emotional responses that emerge from the intercourse of these meta-corporial projections of ego are revealed in on line forums, and chats. These discussions evidence our need to create, direct and vicariously experience the human self as a simulacral other.
 

In Sweetness and Light, Roshini Kempadoo uses a 'plantation' analogy to address the neo-colonial inequities behind globalising media and communications network. Anette Weintraub's Realms is an interactive narrative of the urban landscape which negotiates the 'shared intimacy' of the World Wide Web. In Peeping Tom, Julie Myers explores how both observer and observed reveal themselves in the voyeurism of the Internet. The ada web  is a collabrative site that reflects on the Internet as a medium for communication in projects like Securityland, Jenny Holzer's Please Change Beliefs.
 

As the World Wide Web brings the cultural 'mainstream' on-line, larger and more sophisticated art sites are being produced with corporate, institutional and technological patronage. The Laboratory at Oxford University's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art presents Jake Tilson's works for the World Wide Web in The Cooker and David Mach's Quick Time Virtual Sculpture Vessel.
 

TUAREG is a group show involving Art In Ruins, Lori Bartol, Babara Bechtloff,  Louis Couturier, Jacky G. Lafargue Allan Knut Eckstein,  Hlynur Hallson,  Gerd Schmedes, An Seebach, Tomasz Thun and  Sylvie Ungauer which deals with issues like homelessness, mobility, nomads and related ideas/concepts.
 

Aharon Amir investigates the construction of time itself in an on line interactove VRML environment Time Creator
 

4D Duchamp  is a collaborative web project coordinated by Dew Harrison in which which involves the transposition of Duchamps 'Large Glass into hypermedia on the world wide web.
 

Keith Roberson's experiments with online videoconferencing reveal how this medium is an environment within art is
developing. His interactive (blue screen) performance works question the relations hip between the artist and his audience.
 

Heaven 194.94.211.200 by Paul Sermon and Joachim Blank involves the use of a CU-see me reflector and a World Wide Web site running off the same server. There are two 'CU-see me bots' permenantly logged on to the reflector who appear to be engaged in inteligent conversation and who engage with new visitors.
 

'VIRTUAL CURATION' is still under construction.