RE: net.art

So, there are a million things that can be said about net.art, but for the sake of expediency, let’s start with answering some questions with regard to the net.art. The first question that we’ll consider is seemingly simple: what is net.art? I think a simple definition (one that will undoubtedly be subjected to my own scrutiny and revision as the semester goes on) is a piece of work developed with the intention of dissemination and placement in the context of the Internet. As such, net.art relies entirely upon the Internet as a medium to exist. Therefore, a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not net.art, but is, rather, art on the net. Also, the art itself may deal with themes that are both web-bound and non-web-bound.

That said, the two questions that were asked after this first question become slightly irrelevant. If the net.art fulfills the criteria I’ve stated, it can still be displayed in a museum—though, the net.art manifesto might disapprove of this—the Internet or anywhere else that is possible. As such, the places where one can find net.art are similarly only limited by publicity, placement in places such as museums (or not), and other social factors. It seems, though, that the most natural place for a piece of net.art would be on the Internet where individuals using a home/work/whatever computer can access it.

On to the introduction to net.art reading. Some sections seem incredibly ambitious and others seem very prophetic. The first quote that I’ll pull from the introduction lists this as a specific feature of net.art:

Vanishing boundaries between public and private.

This seems very true and is currently being grappled with by artists from media not exclusive to net.art. Net artists, however, do have an obligation to consider whether their art ought to be made public or private. This facet raises some interesting questions about the very nature of net.art. If a work of net.art is made private (i.e. shown only in a gallery, despite existing at an undisclosed location on the web), is it still net.art? Does net.art depend upon a “public” level of accessibility? I would think this violates my criteria for what net.art is and would, therefore, still be considered net.art. However, this would violate one of the tenets of this introduction to net.art, so this was, at least, being considered and interrogated from the very conception of net.art.

The second quote, which I’ve pulled from the introduction, lists this as a specific feature of net.art:

[The] disintegration and mutation of artist, curator, pen-pal, audience, gallery, theorist, art-collector, and museum.

As we know, this hasn’t happened—at least not to my knowledge. There exists still in net.art the desire to have works recognized, written about (theoretically or otherwise), and it appears that distinguished digital-art websites (i.e. Rhizome, Turbulence) have taken the place of the museum with regard to net.art. So, disintegration no; mutation, yes.

Finally, let’s take a look at some questions raised by my tooling around with some early (and not-so-early) works of net.art. The first question that came to my mind while I was perusing these old “galleries” was: What happens to the art when the link no longer works? It seems as if the writers of the net.art manifesto foresaw the role things like bandwidth would play with regard to distribution and publicity, but it also seems as though they didn’t adequately prepare for the repercussions of things like broken links, a lack of server space, and improperly backed-up data. Coming across a repository of user-generated anecdotes and stories relating to “happier days,” I was saddened to see that the data was lost somewhere. Other times, the “art” (be it algorithm based or otherwise) would yield things like this:




Or this, the dreaded “404”:




One of the pieces that interested me most was a newly begun piece called “FUJI” (from the Turbulence website). It was of particular interest to me because of the break it signified between older, Web 1.0 works of net.art, and newer Web 2.0 works of art. Whereas the latter seemed entrenched in asking questions like, “what is the self in the digital realm? what is being in the digital realm? etc.” the newer works of net.art I encountered were more interested in playing with and investigating artifacts of the Internet age. Thus, FUJI is a project that melds a year’s worth of webcam images of Mount Fuji (culled from several webcams) together to create a sort of time-lapse.

This, however, by no means de-values the earlier works of net.art, but merely places them in their historical context. And, if anything, it validates the earlier works of net.art by signifying that, perhaps, those works elucidated the sorts of philosophic themes they were plumbing. And, of course, this is only based on a very brief, cursory survey of early net.art., so I am no doubt making broad generalizations.

Here are some pictures of FUJI: