(1) This paragraph obviously oversimplifies the issue, as my focus is more on "translating net art for the physical space". My aim was to comment on online exhibitions and their usually limited target, when the Net offers much greater possibilities. And there is certainly nostalgia for the period of events such as Refresh, Desktop IS or WWW Art Award, all organized by Alexei Shulgin (check http://www.easylife.org/), or 1000 $ Page Context, by Olia Lialina (http://art.teleportacia.org/1000$).
(2) Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, New York, Routledge 2007.
(3) The marginality of New Media Art in the contemporary art world and discourse is another hot issue, difficult to sum up in a few lines. According to Lovink, New Media Art never managed to find its "cool obscure". My point is that this is just a problem of bad translation – therefore, first and foremost, of bad translators.
(4) From Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation
(5) PORT: Navigating Digital Culture, organized by artnetweb for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. January 25 through March 29, 1997. Online at http://artnetweb.com/port/index.html
(6) net_condition, curated by Peter Weibel, Walter van der Cruijsen, Johannes Goebel, Golo F?llmer, Hans-Peter Schwarz, Jeffrey Shaw, Benjamin Weil. Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999. Online at http://on1.zkm.de/netcondition/start/language/default_e
(7) See Marina Abramovic's considerations in M. Abramovic, 7 Easy Pieces, Charta, Milan 2007.
(8) From Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation
(9) Ibid.
(10) Lev Manovich, "The Death of Computer Art", 1996. Available online at http://www.thenetnet.com/schmeb/schmeb12.html
(11) "Fidelity pertains to the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning, and otherwise without distorting it." From Wikipedia, quoted.
(12) "Transparency pertains to the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions." Ibid.
(13) net.ephemera, curated by Mark Tribe, Moving Image Gallery, New York, NY, May 3 - May 31, 2002. Online at http://www.nothing.org/net_ephemera/
(14) in_rete, curated by Luciano Caramel and Domenico Quaranta, Miniartextil 2006, Como (IT), October 7 – November 12, 2006.
(15) Lisa Jevbratt, "Infome Imager Description", online at http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/infome_imager/lite/description.html
(16) See http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/biennale_py/ and http://www.epidemic.ws/biannual.html respectively
(17) The exhibition site is no longer online. For a photographic record of the event, see http://ilribaltatore.net/connessionileggendarie/OpeningANDpeople/
(18) Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, curated by D. Quaranta and Yves Bernard, iMAL Center for Digital Culture and Technologies, Brussels, April 18 – 30, 2008. Online at http://www.imal.org/HolyFire/
(19) Another over-simplification. For a deeper analysis of the ways artists "translate" their work for the art world, see the two intro texts featured in the Holy Fire catalogue: D. Quaranta, Y. Bernard (eds), Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, exhibition catalogue, FPEditions, Brescia 2008. Besides that, we have also to notice that, even if this essay is focused on translation, this concept may not work so well for the most recent developments of New Media Art. An artist, or a curator, has to translate something that exists only in another context, or cultural space. Today, what we see more and more is that the formerly known "net artists" don't work just online, but approach the same problem from different points of view, and with different media, at the same time. Patrick Lichty has a name for that: he calls this attitude "multivalence". Holy Fire displayed some examples of multivalent works: UBERMORGEN.COM's Psych|OS project, or Joan Leandre's In the Name of Kernel!, just to name a few.