"What is given to thought nowadays cannot be written according to the line and the book, unless we were to imitate the operation that would consist in teaching modern mathematics with the help of an abacus. This inadequacy is not modern, but more representative today than ever. The access to multidimensionality and to a non-linear temporality is not a simple retrogression to "mythogram": on the contrary, it makes all rationality subject to the linear model appear as one more form and one more epoch of "mythography".

Jacques Derrida

"A new type of artist emerges, an architect of the space of events, an engineer of worlds for billions of stories to come: he sculpts that which is virtual."

Pierre Lévy

"... the amazing growth of our means, and the flexibility and precision they have reached... assure us of the next very deep changes in the old industry of the Beauty. In all arts there is a physical part that cannot be seen nor be treated as beforehand... We may expect these great novelties to transform all of the artistic technique... perhaps even marvellously modifying the notion of art itself."

Paul Valéry

When Walter Benjamin chose this quotation of Valéry with which to start his essay "The Work of Art at the Time of its Technical Reproduction", he intended to show that the image reproduction technologies, such as photo and cinema, altered the heart of the artistic experience, affecting the concepts of aura, cultural value and authenticity. He believed this change was a positive one, for it unmasked the elitist ideology of the western aesthetics. For Benjamin, with the advent of new image technologies, art should not be understood as opposed to the cultural industry, but within it."

This is the theoretical framework in which we plan the curatorship of the Web Art Nucleus of the 24ª São Paulo International Biennale. If both photography and cinema were first in affecting the idea of artistic authenticity, the Internet comes to destroy it for good. A piece of work created for the Web is, by definition, infinitely reproducible. When dealing with computerised files or clones, how to discern the false from the original ones? The easiness of the digital copy through the Web, stimulate the indiscriminate usage of "quotations". How to distinguish the anthropophagic appropriation of the authorship cannibalism in the world of software?

The World Wide Web is a fruit of this quotation and appropriation overlap. How to work on the interweave which often is nothing but the nonsense entangled threads ? Would it be possible to select a few among the millions of pages (or sites) interwove in this web which surrounds the planet? The concept of curatorship itself should be appraised in this new media in which any person may use automatic search systems and research in selected addresses indexes.

Therefore, our curatorship action is structured as a reflection or mirroring the web itself, a miniature web, always under construction and open to the collective creation. The nodes of this web are a vocabulary of signs related to anthropophagy, cannibalism and the World Wide Web. The visitor to the site will navigate on these moving words and at a mouse click will get to know those websites initially selected for the exhibit. Nevertheless, the curatorship action will be a work in progress, permanently reelaborated during the Biennale’s term. The visitors will be able to indicate new sites for links to the web signs. The outcome will be a participating exhibit, which invites the visitors to become curators themselves – thus raising issues on presence, monitoring, interactivity, time and space.

Half anthropophagic by excellence, the Web absorbs it all in the more and more complex contents interlink produced in all corners of the globe. The oswaldian posture perpetuates itself in this curatorship proposal that abandons the authorship fetish in order to be structured as a process. Hence we intend to anthropophagically devour the visitor to the exhibit who will then transform from an observer into a curator. Paraphrasing the "Manifest": only that which is not ours is appealing.

Ricardo Ribenboim
Curator

Ricardo Anderáos
Adjunct-curator