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Hi All, I'll follow Curt's theoretical grounding (unless someone beats me to it). In all honesty, I haven't thought deeply about the "performativity of code," at least not worded in quite this way. But, when I read Arns' "Program code is characterized by the fact that here 'saying' coincides with 'doing,'" I felt myself nodding my head in agreement. Web code is a set of instructions that a browser interprets and a viewer/user experiences. The artist authors the directions (providing the "saying") and, following Curt's summary of Barthes, Austin, and Derrida: the viewer/user collaborates with the browser to execute the doing. What I enjoy about the inherent set of directions--either showing up as the code itself or as an implicit part of a web project--is the historical connection that can be drawn between web projects and conceptual art works that predate the web. I feel like there's more to write but I don't want to ramble. Not yet anyway. But if someone else feels like this is making sense, maybe there's a connection that can be explored between how performativity is expressed through "code" (social, written, or otherwise) for a pre-web conceptual work and a contemporary new media project. Yours, xtine www.missconceptions.net