| Philosophy The Digital Art Exchange is a diverse group of artists, engineers and researchers collaborating on various telematic projects. The group intent is to create ‘thought bundles’ – cultural probes that connect peoples throughout the world via global networks. In order to see the electronic age for what it is, we must create a new paradigm and learn to deal with the altered consciousness resulting from the rapid development of technology. Further, the immediacy of telecommunications can take on an irony and intensity when planned projects collide with actual world events that are transmitted on a global scale. We like to think of ‘Daxonians’ as sojourners embarked on a journey without end – artist travellers whom we choose to call mariners, cultural navigators moving about in a great telematic sea seeking to connect mind to mind. The analogy we prefer is that of a journey through a fluid environment that approximates the feelings we often experience in our attempts to create art in electronic space. A transformation is taking place. We live and work in a world of simultaneity and horizontality. The revolutionary platitude is that knowledge and communication are rapidly becoming independent of the institution. Structure has been eclipsed by process. This creates enormous discontinuities, with all of the obvious fallout. We are now living and working in a shared electronic space, and we have compressed time and space such that we must deal with our resulting altered consciousness. We have broken through the boundary of ‘thingness’. The environment in which we now probe feels more like water because every thought is like an immersion. We are traversing a complex system, accumulating layers of information at electronic speed – discovering internal landfalls to aid us in our search for the critical path. Telematic artists are engaged in the network by their actions, reactions, interactions, accumulations, collections, integrations-layering and folding as our accumulated thought bundles become the integrated remnants of all previous collective actions. Every action modifies what we already know. In this dynamic context, idiomatic icons, stored on audio and video tape or in computer memory, form psychic maps – acoustic images resonating on our brain pans from video monitors or as a response to hardcopy printouts. The DAX Group in 1991 "Keep in mind that we are the aquatic ones who live on a Mind Island we call Daxonia (which is anywhere you want it to be, it is your island located in the Telematic Sea somewhere off the shore of Robert Filliou's "Ingenious Republic") home of the cybernautical artisans." Bruce Breland
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