Internet art

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

In some cases there might be an analogy to earlier formal art forms like video art, which uses video as its medium - but is also very much about video, like some forms of painting. Some net artists see the Internet as only one component in a meta-artistic system, depending on their specific artistic approach. 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.

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

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, code poetry and installations or projects offline. Internet art 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, code poetry, and net-poetry.

In literature, the terms Internet art, Internet-based art, net art, net.art, Web art and "artists working with networks" are all used for this type of work; not any of those names have 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, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting. These artists were considered a group, and when this group seemed to fall apart, many thought net.art was dead. The art works the term net art refers to however applies to works made by artists before and after the specific period this alleged group existed.

Other artists were working at about the same time: Cornelia Sollfrank, Akke Wagenaar, Yvon Legrand, Peter Luining, Mouchette, Meta, Pit Schultz, Knowbotic research, Eva Wohlgemut, Mark Amerika, Jaromil, Superbad (Ben Benjamin), etoy / the etoy. CORPORATION, Snarg, mez, Zuper (Michael Samyn), I/O/D (Collective), G. H. Hovagimyan, Agricola de Cologne, incident.net, Frederic Madre, Valéry Grancher, Fred Forest, Eryk Salvaggio, Miltos Manetas, Rafael Rozendal, Bob Holmes, Angelo Plessas, joel Fox, Annie Abrahams, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield.org), Dimitrios Fotiou and Antiorp to name but a few. Earlier works of net art were created from roughly 1980 to 1994 by for instance Roy Ascott, Robert Adrian, Hank Bull, Station Rose, Wolfgang Staehle, Julia Scher, VNS Matrix and Van Gogh TV. Some art projects done in other media are sometimes perceived as part of net art, like Hole in Space by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (created through satelite video link up), but one could also see them as a forerunner.

History and context

Internet art is rooted in a variety of artistic traditions and movements, and could maybe be seen as a radical extension of various art disciplines. Some Internet art projects are particularly related to conceptual art, Fluxus, pop art and performance art. Internet art was initially created in an institutional context, partly in the traditional art world and partly in the media art world. Early projects were performed in collaboration with museums and other art institutions, such as Roy Ascott's work La Plissure du Texte which was created for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1983. Media art institutions such as Ars Electronica Festival in Linz or the Paris-based IRCAM, a research center for electronic music would also support or present early net art. The fact that both the computer and the internet have become a common, accessible technology has allowed a much broader scope of artists to enter the field, often completely independent from art institutions.

Internet art was very much in the picture between 1995 to 1998 when the general audience first discovered the Internet. Successful on and offline public venues such as Adaweb directed by Benjamin Weil, Alt-X founded by net artist Mark Amerika, Rhizome initiated by artist and curator Mark Tribe and the Dx web site documentaX curated by Simon Lamuniere put Internet art on the map. The dot-com mania at the time created a double edged sword: it created a lot of attention for this type of art, but at the same time connected it to the soap bubble of online commerce in the minds eye of part of the audience. Currently, there is a strong tendency to look at Internet-related artworks in a wider context of art and technology, as also artists working with networks usually prefer to be contextualized within a general contemporary art discourse.

See also

• Digital art
• Cyberculture
• Net-poetry
• DeviantArt

External links

• 0RF.at - net-art, homography and hacktivism since 1999
• netzwissenschaft - complete collection of net-art links
• [1] - Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace - 1997 exhibition curated by Mark Amerika and Alexander R. Galloway
• Annotated links - annotated links to net art sites
• net-art Community Congress
• File Festival-complete collection of net-art
• Feature on Net Art Commissions - Artkrush.com, July 2006
• JavaMuseum - Forum for Internet Technology in Contemporary Art-comprehensive collections of Internet based art
• JavaMuseum Interview Project- collection of interviews on Internet based art
• net-art.org - portal to web related art
• whitneybiennial - Online exhibition dedicated to web-art
• Rhizome Artbase - Archive of Internet based art at the New Museum in NYC

References

• Baumgärtel, Tilman (2001). net.art 2.0 – Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst / New Materials towards Net art. Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst. ISBN 3-933096-66-9.
• Wilson, Stephen (2001). Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-23209-X.
• Net Art Review a daily updated site that tries to keep pace with what is happening in the world of netart: netartreview
• Greene, Rachel (2004). "Internet Art". Thames and Hudson. ISBN-10: 0500203768, ISBN-13: 978-0500203767.
• Stallabras, Julian (2003). "Internet Art: the online clash of culture and commerce". Tate Publishing. ISBN-10: 1854373455, ISBN-13: 978-1854373458.
• The syndicate network for media culture and media art : http://anart.no/~syndicate
• JIP - JavaMuseum Interview Project: [2]
• WB05 e-symposium published as ISEA Newsletter #102 - ISSN 1488-3635 #102 [3]