The production of cultural content: art, heritage, channels of diffusion

Virtual museums should focus on the production of work specifically for the Internet, ie. on net art, rather than on the specific process of the diffusion of heritage. Digital technologies have changed and continue to change artistic praxis, above all the artist-spectator-work relationship, a relationship in which digital art comes from a very specific resource, one that is part of digital media, namely interactivity. Interactivity -which is not a new concept in the art world, as it goes back to the avant-gardes of the twenties and the cybernetic art of the fifties- is a fundamental element in digital art, offering the spectator the possibility of actively intervening in producing the work. We are thus talking of a work in which the process takes predominance over the definitive or final production; of work that is profoundly temporal, dynamic and changing, above space and permanent or static forms. Paul Sermon's Telematic Vision illustrates this new concept of interactive work clearly.