# Neen Manifesto

A Few Things I Know about NEEN

NEEN stands for Neensters, a still undefined generation of visual artists. 
Some of them belong to the contemporary art world, while others are software creators, web designers, and video game directors and animators.
Our official theories about reality, such as quantum physics, have proved that the taste of our life is the taste of a simulation. 
Machines help us feel comfortable with this condition, as they simulate the simulation that we call nature. 
Opening the door of your room, or clicking on a folder on your computer’s desktop, will send you to similar destinations. 
These are two versions of reality that are seemingly perfect and dense, but they will start dissolving after you analyze them.

Computing is to NEEN what fantasy was to surrealism, and what freedom was to communism. 
Computing creates its context, but it can also be postponed. Neensters buy the newest products and they study how to create momentum. 
They glorify machines, but they get easily bored with them. Sometimes they simply prefer to watch others operating them.
Neensters find their pleasure in the in-betweens of actions. NEEN is about losing time on different operating systems.
Neensters love copying, in the similar, but a slightly different way that the city of Hong Kong multiplies its most successful buildings. 
Names, clothes, style, art, and architecture are important for Neensters. So they create all of these things from scratch, as if what has been done before is not important.

NEEN is very sentimental, but is not about identity, even though Neensters do occasionally use their identities as passwords in order to special certain privileges.
Because the identity of a Neenster is in his state of mind, he is free to use the identity of another Neenster if he needs to do so. 
But this works also in reverse, as a Neenster can create artwork for another Neenster. That is the major difference between NEEN and Contemporary Art.

While in Contemporary Art you need to be yourself all the time, a certain type of hero that is always polishing his image until he becomes a mirror of his lifetime, in NEEN, you are a kind of screen. 
A Neenster projects a temporary self that is always under construction, and that moves from the present to the past and future, without limitations.
Because a Neenster publishes everything on the web, his state of mind reflects the public taste. Neensters are public personae.
If fantasy brought Surrealists to the ridiculous, and revolution drove communists to failure, it will be curious to observe where computing will bring NEEN.

Miltos Manetas, New York, 2000

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Source: http://www.manetas.com/eo/neen/manifesto.html
