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This is a love letter sent to Adam in 1996 when he was living in Amsterdam and I in California. We communicated via email, yet the disembodied language of e-mail and a double distance, not only physically but most importantly a distance in time, woke a desperate and silent attempt of making the writing machine into a sensual machine. I began scanning parts of my body and sending them to Adam. But a still image fell so short from conveying my desire to feel his beautiful skin on my hands, even if for a few seconds. The closest I could get to his machine and therefore to him was to caress the scanner itself, leaving finger print traces behind also captured by the scanner. And that is how Mediated Eros began. Thirty four frames dissolving onto each other as they press onto the glass. A monotonous female voice softly calls to her lover ‘I love you’ over and over and over. Adam is now my husband.

For Adam Eeuwens, with Electrotete.

Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Museum of Art wrote the following article for Business 2.0 in 2000, when he was curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where he curated a solo exhibition of my work in 1998.

Beyond the Canvas: The New Net Age Palette

Aaron Betsky is establishing a permanent collection of art Websites at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he is curator of architecture, design, and digital projects.

From the September 26, 2000 issue

By Aaron Betsky

Several years ago, Los Angeles—based artist and designer Rebeca Mendez traveled to the Netherlands for a conference, where the new-media star met editor and critic Adam Eeuwens. They fell in love, and for almost a year their relationship consisted of passionate emails and telephone calls. Then Adam received a strange attachment to one of Rebeca’s missives. He opened it up, and there on his Dutch computer saw Rebeca’s Los Angeles hands, caressing the screen of her scanner as she whispered ‘I love you, I love you’ over and over. Adam did the only thing he could: He turned off his computer, packed his bags, and moved to Los Angeles. Rebeca and he soon married. Rebeca later converted the image into a limited-edition print that is now owned by several major museums. The ghost of the body transmitted over the Internet has found a body that is–because of the artist’s ability–valuable enough to be stored, conserved, and venerated.

Sex seems to be on the brains of many of the artists and designers who are using the Internet to create. When the duo Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn, who collaborate in Belgium on the Entropy8Zuper.org Website, won the SFMOMA Webby award as the most accomplished artists working on the Web (I was a juror for that program), they celebrated in front of an audience of 1,500 in a San Francisco theater (and countless others watching the simulcast in the privacy of their homes) with a three-minute French kiss.

Both Rebeca Mendez and Entropy8Zuper come back again and again to their own sensual presence even as they work in the most rarified of media. Maybe it’s just because porn seems to be the only killer app to emerge on the Web–at least on the B-to-C side of things–but bodies, naked or otherwise, keep cropping up. I would say that it’s actually part of a bigger picture. Whereas businesses want their sites to look as slick, clean, and, well, virtual as possible, artists want to mess things up. When they aren’t making you aware of their bodies, they are confronting you with the reality of the machine you’re using. The artists lurking behind sites such as Jodi.org and The Shredder delight in taking your desktop apart into a million bits while you watch. Yet others take you to a very particular place, using Webcams and remote controls to bind you to a site. Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, for instance, presented a work last year in which digital surfers for several weeks controlled a barrage of lasers stationed around Mexico City’s central square.

All of these artists are using the Internet, that most abstract and ‘placeless’ of technologies, to focus our attention on simple, carbon-based reality. It turns out that what the Web does to the art space is what it does everywhere: it strips away the stuff between us and the world. That’s true not just in the art market, where buyers and makers of paintings can now dream of dispensing with snooty galleries and self-proclaimed experts (and accept the risk of being snookered), but it is also true for what art does. Internet-based art may just return us to the importance of real things, which artists understand so well. Just as we admire Cézanne for the way he rendered everyday fruit, Vermeer for demonstrating how he saw the light on a girl’s face, and Monet for capturing the richness of his garden, so artists working with digital equipment will do what they do best in any medium, which is to make us see our reality in new ways.

Of course, not all artists are running toward the real. Others delight in the very ephemeral nature of the Web. Although the early promise of virtual reality has not yet been realized, there are a few hints at what William Gibson described as ‘consensual hallucinations,’ which we might think of as art. Designers such as Amy Franceschini in San Francisco or Jody Zellen in Los Angeles delight in the dreamlike quality of the world you can present on the screen. In Zellen’s ‘Ghost City,’ memories of urban scenes and of the artist’s youth mingle with pure abstraction to create an otherworldly environment. In Franceschini’s projects, cartoonlike blobs float freely through the ether, controlled by users. For brief periods, Erik Adigard’s push media site, LiveWired, offered what the artist described as an alternative to the real city: a dense mix of news, advertising, flashes of color and form, and half-recognizable images.

That’s the other thing artists do well: Invent worlds we never knew could exist. Whether it is the ideal cities of the Renaissance, the surreal landscapes of Salvador Dali, or the abstractions of Mark Rothko, artists are very good at giving us something beautiful, startling, and profoundly new. The Internet will only increase their ability to create such spaces. Some day soon, we may stare endlessly at our screen, absorbed in a fantastic play of light and form that moves far beyond what an artist can make with a brush or a chisel.

On the other hand, artists have a way of fooling us. Who could have predicted, for example, that 19th-century inventions such as railroads and cameras would produce such wonderful oddities as Picasso’s fractured portraits? Who would have thought that photography would move so far beyond its use as a tool for documentarians and into the realm of art? Who could have imagined that television, which offers everyone the opportunity to live, however briefly, the role of performer and subject of the camera, would produce those compelling scenes of artists acting out what we now call performance art?

Maybe Internet art will be another fleeting form of expression: the momentary appearance of something its creators call art that we must consume before it disappears from our screens.