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<F.F> You are consider the inventor of Virtual Reality and innovator in the electronic media, music and above all a thinker, a critic of your timeS and a "renaissance man", How does Lanier sees Lanier?

<J.L> This is not something I worry about. I do occasionally joke that I practice the art of "cross-procrastination", which means doing something productive to avoid doing some other productive thing. For instance, I'll make music to avoid working on a technical paper, but I'll also work on the same paper to avoid finishing some music that is due on a deadline. In this way I am able to feel lazy, which is my nature, but still get a lot done. This technique can only work if one does a lot of different sorts of things, thus my varied careers, and the difficulty in characterizing me. Yes, I am answering these questions in order to avoid attending to other pressing matters, if you are curious.

<F.F> What is the borderline between art and technology; what is considered art and what technology? Do you think is a discrepancy in assuming that programming and the "codes" is also form of art and or an art by itself? What is Art in the Networking digital Era?

<J.L> It depends who is asking. If the question is asked by a cultural critic, it seems to me that any answer might be fun. There are several intellectual frameworks of greater consequence, however, in which art and technology can be distinguished more usefully.

One framework is that the functionality of technology is uncontestable. No one can deny an airplane flies. Therefore, technology is a final stage of empirical method, a result of an experiment. I still find it endlessly remarkable that we live in a world in which technology is possible at all.

Another framework is economic. Technology is conceived of by a customer as something that achieves something beyond itself, something that might be also achieved by a competing technology. Whether this is perfectly true or not is not important, but it is the belief that underlies the economics of technology, and therefore our technocentric legal and educational practices. In a capitalist framework, something is art to the degree it has no precise competition and is not even hypothetically replaceable.

Finally, there is an existential, or if you prefer, spiritual, level of definition, which is inevitably similar to the economic perspective. We expect to be able to define the function and purpose of technology, while we hope that art is something at least a little beyond us.

<F.F> Upon your point of view, what makes an electronic-net-art a quality work". What are the necessary ingredients of a "quality" piece? What are the essential elements for an outstanding net art piece?

<J.L> This is a difficult question for me to answer, because I dearly wish I could say that I have already encountered quality art on the net. If I use my subjective experience of the net as a guide, and compare what I have experienced online with what I have felt in concert halls, galleries, or playhouses, then I must admit that no art on the net is as good as what exists off of it. There are several explanations for why this might be true. One is that I might be too old. Maybe I am of an elder generation, a generation of Moseses who were able to serve as guides to a promised land, but were not able to gaze upon it. It might be that younger people who grew up with the technology are able to see what I cannot.

Another explanation is that digital works require a different kind of craft than previous industrial arts. If you point a camera at a anything, you get an image. For example, all one had to do was point a movie camera at an oncoming locomotive to achieve the first outrageous thrill of cinema. Digital works must be built up and maintained in a tedious manner, and it might take considerably more time- decades or even centuries- for there to be enough underlying layers of software tools and experience with using them for anyone to build art with a sense of ease, without being buried by endless frustrating details.

A third explanation might be that net art exists in the process of experimentation and not in the results. Enormous energy has gone into playing with digital designs. Because the standards shift over time, these experiments become lost anyway. I saw astounding experiments in digital interactivity twenty years ago that can never again be recreated because it would be impossible to realign all the proper pieces of obsolete hardware and software. It might be that net art is like a sand painting or an improvised musical performance. It might be that only the creators and those very near to them are able to experience this kind of art in its truest sense. The remaining bits might not retain the important parts.

<F.F> Can we think in terms of turning the networking and digital media into a real poetic language rather than using it exclusively as a tool for generating special effects for high-tech-level performance?

<J.L> Well, this is a personal goal. I use some of the tools from my virtual reality laboratories in stage performance sometimes, but this is really an odd thing to do. It is more like a digital version of a puppet theater, perhaps, than the "shared dreams" I would love to be able to create for people. Perhaps I will live long enough to create the art I would love to create, in which the audience is inside a virtual world that I am improvising, but in which they also contribute. Currently it would be economically impossible to finance the performances I imagine, and there are also unsolved problems in the design of software.

<F.F> Can we think in terms of turning the networking and digital media into a real poetic language rather than using it exclusively as a tool for generating special effects for high-tech-level performance?

Well, this is a personal goal. I use some of the tools from my virtual reality laboratories in stage performance sometimes, but this is really an odd thing to do. It is more like a digital version of a puppet theater, perhaps, than the "shared dreams" I would love to be able to create for people. Perhaps I will live long enough to create the art I would love to create, in which the audience is inside a virtual world that I am improvising, but in which they also contribute. Currently it would be economically impossible to finance the performances I imagine, and there are also unsolved problems in the design of software.

<F.F> Can we create the link between the virtual, the real and the imaginary with the support of the networking and emerging technology?

Linking the virtual and the real is already being done. A variant of Virtual Reality called "Augmented Reality" creates the illusion that virtual objects are placed in the real world. For instance, you might add gargoyles to a building. That would be a nice way to add some flavor to all those Bauhaus-inspired buildings bequeathed upon us by the twentieth century.

Integrating the Imaginary is a different question. In an obvious sense, anything made by people integrates imagination with reality, but I think the question must refer to something more novel, perhaps a direct brain-reading interface. But this notion is probably motivated by a false hope. You can't get something for nothing. Nothing can be constructed without the effort of constructing it. The brain is free to synthesize a subjective appreciation of something in a dream without constructing the thing itself. Even if there is some kind of brain reading device in the far future, an artist will still have to do the work of construction that a dream does not have to do.

<F.F> Position of the contemporary museums and galleries toward networking and electronic Art in United States.

<J.L> In the USA there has been a lot of experimentation, but I don't think anyone has solved the puzzle.

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