History Is Written by the Victorious

And Losers Have Nothing to Lose

[archival documentation]

The Extension competition was organized in 1997 by the Hamburg Kunsthalle as an international net art contest.

In January 1996, I created my first net art work, 0.HTML. The work was submitted to Extension ’97. It consisted of a collage of online materials such as political speeches, animated GIFs, philosophy quotations, academic texts, and fragments of history. Andreas Broeckmann later described it as “an archive of historical techno imagination, world politics and a grain of melancholy” (Leonardo Electronic Almanac, MIT Press, 2000).

↑ 0.HTML (created: January 1996, deleted: 15 June 2011)

My work received the third prize.

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A freely accessible version of the Large Language Model was instructed to write a short essay on non-art entirely on its own, in a single nonchalant sweep and without any human intervention, whether content-related, theoretical, stylistic, or grammatical. The version employed was OpenAI GPT-5 [Free], August 2025 release.

[slovenska verzija je spodaj: NEUMETNOST]

Internet, 14 August 2025

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NON-ART

a=tF²: Non-Art as the Product of Time and the Square of Force

ᅠ
Introduction: The Asymmetrical Premise

Non-art is not a concept that can be unlocked by definition. It can only be approached through an incision, an opening cut into its own incapacity for naming. If definition, in its most naïve horizon, promises stability, the cut promises an unresolved wound: an incision that leaves no scar, an imprint of incompletion in which the scar precedes the wound, and the wound emerges from its own forgetting.

In this sense, non-art is both the precondition and the consequence of its own construction: a precondition because it presupposes the inevitability of representational failure, and a consequence because it continually reproduces its own negation as a mode of persistence. Identity unravels in what might be called the interval of coherence, not as the void between two points of meaning, but as an excessively precise difference that traverses every point and drains it of all stability. In this tension, in the rhythm of appearance and disappearance, the experience of non-art offers neither convergence nor divergence, but a perpetual lateral displacement, a tangential sliding. It moves not from something toward something else, but from displacement toward further displacement.

“Non-art is merely the discipline of delay,” writes Domitia Verne, “where delay itself is not a temporal interval, but an ontological derivative that strips every appearance of the possibility of becoming an event” (Verne, Topology of Sub-Absence, 1974). This delay is not a euphemism for indeterminacy, but a rigorous form and, at the same time, the dissolution of form, through which non-art ensures that meaning never ripens but is presented as continual pre- and post-ripening.

Continue reading “NON-ART”