Some of the earlier net art projects are, in comparison, more concerned
 with manufacturing a pure representation of collective will and, arguably,
 'only' produce the conditions through which it might be manifested.
 Returning briefly to McLuhan, this artistic endeavour is an attempt to
 produce art through cool media and significantly often leads to the
 production of cool art per se, a kind of 'low definition' art. A question
 that will become increasingly pressing throughout the discussion of the
 global village and its involvement in net art is how public space, both as
 ideal and as practice, mutates within this techno-cultural order.

 Heath Bunting's 1994 project Kings X Phone In applies an Internet-based
 logic - the creation of a communications environments which can accommodate
 multiple participants - to the relatively individualised medium of the
 telephone. With Kings X Phone In Bunting made use of the Internet to
 publicise an event which could only occur if the 'audience' participated.
 The concept was as follows:

 "During the day of Friday 5th August 1994 the telephone booth area behind
 the destination board at Kings X British Rail station will be borrowed and
 used for a temporary cybercafe. It would be good to concentrate activity
 around 18:00 GMT, but play as you will."

 Bunting then lists out the telephone numbers of the booths and invites
 people to:

 "(1) call no./nos. and let the phone ring a short while and then hang up
 (2) call these nos. in some kind of pattern (the nos. are listed as a floor
 plan of the booth)
 (3) call and have a chat with an expectant or unexpectant person
 (4) go to Kings X station watch public reaction/answer the phones and chat
 (5) do something different"

 In this project Bunting playfully highlights the coextensivity of
 telecommunications and physical public space; the phone in, writ large,
 envisages every public phone booth to be not just an instrument of
 personal, one-to-one conversation but as a conduit for engineering
 encounters between 'members of the public' and in this sense 'earthing' the
 communications network in the local context. This is an example of
 paradoxical the logic touched on above, whereby the self same instrument of
 deterritorialisation is employed in a bid at reterritorialisation. Despite
 McLuhan's designation of the telephone as a cool medium which couples
 action with reaction, it is nevertheless also a tool which allows man to
 distanciate his/her affect and which can essentially only accommodate
 discussion between two interlocutors. But if the telephone faciliatates
 man's ability to act at a distance, thus helping to obscure the origin of
 things - the original - and structuring presence through absence, it can
 also become an instrument for revealing that reality. The phone-in, at
 least in principle , figures the distanciated nature of its participants,
 whose individual actions - their phone calls - constitute a collective act
 by sheer dint of simultaneity. Although the caller is not sure whether they
 are alone in following the artist's instructions and contributing to an
 intervention in public space, they act in the belief that their solitary
 action is part of a greater pattern. Here the individualist medium of the
 telephone becomes a medium of collectivity both in the imaginations of its
 participants and in the local context of Kings X where, in principle at
 least, the chorus of ringing telephones creates a localised disruption
 through drawing on a absent and scattered 'community'.

 The question is, however, what this redeployment of the means of alienation
 in the service of the collectivity actually constitutes? In overarching
 terms perhaps, the detournement of the telephone system, effecting the
 creation of a public space though linking together the individuated cells
 in which we live, sets up an action/reaction or call/response paradigm. The
 artist could be viewed as positing alienated, late-capitalist existence as
 the statement to which he, acting vicariously on the part of the public and
 with their assistance, formulates a response. The response being that a
 response is still possible. But still we must ask who is speaking and what
 is being said? Does the registration of the potential for a distanciated
 gathering or simultaneity of action or the radical demonstration of the
 latent lines of connection which bind us all together constitute a
 reclamation of public speech?

 Here I woul like to turn to Jean Baudrillard's forumlation of the
 relationship between mass media and the masses in his article The Masses:
 The Implosion of the Social in the Media. Here he attempts to think beyond
 the pessimistic position he adopts in an earlier essay entitled "Requiem
 for the Media" through an analysis of opinion polls. Rather than reading
 broadcast media as the instrument of transmission/reception which "renders
 impossible any process of exchange" and concluding that "power belongs to
 him who gives and to whom no return can be made" , he interprets the
 'silence' of the masses as an "ironic and antagonistic" refusal of an
 imposed philosophical imperative to have will, to know it, and to attain
 liberty on the basis of this understanding. For Baudrillard the opinion
 poll is result of trying to construct a relationship between two
 fundamentally heterogeneous systems: the simulacral information system and
 the system of meaning. He suggests that opinion polls cannot be accused of
 manipulating democracy because there is no authentic will, truth or nature
 for them to manipulate. The situation is really quite the reverse: the
 opinion poll does not measure a preexisting mass will or desire but rather
 aids its dissapearance by offering the public a spectacle of opinion or a
 simulacral mirror. The masses become the voyeurs of the spectacle of their
 own opinions as they are submitted to a recursive barage of information
 which ultimately constitutes the poliical 'scene' it is supposed to
 represent. This, argues Baudrillard, leads to a "radical uncertainty"
 brought about not by lack of information but by its excess. However, and
 this is the redemptive moment in the text, this uncertainty effectively
 turns the tables on the media machine's diningenuous adoption of the system
 of meaning - a system which it has destroyed - because the masses, whose
 opinion the pollsters seek to divine, does not exist. The opinion poll
 provides the masses with a spectacle-as-game by which they - the object of
 analysis - refuse to share the objectives or even the ideology of their
 subject (the pollsters), namely the posession of will and desire. In this
 way the masses destroy politics as will and representation and "give
 pleasure to the[ir] ironic unconscious Š (and to our individual political
 unconscious, if I may use this expression), whose deepest drive remains the
 symbolic murder of the political class, the symbolic murder of political
 realityŠ"

 ///Josephine Berry\\\