Communicating Vessels: Digital Semiotics and Web Installation Art. Installation art fundamentally changed the nature of artistic
practice, the role of the spectator and exhibition strategies. It helped define the
postmodern from the modern through its compromising of boundaries between the visual arts and other cultural forms including performance, architecture and video. Installation has now become a preeminent postmodern practice and has changed substantively since its inception. Is Web Installation Art now the site of post-postmodern artistic production? This presentation considers new
media exhibitions presented on-line that address the impact of technology on the practice of art, communication and the representation of the body. Artists who use web installation challenge the boundaries of art as a communicative medium. At the same time their production questions the nature of installation art in relationship to its past achievements — the use of ephemeral materials to provide institutional critiques and a resistance to commodity status.
In order to interpret these web installations, a "digital semiotics" is proposed that considers how meaning occurs in digital media (including digital photos, digital prints and web art) through its social, discursive creation and its paradoxically finite and individual status. The methodological basis for this investigation is adapted from Ferdinand Saussure—
signifier (the sound/image, the "material" with which meaning is made), signified (the "concept" which is produced by the brain) and the sign (the combination of both signifier and signified and socially/individually produced meaning). Binaries identified by Saussure’s system (arbitrary/linear, immutable/mutable, diachronic/synchronic) express the relationship between the creator and consumer of meaning and can similarly be adapted to digital media. Extension of "digital semiotics" involves application of Foucault's definitions of author and author-function, Derrida's " "transcendental signifier" and Barthes' declaration of the "death of the author