net.art
net.art refers to a group of
The term "net.art" is also used as a synonym for net art or Internet art and covers a much wider range of artistic practices. In this wider definition, net.art means art that uses the Internet as its medium and that cannot be experienced in any other way. Typically net.art has the Internet and the specific socio-culture that it spawned as its subject matter but this is not required.
The German critic Tilman Baumgärtel - building on the ideas of American critic Clement Greenberg - has frequently argued for a "media specificity" of net.art in his writings. According to the introduction to his book "net.art. Materialien zur Netzkunst", the specific qualities of net.art are "connectivity, global reach, multimediality, immateriality, interactivity and egality".[3]
History of the net.art movement
The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet art. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet art history, than a specific genre. Early precursors of the net.art movement include the international fluxus (Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (Mark Amerika) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site.
In 1995, the term "net.art" was used by nettime initiator Pit Schultz as a title for an exhibition in Berlin in 1995, in which Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin both showed their work.
Online social networks
net.artists have built
net.artists like
A connection can be made to the e-mail interventions of "Codeworks" artists such as Mez or mi ga or robots like Mailia which analyze emails and reply to them. "Codeworks" is a term coined by poet Alan Sondheim to define the textual experiments of artists playing with faux-code and non-executable script or mark-up languages.[citation needed]
Tactical media net art
net.art developed in a context of cultural crisis in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990s after the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The artists involved in net.art experiments are associated with the idea of a "social responsibility" that would answer the idea of democracy as a modern capitalist myth. The Internet, often promoted as the democratic tool par excellence, but largely participating in the rules of vested interests, is targeted by the net.artists who claimed that "a space where you can buy is a space where you can steal, but also where you can distribute". net.artists focus on finding new ways of sharing public space.
By questioning structures such as the navigation window and challenging their functionality, net.artists have shown that what is considered to be natural by most Internet users is actually highly constructed, even controlled, by corporations. Company browsers like
Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting have played with the structure of advertisement portals by establishing lists of keywords unlikely to be searched for but nonetheless existing on the web as URLs or metadata components: they use this relational data to enmesh paths of navigation in order to create new readable texts [
Rachel Greene has associated net.art with
Hacker culture
The Jodi collective works with the aesthetics of computer errors, which has a lot in common, on both the aesthetic and pragmatic levels, with
"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.".[12]
A networking expert hacked into DNS servers to have the traceroute Linux command reveal the history of star wars IV.[13] This deep technical repurposing for the sake of enchantment and fun can be considered as a net.art performance.
Computer worms can be intentionally good and positive when they are repurposed for large-scale ephemeral art that uses the whole Internet as a canvas.[14]
Critique of the art world
During the heyday of net.art developments, particularly during the rise of global dot.com capitalism, the first series of critical columns appeared in German and English in the online publication Telepolis. Edited by writer and artist Armin Medosch, the work published at Telepolis featured American artist and net theorist Mark Amerika's "Amerika Online" columns.[15] These columns satirized the way self-effacing net.artists (himself included) took themselves too seriously. In response, European net.artists impersonated Amerika in faux emails to deconstruct his demystification of the marketing schemes most net.artists employed to achieve art world legitimacy. It was suggested that "the duplicitous dispatches were meant to raise US awareness of electronic artists in Europe, and may even contain an element of jealousy."[16]
Many of these net.art interventions also tackled the issue of art as business and investigated mainstream cultural institutions such as the Tate Modern. Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective, in his work Uncomfortable Proximity[17] (the first on-line project commissioned by Tate) mirrors the Tate's own website, and offers new images and ideas, collaged from his own experiences, his readings of Tate works, and publicity materials that inform his interest in the Tate website[citation needed].
net.artists have actively participated in the debate over the definition of net.art within the context of the art market. net.art promoted the
Some projects, such as Joachim Schmid's Archiv, Hybrids, or Copies by
Olia Lialina has addressed the issue of digital curating via her web platform Teleportacia.org, an online gallery to promote and sell net.art works. Each piece of net.art has its originality protected by a guarantee constituted by its URL, which acts as a barrier against reproducibility and/or forgery. Lialina claimed that this allowed the buyer of the piece to own it as they wished: controlling the location address as a means of controlling access to the piece.[citation needed] This attempt at giving net.art an economic identity and a legitimation within the art world was questioned even within the net.art sphere, though the project was often understood as a satire.[20] On the other hand, Teo Spiller really sold a web art project Megatronix to Ljubljana Municipal Museum in May 1999, calling the whole project of selling the net.art.trade.[21]
Teleportacia.org became an ambiguous experiment on the notion of originality in the age of extreme digital reproduction and
Online social networks experiments, such as the Poietic Generator, which existed before[22] the net.art movement, was involved in it,[23] and still exist after it,[24] may show that the fashion scheme of net.art may have forgotten some deep theoretical questions.[25]
See also
- Digital culture
- History of the Internet
- Internet art
- Glitch art
- Net-poetry
- Surfing club
References
- ISBN 978-0-8165-3753-2.
- ISBN 978-1-317-06349-0.
- ISBN 3-933096-17-0
- ^ Bosma, J. (2011). Nettitudes. Let's Talk Net Art. Rotterdam: NAiPublishers, 2011. Print. p.148.
- ^ "Specific Net.art found possible". CNN Interactive. 1989-05-16. Retrieved 2009-03-12. (reproduction of event listing, on Ljudmila.org)
- ^ a b c Rachel Greene, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, 2004
- ISBN 978-0262731386
- ^ Lialina, O A New Definition, Nettime Archive List
- ^ Madre, F Interview by Josephine Bosma, Nettime list archive
- ^ Madre, F pleine-peau.com, site created in 1994
- ^ My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone.
- thing.net. 1998-05-01. Retrieved 2009-03-12.
- ^ Sharwood, Simon. "Traceroute reveals Star Wars Episode IV 'crawl' text". www.theregister.com. Retrieved 2022-02-06.
- ^ Aycock, John (2022-09-15). "Painting the Internet". Leonardo. 42 (2): 112–113 – via MUSE.
- ^ "Amerika Online". Telepolis. Archived from the original on 2009-05-04. Retrieved 2009-03-12.
- ^ Mirapaul, M War of the Words: Ersatz E-Mail Tilts at Art Archived 2007-09-30 at the Wayback Machine, New York Times
- ^ Uncomfortable Proximity
- ^ "Jodi's Infrastructure - Journal #74 June 2016 - e-flux". www.e-flux.com. Retrieved 2017-03-15.
- ^ "A Multi-Nodal Web-Surf-Create-Session for an Unspecified Number of Players". 1997-03-14. Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2009-03-12.
- ^ Wright, Richard (1998-08-25). "Net Art Market: What Happens Next?". Retrieved 2009-03-12.
- ^ Mirapaul, M "There May Be Money in Internet Art After All", The New York Times, 1999-05-13
- ^ Don ForestaArchived 2013-10-18 at the Wayback Machine : Chronologie historique résumée d'échanges artistiques par télécommunications. Les précurseurs, jusqu'en 1995, avant l'Internet (PDF) Archived 2013-10-18 at the Wayback Machine, Gilbertto Prado : CRONOLOGIA DE EXPERIÊNCIAS ARTÍSTICAS NAS REDES DE TELECOMUNICAÇÕES (Web Archived 2009-04-25 at the Wayback Machine)
- ^ Musée Royal de Mariemont, Belgium, 1999 : art en ligne · art en réseau · art en mouvement, Festival X-00, Lorient, France, 2000, Théophanie assistée par ordinateur BREAK21 festival - Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2000
- ^ A call to finance the mobile version of the Poietic Generator (KissKissBanBank crowdfunding platform)
- ^ Anne Cauquelin: Fréquenter les incorporels, PUF, collection « Lignes d'art », 2006. Que sais-je ? L’art contemporain, PUF, 9eme édition, mai 2009.
Bibliography
- Baranski Sandrine, La musique en réseau, une musique de la complexité ?, Éditions universitaires européennes, 2010 La musique en réseau
- 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, Editorial AKAL, Madrid, 2012, ISBN 978-84-460-3517-6
External links
- Thomas Dreher: History of Computer Art, chap. VI.3 Net Art in the Web Munich 2014
- Thomas Dreher: IASLonline Lessons in NetArt.