The term net.art designates a collective of artists who have engaged with Internet art as a medium since 1994. Key early practitioners and prominent figures within this movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting, Daniel García Andújar, and Rachel Baker. Despite its inception as a satirical commentary on avant-garde movements by authors like Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber, and Pit Schultz, the artistic outputs of its individual members exhibit minimal thematic or stylistic commonality.
Furthermore, "net.art" functions as a broader synonym for net art or Internet art, encompassing a significantly wider spectrum of artistic endeavors. Within this expanded definition, net.art is characterized as art that exclusively utilizes the Internet as its primary medium, rendering it inaccessible through any alternative experiential format. While net.art frequently explores the Internet and its emergent socio-cultural landscape as its thematic core, this thematic focus is not a mandatory characteristic.
Drawing upon the theoretical framework established by American critic Clement Greenberg, the German critic Tilman Baumgärtel has consistently advocated for a "media specificity" inherent to net.art throughout his publications. As articulated in the introduction to his book "net.art. Materialien zur Netzkunst," the defining attributes of net.art encompass "connectivity, global reach, multimediality, immateriality, interactivity and egality."
The Historical Trajectory of the net.art Movement
The net.art movement emerged within the broader evolution of Internet art, positioning itself less as a distinct genre and more as a significant critical and political milestone in the history of Internet art. In 1995, Pit Schultz, a founder of nettime, employed the term "net.art" as the title for a Berlin exhibition that featured works by Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin. Its usage expanded to describe the "net.art per se" gathering of artists and theorists in Trieste in May 1996, referencing a collective of artists who collaborated extensively during the early 1990s. These gatherings subsequently led to the creation of the net.art per se website, a simulated CNN site designed to "commemorate" the event. The attribution of the term "net.art" to artist Vuk Cosic in 1997 was erroneous, following Alexei Shulgin's humorous email to the nettime mailing list detailing the term's origin. Shulgin's email suggested that net.art originated from "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term 'net.art')". Researcher and artist Ramzi Turki utilizes the Facebook platform for artistic exchange—Fanny Drugeon, "Ramzi Turki, Net Art and the Aesthetics of Sharing: Walls Also Have Eyes That Watch Us," Art Criticism. International News of Critical Literature on Contemporary Art, May 27, 2020 (ISSN 1246-8258, DOI 10.4000/critiquedart.47849).
Digital Social Networks
net.artists have actively fostered digital art communities through dedicated practices of web hosting and the curation of web-based art. Their identity is characterized by an international, networked communication paradigm, involving dynamic exchanges, collaborative efforts, and cooperative projects. These artists maintain a significant presence across various mailing lists, including Rhizome, File festival, Electronic Language International Festival, Nettime, Syndicate, and Eyebeam. The collective identity of net.artists is shaped by both their digital creations and their critical engagement within the broader digital art community, exemplified by the contentious debate initiated by Olia Lialina on Nettime in early 2006 concerning the "New Media" Wikipedia entry.
Certain net.artists, such as Jodi, pioneered a distinctive genre of email art, often referred to as spam mail art, which involved text reprocessing and ASCII art techniques. The designation "spam art" was introduced by Frederic Madre, a practitioner of net critique and net art, to categorize disruptive interventions within mailing lists. These interventions typically involved the generation of seemingly illogical texts through basic scripts, online forms, or manual input.
A notable parallel exists with the email-based interventions of "Codeworks" artists, including Mez or mi ga, and automated systems like Mailia, which are designed to analyze and respond to emails. The term "Codeworks" was originated by poet Alan Sondheim to characterize textual explorations by artists who manipulate simulated code and non-executable scripting or markup languages.
Tactical Media in Net Art
Net.art emerged amidst a period of cultural upheaval in early 1990s Eastern Europe, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Artists involved in net.art experiments aligned themselves with a concept of "social responsibility," aiming to critique the notion of democracy as a modern capitalist construct. The Internet, frequently lauded as the quintessential democratic instrument, yet often operating under the influence of entrenched commercial interests, became a focal point for net.artists, who asserted that "a space where you can buy is a space where you can steal, but also where you can distribute." These artists concentrated on innovating methods for sharing public digital spaces.
Through critical examination of interface elements like the navigation window and a deliberate challenge to their inherent functionality, net.artists revealed that elements perceived as natural by most internet users are, in fact, meticulously constructed and often controlled by corporate entities. Commercial browsers, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, present ostensibly user-friendly structures—with terms like "navigation" and "exploration" echoing established social practices—to cultivate a sense of familiarity for the user. Conversely, net.artists sought to disrupt this ingrained familiarity. Artists like Olia Lialina, through works such as My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, and the duo Jodi, with their sequence of pop-up interventions and browser-crashing applets, actively explored the material aspects of digital navigation within their artistic practice. These experimental endeavors led to the emergence of "browser art," a genre further developed by the British collective I/O/D with their innovative navigator, WebStalker.
Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting manipulated the architecture of advertisement portals by compiling keyword lists that, while improbable search terms, nonetheless existed online as URLs or metadata components. They leveraged this relational data to intertwine navigational pathways, thereby generating novel textual compositions. Consequently, users do not merely navigate a singular art website with self-contained meaning and aesthetic value; instead, they encounter the entire network as an aggregate of often-unseen socioeconomic forces and political positions.
Rachel Greene has linked net.art to tactical media, characterizing it as a form of détournement. Greene states: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media.'"
Hacker Culture
The Jodi collective explores the aesthetics of computer errors, exhibiting significant commonalities with hacker culture at both aesthetic and pragmatic levels. Their practice, involving the disruption of the browsing experience through hacks, code manipulations, simulated code, and faux-viruses, critically examines the operational context of these digital agents. This approach, in turn, prompts the digital environment to reflect upon its own internal architecture. The collective 0100101110101101.org extends the concept of "art hacktivism" through code-based interventions and disruptions at prominent art festivals, including the Venice Biennale. Conversely, the collective irational.org broadens "art hacktivism" by executing interventions and perturbations in the physical world, treating it as a potential domain for social re-engineering.
"We can point to a superficial difference between most net.art and hacking: hackers have an obsession with getting inside other computer systems and having an agency there, whereas the 404 errors in the JTDDS (for example) only engage other systems in an intentionally wrong manner in order to store a 'secret' message in their error logs. It's nice to think of artists as hackers who endeavour to get inside cultural systems and make them do things they were never intended to do: artists as culture hackers."
One instance involved a networking expert configuring DNS servers to generate the introductory text of Star Wars IV via the traceroute Linux command. This profound technical repurposing, undertaken for aesthetic and recreational purposes, exemplifies a net.art performance.
Computer worms can be intentionally utilized for constructive purposes when re-engineered to create large-scale ephemeral art, effectively transforming the entire internet into a canvas.
Critique of the Art World
During the peak of net.art development, particularly amidst the expansion of global dot.com capitalism, a series of critical columns emerged in both German and English within the online publication Telepolis. Edited by the writer and artist Armin Medosch, Telepolis featured the "Amerika Online" columns by American artist and net theorist Mark Amerika. These columns offered a satirical critique of the perceived self-seriousness among net.artists, including Amerika himself. In response, European net.artists adopted Amerika's persona in fabricated emails, aiming to deconstruct his demystification of the marketing strategies frequently employed by net.artists to gain legitimacy within the art world. It was posited that "the duplicitous dispatches were meant to raise US awareness of electronic artists in Europe, and may even contain an element of jealousy."
Many of these net.art interventions also addressed the commercial aspects of art and scrutinized established cultural institutions, such as the Tate Modern. Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective, created Uncomfortable Proximity, the Tate's inaugural online commissioned project. This work mirrored the Tate's official website, incorporating new images and concepts derived from Harwood's personal experiences, his interpretations of Tate artworks, and promotional materials that fueled his interest in the Tate website.
net.artists have actively engaged in discussions concerning the definition of net.art within the art market. net.art championed the modernist concept of art as a process, contrasting with the traditional view of art as object creation. Alexander R. Galloway, in an e-flux article titled "Jodi's Infrastructure," asserts that Jodi's net.art methodology, which integrates the fundamental structures governing coding, is distinctly modernist, as form and content converge within the artwork. The integration of this process-oriented art into the art world—specifically, whether it should be commercialized or exhibited in institutional settings—presents challenges for digital works designed for the Internet. Despite its marketability, the web cannot be confined to the ideological parameters of the legitimate art field, which serves as an institution for validating art value, encompassing both ideological and economic dimensions. All for Sale by Aliona represents an early net.art experiment that explored these issues. Furthermore, the WWWArt Award competition, initiated by Alexei Shulgin in 1995, proposed recognizing found Internet works with what he termed an "art feeling."
Certain projects, such as Joachim Schmid's Archiv, Hybrids, or Copies by Eva & Franco Mattes (operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org), exemplify methods for storing art-related or documentary data on a website. Concepts like cloning, plagiarism, and collaborative creation are presented as alternative approaches, as demonstrated in the Refresh Project.
Olia Lialina addressed the complexities of digital curating through her web platform, Teleportacia.org, an online gallery designed to promote and sell net.art works. Each net.art piece's originality was purportedly safeguarded by its unique URL, which functioned as a deterrent against reproducibility and forgery. Lialina contended that this mechanism allowed buyers to possess the artwork as they desired, controlling the URL as a means of regulating access to the piece. This endeavor to establish an economic identity and legitimacy for net.art within the art world faced scrutiny even within the net.art community, although the project was frequently interpreted as satire. Conversely, Teo Spiller successfully sold the web art project Megatronix to the Ljubljana Municipal Museum in May 1999, labeling the entire transaction as the net.art.trade.
Teleportacia.org evolved into an ambiguous experiment examining the concept of originality in an era characterized by extensive digital reproduction and remix culture. The URL-protected guarantee of originality was swiftly challenged by Eva & Franco Mattes, who, under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, replicated the content and launched an unauthorized mirror-site, presenting the net.art works with identical context and quality as the original. The Last Real Net Art Museum serves as another instance of Olia Lialina's efforts to engage with this issue.
Experiments with online social networks, such as the Poietic Generator, which predated, participated in, and outlasted the net.art movement, may indicate that the fashionable aspects of net.art might have overshadowed some profound theoretical considerations.
Digital culture
- Digital culture
- Internet art
- Net-poetry
- References
References
Bibliography
- Baranski, Sandrine. *La musique en réseau, une musique de la complexité?* Éditions universitaires européennes, 2010.
- Bosma, Josephine. Nettitudes Let's Talk Net Art. Nai010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2011, ISBN 978-90-5662-800-0.
- (in Spanish) Martín Prada, Juan. Prácticas artísticas e Internet en la época de las redes sociales [Artistic Practices and the Internet in the Era of Social Networks]. Editorial AKAL, Madrid, 2012, ISBN 978-84-460-3517-6.
- Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art, chap. VI.3 Net Art in the Web Munich 2014
- Thomas Dreher: IASLonline Lessons in NetArt.