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Internet Art

Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of digital artwork distributed via the Internet. This form of art has circumvented the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering aesthetic experiences via the Internet. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

Net artist 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-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 online galleries. 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.

Net Art Diagram. "The Art Happens Here"

Theorist and curator Jon Ippolito defined "Ten Myths" about 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 to Situationism, conceptual art, Fluxus, video art, kinetic art, performance art, telematic art and happenings.

The term "Net Art" originated as an accident when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic received an anonymous email that due to a software glitch had become illegible besides the term "net.art" in December 1995.

In 1974, Canadian artist Vera Frenkel 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 artwork was Roy 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.

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 networked art. In 1997 MIT's List Visual Arts Center 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, and Adrianne Wortzel. In 2000 the Whitney Museum of American Art 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, Fakeshop, Ken Goldberg, 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'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 displayed items amassed from hard drives around the world in a computational collective unconscious.' 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 (point to point) applications, suggesting the existence of reference points, there is also a multicast (multipoint and uncentered) internet that has been explored by very few artistic experiences, such as the Poietic Generator. 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 platform 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, 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".

An expanded form of Internet Art which utilizes off and online tools to focus on informational culture exists now due to the spread of internet into every aspect of human life through smartphones, social media, and faster bandwidths.

Rhizome's Net Art Anthology, which was presented alongside an exhibit at the New Museum in New York in winter 2019, attempts to identify, categorize, present, and preserve 100 internet art works in order to combat the lack of historical information on the topic.

Tools

Art historian Rachel Greene identified six forms of internet art that existed from 1993 to 1996: email, audio, video, graphics, animation and websites.

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. These mailing lists allowed for organization which was carried over to face-to-face meetings that facilitated more nuanced conversations, less burdened from miscommunication.

Many artists today use Google's search engine and other services for inspiration and materials. New Google services breeds new artistic possibilities. Beginning in 2008 and currently ongoing, Jon Rafman collected images from Google Street View, which at the time was a relatively new platform, and displayed them on his tumblr blog, in books, as prints in galleries, or as pdfs for his project called The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. The name alludes to the original amount of cameras on the Street View Car, which now has fifteen cameras, and aims to juxtapose the human gaze and the alleged neutral automated gaze. The tumblr blog for the project is organized under four categories: street photography, photos of natural beauty, surreal images, and people responding to Google cameras. 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.

Another tool utilized by net artists is hacking, with the most famous example being 'SWARM' by Ricardo Dominguez in 1998 that interfered with the websites of the Pentagon, the Frankfort Stock Exchange, and Mexican President Ernest Zedillo with the goal of developing activists' vocabulary of dissent.

Themes

International arts festival Ars Electronica, located in Linz Austria, assigns a theme that each year that exhibits must follow. Past internet related themes have been "Intelligence Ambiente", "Endo Nando", and "Welcome to the Wired World", however 1998's "Infowar" departed from previous utopic views to blur the lines between activism, politics, art, and parody by focusing on how social, political, and informational phenomena interact.

'Rehearsal of Memory' created by the artist collective Mongrel in 1996 aimed to tackle the theme of mental health treatment by collaborating with patients at the Ashworth Mental Hospital where a map of the patients' skin was linked to documents about their lives within the hospital. The collective aimed to address race and class issues in 1997's 'Heritage Gold', a hack of Adobe Photoshop where image editing tools were relabeled for class and race editing tools. The goal was to question the supposed neutral nature of graphic design software.