Blast
now operates as a mobile catalyst, developing a network of relationships with
other organizations, in order to accomplish highly specific tasks. It operates
as an agent of activity, a kind of marker or brand. We refer to this new program
as "Blast agencies."// Our intent is to focus attention on critical issues pertaining
to cultural practice in the network. By "network" we do not mean solely the Internet,
but a proliferating complex of global communications increasingly tied into one
another. We try to balance investigations of specific regions of net space (financial
networks, the web, social realms such as the MOO, and so on) with an emphasis
on the intersections and coordinations of on- and offline spaces -- particularly
in terms of the organizational protocols and imperatives through which these spaces
are synchronized, crossformatted, and brought "in line" with one another. While
our emphasis is in the field of representation, we seek to understand how representations
and built realities affect and constitute one another: how, on the one hand, the
image-field is urbanized, and on the other, the urban configures as a network
of inhabitable images. // We aim to articulate changes in the structure of representation
and the visual field -- what is going on in the image, how does one see it, how
is one made adequate to see it? How is one adjusted to its frequencies? How does
network representation operate, how does it signify, what identifications does
it compel? // We aim to develop progressive critical formats, which are historically-engaged
and actively confronting issues of globalization. We aim to facilitate cross-disciplinary
engagement among diverse fields of cultural practice -- opening up some productive
channels between that microcosm called the art world and broader, more engaged
fields of cultural practice. And finally, we aim to develop complex cultural articulations
rather than reductive multiculturalisms -- potent combinations of the local and
global, of national, transnational, and cultural identity.