upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden
Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of
new media art
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of new media, electronic media technology, technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video g ...
distributed via the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the physical gallery and museum system. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of
interaction
Interaction is action that occurs between two or more objects, with broad use in philosophy and the sciences. It may refer to:
Science
* Interaction hypothesis, a theory of second language acquisition
* Interaction (statistics)
* Interactions o ...
with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.
Net artists may use specific social or cultural internet traditions to produce their art outside of the technical structure of the internet. Internet art is often — but not always — interactive, participatory, and
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...
-based. Internet art can be used to spread a message, either political or social, using human interactions.
The term ''Internet art'' typically does not refer to art that has been simply digitized and uploaded to be viewable over the Internet, such as in an online gallery.
Rather, this genre relies intrinsically on the Internet to exist as a whole, taking advantage of such aspects as an interactive interface and connectivity to multiple social and economic cultures and micro-cultures, not only web-based works.
New media theorist and curator
Jon Ippolito
Jon Ippolito is an artist, educator, new media scholar, and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Ippolito studied astrophysics and painting in the early 1980s, then pursued Internet art in the 1990s. His works explore digitally indu ...
defined "Ten Myths of Internet Art" in 2002.
He cites the above stipulations, as well as defining it as distinct from commercial web design, and touching on issues of permanence, archivability, and collecting in a fluid medium.
History and context
Internet art is rooted in disparate artistic traditions and movements, ranging from
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 192 ...
to
Situationism
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution ...
,
conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
,
Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...
,
video art
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...
,
kinetic art,
performance art
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
,
telematic art Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive ...
and
happenings
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events.
History
Origins
Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happen ...
.
In 1974, Canadian artist
Vera Frenkel
Vera Frenkel D. Litt (born November 10, 1938) is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her installations, videotapes, performances and new media projects address the forces at work in human migration, the learning and unlearning ...
worked with the Bell Canada Teleconferencing Studios to produce the work ''String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video'', the first artwork in Canada to use telecommunications technologies.
An early
telematic art Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive ...
work was
Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott FRSA (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetic by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott ...
's work, ''La Plissure du Texte'',
performed in collaboration created for an exhibition at the
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983.
In 1985,
Eduardo Kac created the animated
videotex
Videotex (or interactive videotex) was one of the earliest implementations of an end-user information system. From the late 1970s to early 2010s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typi ...
poem ''Reabracadabra'' for the
Minitel
The Minitel was a videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was invented in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes in Brittany, France.
The service was ...
system.
Media art institutions such as
Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the ...
Festival in
Linz
Linz ( , ; cs, Linec) is the capital of Upper Austria and third-largest city in Austria. In the north of the country, it is on the Danube south of the Czech border. In 2018, the population was 204,846.
In 2009, it was a European Capital of ...
, or the
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
-based IRCAM (a research center for electronic music), would also support or present early networked art. In 1997
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
's
List Visual Arts Center
Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its admini ...
hosted "PORT: Navigating Digital Culture," which included internet art in a gallery space and "time-based Internet projects." Artists in the show included
Cary Peppermint,
Prema Murthy,
Ricardo Dominguez
Ricardo is the Spanish and Portuguese cognate of the name Richard. It derived from Proto-Germanic ''*rīks'' 'king, ruler' + ''*harduz'' 'hard, brave'. It may be a given name, or a surname.
People Given name
* Ricardo de Araújo Pereira, Portu ...
, and
Adrianne Wortzel. In 2000 the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
included net art in their Biennial exhibit. It was the first time that internet art had been included as a special category in the Biennial, and it marked one of the earliest examples of the inclusion of internet art in a museum setting. Internet artists included
Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika (born 1960, Miami, Florida) is an American artist, theorist, novelist and professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado. He is a graduate of the Literary Arts program at Brown University, where he received his MFA in ...
,
Fakeshop,
Ken Goldberg,
etoy
Etoy is a European digital art group formed in 1994. It has won several international awards including the Prix Ars Electronica in 1996. Their main slogan is: "leaving reality behind."
Etoy has routinely experimented with the boundaries of art, ...
and
®™ark.
With the rise of search engines as a gateway to accessing the web in the late 1990s, many net artists turned their attention to related themes. The 2001 'Data Dynamics' exhibit at the Whitney Museum featured 'Netomat' (Maciej Wisniewski) and 'Apartment' (Marek Walczak and
Martin Wattenberg), which used search queries as raw material.
Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer. She pioneered the field of game research with her ideas on critical play and has written five books. She is the founding director of the research laboratory and design studio Tiltfactor ...
's ' The Perpetual Bed' received attention for its use of 3D nonlinear narrative space, or what she called "navigable narratives."
Her 2001 piece titled 'Collection' shown in the
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...
displayed items amassed from hard drives around the world in a computational
collective unconscious
Collective unconscious (german: kollektives Unbewusstes) refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populat ...
.'
Golan Levin's 'The Secret Lives of Numbers' (2000) visualized the "popularity" of the numbers 1 to 1,000,000 as measured by Alta Vista search results. Such works pointed to alternative interfaces and questioned the dominant role of search engines in controlling access to the net.
Nevertheless, the Internet is not reducible to the web, nor to search engines. Besides these
unicast
Unicast is data transmission from a single sender (red) to a single receiver (green). Other devices on the network (yellow) do not participate in the communication.
In computer networking, unicast is a one-to-one transmission from one point in ...
(point to point) applications,suggesting the existence of reference points, there is also a
multicast
In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...
(multipoint and uncentered) internet that has been explored by very few artistic experiences, such as the
Poietic Generator
The Poietic Generator is a social-network game designed by Olivier Auber in 1986, and developed from 1987 under the label free art thanks to many contributors. The game takes place within a two-dimensional matrix in the tradition of board games a ...
. Internet art has, according to Juliff and Cox, suffered under the privileging of the user interface inherent within computer art. They argue that Internet is not synonymous with a specific user and specific interface, but rather a dynamic structure that encompasses coding and the artist's intention.
The emergence of social networking platforms in the mid-2000s facilitated a transformative shift in the distribution of internet art. Early online communities were organized around specific "topical hierarchies",
whereas social networking platforms consist of egocentric networks, with the "individual at the center of their own community".
Artistic communities on the Internet underwent a similar transition in the mid-2000s, shifting from Surf Clubs, "15 to 30 person groups whose members contributed to an ongoing visual-conceptual conversation through the use of digital media"
and whose membership was restricted to a select group of individuals, to image-based social networking platforms, like
Flickr
Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...
, which permit access to any individual with an e-mail address. Internet artists make extensive use of the networked capabilities of social networking platforms, and are rhizomatic in their organization, in that "production of meaning is externally contingent on a network of other artists' content".
Post-Internet
Post-Internet
Post-Internet is a 21st century art movement involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society.
Definition
Post-Internet is a loosely-defined term that was coined by artist/curator Marisa Olson ...
is a loose descriptor
for works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society. It is a controversial and highly criticized term in the art community.
It emerged from mid-2000s discussions about Internet art by
Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh, and
Artie Vierkant (the latter notable for his ''Image Objects'', a series of deep blue monochrome prints).
Between the 2000s and 2010s, post-Internet artists were largely the domain of
millennial
Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the Western demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000 ...
s operating on web platforms such as
Tumblr
Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...
and
MySpace. The movement is also responsible for spearheading slews of
microgenre
A microgenre is a specialized or niche genre. The term has been used since at least the 1970s to describe highly specific subgenres of music, literature, film, and art. In music, examples include the myriad sub-subgenres of heavy metal and electr ...
s and
subculture
A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, poli ...
s such as
seapunk
Seapunk is a subculture that originated on Tumblr in 2011. It is associated with an aquatic-themed style of fashion, 3D net art, iconography, and allusions to popular culture of the 1990s. The advent of seapunk also spawned its own electronic mu ...
and
vaporwave
Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, visual art style, and Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator music, elevator, contemporary ...
.
This term "post internet" was coined by Internet artist
Marisa Olson in 2008. According to a 2015 article in ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'', the term describes "the practices of artists who ... unlike those of previous generations,
mploythe Web
sjust another medium, like painting or sculpture. Their artworks move fluidly between spaces, appearing sometimes on a screen, other times in a gallery."
In the early 2010s, "post-Internet" was popularly associated with the musician
Grimes
Claire Elise Boucher (; born March 17, 1988), known professionally as Grimes, is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Her early work has been described as extending from "lo-fi R&B" to futuristic dance-pop, and has in ...
, who used the term to describe her work at a time when post-Internet concepts were not typically discussed in mainstream music arenas.
Tools
Art historian Rachel Greene identified six forms of internet art that existed from 1993 to 1996: email, audio, video, graphics, animation and websites.
[5-Arts Net>
In the 1990s, email based mailing lists provided net artists with a community for online discourse that broke boundaries between critical and generative dialogues. The email format allowed instant expression, however limited to text and simple graphic based communication, with an international scope.<5-arts net>] These mailing lists allowed for organization which was carried over to face-to-face meetings that facilitated more nuanced conversations, less burdened from miscommunication.
Since the mid-2000s, many artists have used Google's search engine and other services for inspiration and materials. New Google services breed new artistic possibilities.
Beginning in 2008,
Jon Rafman collected images from
Google Street View
Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expa ...
for his project called ''The Nine Eyes of Google Street View''.
Another ongoing net art project is
I'm Google' by Dina Kelberman which organizes pictures and videos from Google and YouTube around a theme in a grid form that expands as you scroll.
See also
*
Art sales
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of what ...
*
Artmedia
Artmedia was one of the first scientific projects concerning the relationship between art, technology, philosophy and aesthetics. It was founded in 1985 at the University of Salerno. For over two decades, until 2009, dozens of projects, studies, e ...
*
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant chara ...
*
Cyberculture
Internet culture is a culture based on the many way people have used computer networks and their use for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. Some features of Internet culture include online communities, gaming, and social media ...
*
Cyberformance
Cyberformance refers to live theatrical performances in which remote participants are enabled to work together in real time through the medium of the internet, employing technologies such as chat applications or purpose-built, multiuser, real-time ...
*
Digital art
Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media.
Since the 1960s, various names ...
*
Electronic literature
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a constr ...
*
Email art
Email art refers to artwork created for the medium of email. It includes computer graphics, animations, screensavers, digital scans of artwork in other media, and even ASCII art. When exhibited, Email art can be either displayed on a computer ...
*
Fax art
Fax art is art specifically designed to be sent or transmitted by a facsimile machine, where the "fax art" is the received "fax". It is also called telecommunications art or telematic art. According to art historians Annmarie Chandler and Norie ...
*
Fractal art
Fractal art is a form of algorithmic art created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still digital images, animations, and media. Fractal art developed from the mid-1980s onwards. It is a genre of compute ...
* ''
Homestuck
''Homestuck'' is an Internet fiction series created by American author and artist Andrew Hussie in the first half of the 2010s. The fourth and best-known of Hussie's four ''MS Paint Adventures'', it originally ran from April 13, 2009 to April 1 ...
''
*
Hypertext fiction
Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text ...
*
Net.art
net.art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. Some of the early adopters and main members of this movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting, Daniel Gar ...
*
Net-poetry
Net-poetry is a development of net.art, involving poetry. This kind of experimental art was born in several different cities and countries around 1995.
Short history
Net-poetry was born in the context of net-art and digital art avant-garde in var ...
*
Online exhibition
An online exhibition, also referred to as a virtual exhibition, online gallery, cyber-exhibition, is an exhibition whose venue is cyberspace.
Museums and other organizations create online exhibitions for many reasons.
For example, an online exhi ...
*
SITO
SITO is an online artist collective which began in January 1993, making it one of the oldest Internet-based art organizations. It was started by Ed Stastny and has been maintained by Stastny and a group of volunteers and supporters. __NOTOC__
Fro ...
*
Surfing club
*
Telematic art Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive ...
*
Virtual art
Virtual art is a term for the virtualization of art, made with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s (or a bit before, in some cases). These include human-machine interfaces such as visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and ...
References
Bibliography
* Kate Armstrong, Jeremy Bailey & Faisal Anwar on Net Art in Canadian Art Magazin
* Weibel, Peter and Gerbel, Karl (1995)
''Welcome in the Net World '' @rs electronica 95 Linz. Wien New York: Springer Verlag.
*
Fred Forest
Fred Forest (born July 6, 1933 in Mascara, French Algeria) is a French new media artist making use of video, photography, the printed press, mail, radio, television, telephone, telematics, and the internet in a wide range of installations, perform ...
1998,¨Pour un art actuel, l'art à l'heure d'Internet" l'Harmattan, Paris
* Baranski Sandrine
''La musique en réseau, une musique de la complexité ?''Éditions universitaires européennes, mai 2010
*
* Baumgärtel, Tilman (2001). ''net.art 2.0 – Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst / New Materials towards Net art''. Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst. .
* Wilson, Stephen (2001). ''Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology''. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press. .
*
Caterina Davinio
Caterina Davinio (born Maria Caterina Invidia; 25 November 1957, Foggia) is an Italian poet, novelist and new media artist. She is the author of works of digital art, net.art, video art and was the creator of Italian Net-poetry in 1998.
Biogr ...
2002. ''Tecno-Poesia e realtà virtuali / Techno-Poetry and Virtual Realities'', Sometti, Mantua (IT) Collection: Archivio della poesia del 900. Mantua Municipality. With English translation.
* Stallabrass, Julian (2003). "Internet Art: the online clash of culture and commerce".
Tate Publishing. , .
*
Christine Buci-Glucksmann
Christine Buci-Glucksmann is a French philosopher and Professor Emeritus from University of Paris VIII specializing in the aesthetics of the Baroque and Japan, and computer art. Her best-known work in English is ''Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics o ...
, "L’art à l’époque virtuel", in Frontières esthétiques de l’art, Arts 8, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004
* Greene, Rachel (2004). "Internet Art". Thames and Hudson. , .
*
Corby, Tom (2006). "Network Art: Practices and Positions". Routledge, .
* WB05 e-symposium published as ISEA Newsletter #102 - #10
* Juliff, Toby & Cox, Travis. 'The Post-display condition of contemporary computer art.' ''eMaj'' #8 (April 2015) https://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/cox-and-juliff_the-post-display-condition-of-contemporary-computer-art.pdf
* Ascott, R.2003. ''Telematic Embrace: visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness''. (
Edward A. Shanken, ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
*
Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott FRSA (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetic by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott ...
2002. ''Technoetic Arts'' (Editor and Korean translation: YI, Won-Kon), (Media & Art Series no. 6, Institute of Media Art, Yonsei University). Yonsei: Yonsei University Press
* Ascott, R. 1998. ''Art & Telematics: toward the Construction of New Aesthetics''. (Japanese trans. E. Fujihara). A. Takada & Y. Yamashita eds. Tokyo: NTT Publishing Co.,Ltd.
*
Fred Forest
Fred Forest (born July 6, 1933 in Mascara, French Algeria) is a French new media artist making use of video, photography, the printed press, mail, radio, television, telephone, telematics, and the internet in a wide range of installations, perform ...
2008. ''Art et Internet'', Paris Editions Cercle D'Art / Imaginaire Mode d'Emploi
*Thomas Dreher
''IASLonline Lessons/Lektionen in NetArt.'' chap.VI: Net Art: Networks, Participation, Hypertext
* Monoskop (2010). Overview of 'surf clubs' phenomenon
Art in the Era of the Internet PBS Report
* Martín Prada, Juan, ''Prácticas artísticas e Internet en la época de las redes sociales'', Editorial AKAL, Madrid, 2012,
* Bosma, Josephine (2011) "Nettitudes - Let's Talk Net Art
NAI Publishers,
* Schneider, B. (2011, January 6). From Clubs to Affinity: The Decentralization of Art on the Internet « 491. 491. Retrieved March 3, 2011, from https://web.archive.org/web/20120707101824/http://fourninetyone.com/2011/01/06/fromclubstoaffinity/
*
*
Moss, Ceci. (2008). Thoughts on “New Media Artists v. Artists with Computers". ''Rhizome Journal''. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/dec/3/thoughts-on-quotnew-media-artists-vs-artists-with-/
* Greene, Rachel. (2000) A History of Internet Art. ''Artforum'', vol. 38.
* Bookchin, Natalie & Alexei Shulgin (1994-5). ''Introduction to net.art.'' Rhizome. http://rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/48530/.
* Atkins, Robert. (1995). The Art World (and I) Go Online. ''Art in America'' 83/2.
* Houghton, B. (2002). ''The Internet & art: A guidebook for artists.'' Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. .
*Bosma, J. (2011). Nettitudes: Let's talk net art. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers. .
* Daniels, D., & Reisinger, G. (2009). Net pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing early net-based art. Berlin: Sternberg Press. .
External links
netartnet.netan online-gallery listing and directory of internet art
netart latino database
* An interview with Martijn Hendriks &
Katja Novitskova"The New Aesthetic and its Politics"*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Internet Art
2000s in art
2010s in art
Internet culture
New media art
Digital art
Theories of aesthetics
Metanarratives
Philosophical movements