Between February and June 1998 everything Editorial were resident at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London where we compiled and produced two net casts (eBC 1 and 2). These took the form of TV shows and aimed to emphasize the distance between the promise of the convergence of TV and the net and its clunky, buffering reality. The first took the format of a news and current affairs program and the second the 'Eurovision Song Contest' model - represented as The Millennium Jingle Contest.

When we created eBC we wanted to create a dysfunctional space by attempting to create a functional space. Our point was that the medium was dysfunctional when compared with TV and this dysfunctionality gave it a certain charm and humour.

The archiving process presents us with a similar impossibility for a number of reasons:
a) The archiving changes the nature of the project. In this formulation things become a matter of record. One of the first things to fall away is the relationship between the live and the remote event, between the spectacle of an event happening live, in front of a live audience and the occasion of someone sitting in front of their computer in Nebraska, say.
b) The upgrading of browsers and applications, the increased power and speed of computers will make the glitches and stutters, which were inherent in the original net casts, seamless (they might even be smart enough to fill in the dropped frames). Maybe in a few years the production will be - in the sense particular to the flow of images - pristine.
Unlike the process of colourisation, where a decision would have to be made to change the original, here no decision will be made, technology's tendency to perfect itself will make those changes for us automatically. We were attempting to make a vain attempt to interrupt this flow toward seamlessness.
To see it in its original state would therefore require the creation of a further artifice: buying a computer of sufficient slowness, installing 1998 versions of real player, netscape 4 ect. If we follow this logic to its extreme sooner or later a large part of the planet will be taken up with Museums of Obsolete Technology.

The choice of artists might also seem curious as many are not particularly assosiated with the emergent form of net.art. The majority have a strong narrative element to their work and are all interested, to varying degrees, in the 'kak aesthetic'.
A curiosity about how a machine brakes down is sometimes more interesting than a fetishisation on how a machine works.

e/E March 99