For me, ritual offers the possibility of encountering hidden aspects of the self, the other, and the cosmos by providing a protective structure within which we may momentarily relinquish control. Ritual asks that we trust our selves, our inner knowing and wisdom: it connects us to a realm where imagination and the spirit become manifest in matter and where the body merges with its surroundings.

Devising rituals is akin to writing poetry; condensing intuition, sensation, feeling and thinking into compact, highly symbolic forms. These forms lie dormant until brought to life through enactment; the carrying through of unconscious intentions and wishes.

According to sociologist Manuel Castells, the distributed network is the organisational form of the Information Age and the Internet is its technological base. The significance of thinking the relationship between the distributed network and the Internet in this way cannot be over-stated. Rather than viewing them as synonymous with each other, Castells argues that the Internet be understood as a tangible manifestation of the distributed network form. Conceptualising the distributed network not merely in technological terms but as organisational form allows it to take up its place as part of a significant historical shift within capitalism and beyond, that informs the way that subjects, objects, processes and relations are organised.

The Internet is a global distributed computer network underpinned by protocol, ‘a set of technical procedures for defining, managing, modulating, and distributing information throughout a flexible yet robust delivery infrastructure.’ Although not designed specifically for warfare, the Internet emerges from American military technology of the 1950s and 1960s. Its origins can be traced to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) set up by the Defense Department of the United States in 1958, the aim of which was the development of technological military superiority over the Soviet Union in response to their launching of the first Sputnik satellite.

Whereas net artists embraced the new information and communication technologies emerging in the 1990s, forging a vibrant lifeworld based on democratic and participatory action, curator Nicholas Bourriaud described how others felt ‘meagre and helpless when faced with the electronic media.’ Whilst net artists’ explorations of community and encounter were pragmatic, giving attention to ways in which technologies could facilitate meetings and dialogue, for Bourriaud, the focus of community and encounter is subjectivity.

The genealogy of protocol in art reveals that from the early twentieth century artists were engaging with processes of rationalisation within everyday life, which develops in the second half of the twentieth century into a profound interest in the logic of computation. For example, attention to mathematical algorithms, geometry, rules and instructions informs the work of artists making minimal and conceptual art: many of them emphasising processes of standardisation, modularisation, rationalisation, incorporation and automation.

The grid, for Rosalind Krauss, ‘announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.’ Commenting on its qualities of flatness, geometry and order she conceives it as ‘antinatural, antimimetic, antireal:’ indeed it is ‘what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.’ Suggesting that the ‘naked and determined materialism’ is the ‘logical way to discuss’ the grid in the mid-to-late twentieth century Krauss identifies ‘[i]n the overall regularity of its organization’ an order of ‘pure relationship’ that ‘crowd[s] out the dimensions of the real.’

In two lectures in 1953 Jacques Lacan proposed three orders that he believed to be the key registers of human subjectivity and according to which all psychoanalytical phenomena can be described: Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. As Bracha Ettinger notes; these ‘levels of human reality […] are revealed in language through speech (parole). [1] The method outlined in the lectures involved a return to the texts of Sigmund Freud and attempted to define and develop the different psychic agencies introduced by Freud – id, ego and superego – beyond the idea of stages through which the human subject passes.

Bracha Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix enables a way of thinking that is not dependent on an adherence to phallic logic, which, at ontological and epistemological levels, informs much Western thought. Ettinger closely engages with but relativises the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, and in particular the concepts of the phallus and ‘castration’ by showing the involvement of other unconscious processes that create desire and meaning. Ettinger names the dominant logic in classic psychoanalysis phallic: not as masculine, but as that which is premised on the oppositions absence/presence, on/off, plus/minus.

The artistic practice and its associated theoretical reformulations of key aspects of sexual difference and aesthetics developed by Bracha L Ettinger have produced a complex archive of painting, installations and theoretical writings about both subjectivity and aesthetics. They provide a specific vocabulary for discussing the difficult terrain of artworking that does not have defined objectives or closed form, and for artworking that seeks to touch on issues as treacherous in the contemporary artworld as healing.

I suggest that net art practices of the 1990s and 2000s contribute to an articulation of a non-technological distributed form in contemporary art. Although, in the main, net artists focused on the materiality of the Internet and world wide web, particularly the different kinds of protocol that underpin the technology, an evaluation of the ways in which artists worked with protocol contributes to the development of a language and to the conceptualisation of a distributed form that extends beyond the technical and technological.

Within certain conceptual and post conceptual art practices it is possible to discern the influence of open source and free software methods and philosophies. These practices engage – directly or indirectly - with new forms of labour; known variously as flexible labour and open/libre ways of working that are emerging within contemporary capitalism. Unlike object-based art, they deal with the invisible: processes, relations, networks, and systems. Artwork like this is made up of many elements often existing in different spaces and temporalities, and is not as readily graspable, or indeed as visible, as object-based work.