In a world where all realities seem to be becoming virtual, everything appears increasingly transient, fleeting, even ephemeral. Something is slipping away and we are not sure what, if anything, is emerging to take its place. What makes this situation so strange -- so uncanny is that what slips away is not merely absent and yet it is not exactly present. A certain withdrawal haunts our era. Neither present nor absent, visible nor invisible, here nor there, the site of this withdrawal is the margin, border, limen, edge, or, more precisely, the between where we are destined to dwell. Forever eluding the either/or of analytic investigation as well as the both/and of dialectical inquiry, the neither/nor of the between returns eternally to mark and remark the space/spacing and time/timing of the work of art.

The work of art is not only an object but is also an activity, not only a product but also a process. The medium of this work is the between where appearances appear in and through an unavoidable disappearance. In a certain sense, art repeatedly achieves the impossible by making disappearance appear in the midst of all appearances. Object and activity, product and process can never be separated because every object is an ongoing activity and all products are endless processes. Within the processes that art puts into play, nothing is ever stable.

Never has the instability of things that have long seemed secure been more evident than in the movement from an industrial to an information society. As webs and networks create links ranging from the local to the global, everything seems to be unraveling. The distinctions and oppositions that we have structured thought and ordered experience -- body/mind, nature/culture, material/immaterial, image/reality, self/other, identity/difference -- are no longer adequate. The psychological, social, and cultural dilemmas we face are not the result of a shift from one to another term in a familiar polarity. To the contrary, the very structure of reality and, correlatively, the shape of knowledge seem to be shifting. In the midst of this transition, the challenge is to rethink every opposition and all differences by reconceiving the spacing and timing of the between in and through which all things arise and pass away.

The artists whose work falls within "b/t (between)" are actively engaged in the urgent task of refiguring the middle that is the medium of human experience. By exploring the artistic resources of new technologies, they show the ways in which the neither/nor of the between opens the space and creates the time in which creativity remains possible. For those who are willing to follow their liminal traces, nothing will remain the same.

Mark Taylor
Williamstown, Massachusetts
February 22, 1998