"And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

Jorge Luis Borges, from "A New Refutation of Time"

To paraphrase Barbara Kruger, "everytime I hear the word 'retrospective,' I reach for my checkbook." What could an Internet art retrospective possibly mean when the work already co-exists with everything else that is easily accessible on the web? Does viewing GRAMMATRON, my large-scale digital narrative created between 1993-1997, take on different meaning, different value, when it appears (virtually re-appears) in an art and technology festival that contextualizes its presentation as a retrospective?

On the net, space is cheap, ever-expandable, ready for mark-up. The resources needed to produce a full-on retrospective are minimal. All that is really needed is the will, and maybe the power. Will power. And the passage of a certain amount of Time to justify its retroness.

In our accelerated blur culture, The Eighties were retro in the Nineties. So the mid-Nineties can be retro in early Zeroes, no? It's a fine feeling to be retro in the zeroes, to be a real, commodified "thing-in-itself" even as "the work itself" still, somehow, seems unreal.

You still cannot touch it. You still cannot own it. You still cannot stop it from generating the audience it will inevitably generate.

You can associate yourself with it. You can network with it. You can link to it. You can co-market your own nomadic performance with its aura.

Speaking of aura, what would have happened if Benjamin had seen the emergence of the Net? Would it have reaffirmed his position on art objects losing their aura in lieu of an increased network-value for the avant-pop celebrity that composed the work?

As new media curator Steve Dietz once noted (while remixing the concepts of many others into a succinct phraseology, as he often doees): "This new millennium is a zero moment, a moment of profound renewal, when everything we thought we knew is wrong..."

Living here in Boulder,Colorado, I may operate on Mountain Standard Time, but it still feels like 43 a.m. to me.

"The world runs on Internet time," says Andy Grove, CEO of Intel. This Internet Art retrospective is, in many ways, ahead of its time. But for how long? As Baudrillard reminds us, "[t]he image is no longer given the time to become an image."

In this regard, it can also be said that net art was never given enough time to become net art.