Spending time in the cat's audio environment, she said, it was possible to experience the world in a non-human fashion. Connections made through the internet were beginning to have similar effects, taking us out of our cultural moorings and exposing us directly to minds that think differently. At the edges of this experience, we start to transcend or expand our notion of human. Boundaries, whether of culture, gender, or even species, are not nearly as fixed as we are often led to believe. Sustainability in this realm of thought and action is only possible through continuous regeneration and reconfiguration.
Community is distributed.
We can now have communities grow around the world based on interests and whims. Art encompasses responses to things we once thought were immutable, and which are now in question. In the discussion that followed, participants pressed a line of questioning about the relationships among art, commerce and technology. Copyright, said Stone, is dead on the net. We need to think beyond copyright to get to useful concepts about how the net can enhance social and cultural values.