hot.list.

The sites we include below are all engaged in one epic struggle or another, and if they use the Web only because it's convenient, they nonetheless use it to the fullest. Two of them seek to increase our knowledge of interesting people (vivabush.com) and places (clui.org), making available in-depth research; the others aim to spread pornography - pictorial or political - to the greatest possible extent, and they do so either at their own peril (simplesexsite.com) or that of others (cato.org).

The Anti-Carthaginian Historical Society

www.cato.org

The Cato Institute - the only art project on this list - has as its motto "Carthage must be destroyed." Although technically Carthage was razed in 146 B.C., Cato members insist that you can never be too careful in matters Carthaginian. Another major concern for Cato: Markets must be free. And the institute spends $13 million a year spreading the word that people shouldn't get in money's way. While Cato members may be alone in their hatred of Carthage - and in some of their other curious passions ("Loaded Guns Can Be Good for Kids") - they have lots of unsavory company for their "free markets" thing. So if you need to get some of that liquidity for yourself, try www.teleportacia.org/swap. And if mobility is simply not an option, why not invest in some company (www.sttf.org/english/proposals/boxful.html)?

SimpleSexSite

www.simplesexsite.com

Victor Sintron wanted to be an Internet porn king, so he put up a site. Two months later, he awoke to a conference call from five would-be brethren, who threatened to rip off his head and shit down his neck unless he shut down the site within the hour. The problem was that SimpleSexSite.com subverted all the mechanisms that make Net porn lucrative. By creating a joystick game in which players won points for "shooting" free "teaser" jpegs - automatically sending Victor the links - our cyber-sleaze-bag quickly and legally amassed the largest porn collection on the Web. SimpleSexSite.com is now back up, but in disabled form, so that Victor remains compliant with his terms for living. With Web pore interests poised to go public on Wall Street, his story serves as a lens on the formative years of an industry.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation

www.clui.org

From the nation's sixth-largest beef-packing plant to the adjacent Pantex nuclear-bomb disassembly facility and beyond, you will find many startling gems in CLUI's searchable database of "unusual and exemplary land use sites." Each featured datum is described in language at once informative and mysterious, resolutely dry yet hinting at the vastnesses behind every surface.

VivaBush.com

www.vivabush.com

VivaBush.com, un sitio Internet en Espanol "only," es rabidamente pro-Jorge Bush. Esta disenado muy efectivamente para fomentar latinos, hispanicos y mojado-americanos que George W. Bush Jr. es lo Mas Macho en la carrera presidencial 2000 para la Casa de Los Blancos. VivaBush.com incluye endorsimientos de celebridades Latinas, como Walter Mercado, Agusto Pinochet, Ricky Martin y el culo de Jennifer Lopez, y las actividades "pro-Latino" de Bush, como tomar mucha cerveza, polvo blanco, viejas y sus ranchos de organos de bebes latino-americanos. "El Hijo de Bush," adorado por millones de hispanicos tejanos y otra gente que padece de deficiencia mental, prueba con este sitio que Jorge tiene "World Wide Huevos."

RELATED ARTICLE: Fault Vault

If Bill Viola and Gary Hill brought video out of the box and into the realm of installation, Ken Goldberg, a Berkeley professor of industrial engineering, has done the same for Net art. This month, at the second biennial of new-media art at Tokyo's Inter-Communication Center, Goldberg (along with Randall Packer, Wojciech Matusik, and Gregory Kuhn, all from Berkeley) unveils Mori, an immersive installation centered around seismic signals uploaded live from California's soon-to-rupture Hayward Fault and transmitted via the Internet.

Viewers enter a giant black box flanked by a shelf of sculpturally poised computers, whose presence confirms the data stream's "realness." So does the illuminated, see-through handrail (filled with Internet access cables) that viewers use to navigate the chamber's spiral interior. An odd, low-frequency symphony of sampled sounds (ranging from the violinlike screeching of train brakes to the percussive thuds of falling rocks) resonates from sub-woofers in the floor. These aural interpretations of the Hayward Fault's actual rumblings complement the visual rendering, which, like the heartbeat on an EKG monitor, pulses across a computer screen looking up from a well at the center of the installation. The fragility of life is one theme sounded by this disturbing, meditative work, whose ambiguous title means "of death" in Latin and "sanctuary" in Japanese.

Can't make it to Tokyo? Then log on to www.memento.ieor.berkeley.edu and check out the site's eerie, pulsating graphics. Mori watchers need only worry when the rumbling stops: The installation's theatrics are programmed to halt the instant an earthquake hits.

- Reena Jana

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