[x] Close ad

NET ART

Internet art (often called net.art) is art or cultural production which uses the Internet as its primary medium (but not necessarily its subject, though this is often the case). Artists using this medium are sometimes called net.artists.

In many cases there might be an analogy to video art, which uses video as its medium - but is also very much about video. Many net.artists view video as only a component in a Software Art or meta-artistic system, which is very much "about" code. As such the medium of internet art might be a number of hypertext markup codes.

Internet art projects are art projects for which the Net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/expressing/participating. Internet art can also happen outside the purely technical structure of the internet, when artists use specific social or cultural traditions from the internet in a project outside of it. Internet art is often, but not always, interactive, participatory and based on multimedia in the broadest sense.

— definition by Steve Dietz, former curator in new media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

Contents

Forms

Internet art can take concrete form in artistic websites, e-mail projects, artistic Internet software, Internet-based or networked installations, online video, audio or radio works, networked performances and installations or performances offline. Internet art as a "movement" is part of new media art and electronic art. A few sub-genres of Internet art are software art, generative art, net.radio, browser art, web-specific art, spam art, click environments and code poetry.

In literature, the terms Internet art, Internet-based art, net art, net.art, Web art and "artists working with networks" are used together; not any of those names has predominated until now. Some feel the term net.art refers to a specific group of artists working on the medium from 1994-1999; these are usually referenced as Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting . This can be misleading, however, as other artists were working at the same time: Jaromil, Superbad (Ben Benjamin), Mark Amerika, etoy / the etoy. CORPORATION, Snarg, mez, (mez breeze), Zuper (Michael Samyn), I/O/D (Collective), Valéry grancher, G. H. Hovagimyan, incident.net, Frederic Madre, Eryk Salvaggio, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield.org) and Antiorp to name but a few. Some culture producers on the Internet liken the term "net art" or "net.art" to a pun, a recapitulation of the consumerist ideals of Pop Art.

History and context

Internet art is rooted in a variety of artistic traditions and movements. Some Internet art projects are particularly related to conceptual art, Fluxus, pop art and performance art. In the early 90s, artists affiliated with the popular artist-run website Alt-X [1] began publishing and exhibiting net art. One of the first-ever online Internet art shows, Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace [2], was co-curated by Alexander Galloway and Mark Amerika and was released on Alt-X in 1997. Internet art is also historically related to the interdisciplinary field of technology-centered or electronic art which has developed since the 1970s in research institutes and specialized art centers throughout Europe, Japan and the United States - outside the regular, "non-technological" museum and gallery circuit. Examples are the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, the LA Freewaves new media film festival, early network radio experiments at ORF Kunstradio, and Paris-based IRCAM, a research center for electronic music. The fact that both the computer and the internet have become a common, accessible technology has opened this formerly high tech art circuit up to a much broader field of artists.

Internet art was most visible and witnessed its peak from 1996 to 1998 with successful public venues such as Adaweb directed by Benjamin Weil and documentaX curated by Simon Lamuniere; broad public attention and acclaim for Internet art at that time were largely related to the dot-com mania, although some cultural producers linked this form to other contemporary art practises, such as ØtherLands, Humbot 1999 and UNMOVIE docs by collaboratives of artists, hackers, architects and writers. An example of the individual artist using video art and new media techniques to create unique internet art can be found at the 2005 Webby Award nominated site Dreamies where electronic artist Bill Holt displays daily flash video compositions expressing his internet art vision of the world around us. Art in and around computer networks has a much older history though, which can be traced back to the early 1980s, and back to the late 1960s and the "Software" show at the Jewish Museum in New York. Currently, there is a stronger tendency to look at Internet-related artworks in a wider context of technological art, while artists working with networks usually prefer to be contextualized within the general contemporary art discourse, bridging real and virtual space, such as Gruppo A12, E-toy, Axel Heide, G. H. Hovagimyan, Knowbotic Research, Joseph Nechvatal, Udo Noll, Philip Pocock, Felix Stephan Huber, Wolfgang Staehle, Gregor Stehle and Florian Wenz.

See also

External links

References

  • Art Servers Unlimited, ed. Manu Luksch, Armin Medosch (1998) http://asu.sil.at ISBN 899858985
  • Baumgärtel, Tilman (2001). net.art 2.0 – Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst / New Materials towards Net art. Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst. ISBN 3933096669.
  • Wilson, Stephen (2001). Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. ISBN 026223209X.
  • Net Art Review a daily updated site that tries to keep pace with what is happening in the world of netart: netartreview
  • The syndicate network for media culture and media art : http://anart.no/~syndicate