Internet art
Encyclopedia
Internet art is a form of digital art
work 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.
Internet art can happen outside the technical structure of the Internet, such as when artists use specific social or cultural Internet traditions in a project outside of it. 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. This can be done through a web browser, such as images of paintings uploaded for viewing in an online gallery.
Rather, this genre relies intrinsically on the Internet to exist, taking advantage of such aspects as an interactive interface and connectivity to multiple social and economic cultures and micro-cultures. It refers to the Internet as a whole, not only to web-based works.
Theoriest 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.
; Internet-based original software projects (sometimes involving games); Internet-linked networked installations; interactive and/or streaming video, audio, or radio works; and networked performances (using multi-user domains, virtual worlds such as Second Life
, chat rooms, and other networked environments).
It can also include completely offline events, like Alexei Shulgin
's 1997 Vienna performance, Real Cyberknowledge for Real People. Shulgin printed out copies of Beauty and the East' / ZKP4, published online by the mailing list nettime
, and handed the booklets out to passers-by on the streets of Vienna.
Internet art overlaps with other computer-based art forms such as new media art
, electronic art
, software art
, digital art
, telematic art
and generative art
.
The terms Internet art, net-based art, net art, Net.art
, Web art, and even networked art have all been used to classify this type of work. However, the term networked art has a history of usage for artworks that were connected through closed networks before the Internet's popularization and commercialization in the early 1990s, such as many Telematic art
projects. Net.art was a more popular term in the 1990s, often referring to some of the first net artists who were critiquing the structures of the Internet.
Critic Rachel Greene states that the term originated "when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term —'net.art'—which he began using to talk about online art and communications." Greene lists several artists as early experimenters of the form: Vuk Ćosić
, Jodi
, Alexei Shulgin
, Heath Bunting
, Shu Lea Cheang
, VNS Matrix
and Olia Lialina
. In her book Internet Art, Green places the inception of Internet art after 1993, with the popularization of graphical web browsing.
to Situationism, conceptual art
, Fluxus
, video art
, kinetic art
performance art
and happenings.
As the art form develops, its historical context is continually re-evaluated. Amsterdam-based critic Josephine Bosma defines Internet art as having "five generations", where the first generation of artists did not work with the Internet proper, but with electronic interconnectivity—precursors to the Internet, such as fax, slow scan television and videotex. These earlier forms are often defined more broadly as Networked art.
An early Networked 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, using a closed-network of invited artists on the ARTEX network. 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 1974, Canadian artist Vera Frenkel worked with the Bell Canada Teleconferencing Studios to produce the work String Games, the first artwork from Canada to use telecommunications technologies.
However, as Greene and others note, with spread of the desktop computer in the 1980s and the advent of the Web in the 1990s, a much broader spectrum of artists entered the field, often completely independent from art institutions—and often purposely at odds with institutional culture.
Between 1994 to 2000, several public venues formed to archive, disseminate and promote Internet art. Key organizations included The Thing
; Adaweb, directed by Benjamin Weil; Alt-X, founded by artist Mark Amerika
; Rhizome
, initiated by artist and curator Mark Tribe
; and FILE Electronic Language International Festival
, founded by artists Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto.
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 of American Art featured 'Netomat' (Maciej Wisniewski) and 'Apartment' (Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg
, which used search queries as raw material. 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.
Digital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
work distributed via the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. 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
Interactivity
In the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels:...
with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.
Internet art can happen outside the technical structure of the Internet, such as when artists use specific social or cultural Internet traditions in a project outside of it. Internet art is often—but not always—interactive, participatory, and multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
-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. This can be done through a web browser, such as images of paintings uploaded for viewing in an online gallery.
Rather, this genre relies intrinsically on the Internet to exist, taking advantage of such aspects as an interactive interface and connectivity to multiple social and economic cultures and micro-cultures. It refers to the Internet as a whole, not only to web-based works.
Theoriest and curator Jon Ippolito
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...
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.
Forms and presentation
Internet art can be created in a variety of media: through websites; e-mail projectsE-mail art
Email art is simply any kind of art sent by email. It includes computer graphics, animations, screensavers, digital scans of artwork in other media, or even ASCII art...
; Internet-based original software projects (sometimes involving games); Internet-linked networked installations; interactive and/or streaming video, audio, or radio works; and networked performances (using multi-user domains, virtual worlds such as Second Life
Second Life
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...
, chat rooms, and other networked environments).
It can also include completely offline events, like Alexei Shulgin
Alexei Shulgin
Alexei Shulgin is a Russian born contemporary artist, musician, and online curator. Working out of Moscow and Helsinki, Shulgin established the Immediate Photography Group in 1988 and started his career in this area of study...
's 1997 Vienna performance, Real Cyberknowledge for Real People. Shulgin printed out copies of Beauty and the East' / ZKP4, published online by the mailing list nettime
Nettime
Nettime is an internet mailing list that was founded in 1995 during the second meeting of the Medien Zentral Kommittee at the Venice Biennale. Founded by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz, the list was meant to provide a space for a new form of critical discourse on and with the nets...
, and handed the booklets out to passers-by on the streets of Vienna.
Internet art overlaps with other computer-based art forms such as new media art
New media art
New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology...
, electronic art
Electronic art
Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media or, more broadly, refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music...
, software art
Software art
Software art refers to works of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software art has attained growing attention since the...
, digital art
Digital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
, telematic art
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, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic...
and generative art
Generative art
Generative art refers to art that has been generated, composed, or constructed in an algorithmic manner through the use of systems defined by computer software algorithms, or similar mathematical or mechanical or randomised autonomous processes....
.
The terms Internet art, net-based art, net art, Net.art
Net.art
"net.art" refers to a group of artists who worked in the medium of Internet art from 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting...
, Web art, and even networked art have all been used to classify this type of work. However, the term networked art has a history of usage for artworks that were connected through closed networks before the Internet's popularization and commercialization in the early 1990s, such as many Telematic art
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, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic...
projects. Net.art was a more popular term in the 1990s, often referring to some of the first net artists who were critiquing the structures of the Internet.
Critic Rachel Greene states that the term originated "when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term —'net.art'—which he began using to talk about online art and communications." Greene lists several artists as early experimenters of the form: Vuk Ćosić
Vuk Cosic
Vuk Ćosić , graduated from Univerzitet u BeograduThe university of Belgrade and earned a BA in Archaeology in 1991, emigrating that year to Trieste, Italy, and the following year to the newly independent Slovenia....
, Jodi
Jodi
Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans . Their background is in photography and video art; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web...
, Alexei Shulgin
Alexei Shulgin
Alexei Shulgin is a Russian born contemporary artist, musician, and online curator. Working out of Moscow and Helsinki, Shulgin established the Immediate Photography Group in 1988 and started his career in this area of study...
, Heath Bunting
Heath Bunting
Heath Bunting is a contemporary British artist born in 1966. Based in Bristol, he is the founder of the site and was one of the early practitioners in the 1990s of Net.art . Bunting's work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communications technologies and social...
, Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang is a multi-media artist who works in the fields of net-based installation,social interface and film production....
, VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix
VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt...
and Olia Lialina
Olia Lialina
Olia Lialina is a pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator...
. In her book Internet Art, Green places the inception of Internet art after 1993, with the popularization of graphical web browsing.
History and context
Internet art is rooted in disparate artistic traditions and movements, ranging from DadaDada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
to Situationism, conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, kinetic art
Kinetic art
Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.-Kinetic sculpture:...
performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
and happenings.
As the art form develops, its historical context is continually re-evaluated. Amsterdam-based critic Josephine Bosma defines Internet art as having "five generations", where the first generation of artists did not work with the Internet proper, but with electronic interconnectivity—precursors to the Internet, such as fax, slow scan television and videotex. These earlier forms are often defined more broadly as Networked art.
An early Networked artwork was Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott is a British artist and theorist, who works with cybernetics and telematics. He is President of the Planetary Collegium.- Biography :...
's work, La Plissure du Texte,
performed in collaboration created for an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art dedicated to the arts of the 20th/21st centuries. It is located at 11 Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.-Description:...
in 1983, using a closed-network of invited artists on the ARTEX network. Media art institutions such as Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica
Ars Electronica is an organization based in Linz, Austria, founded in 1979 around a festival for art, technology and society that was part of the International Bruckner Festival. Herbert W. Franke is one of its founders. It became its own festival and a yearly event in 1986. Its director until 1995...
Festival in Linz
Linz
Linz is the third-largest city of Austria and capital of the state of Upper Austria . It is located in the north centre of Austria, approximately south of the Czech border, on both sides of the river Danube. The population of the city is , and that of the Greater Linz conurbation is about...
, or the Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
-based IRCAM (a research center for electronic music), would also support or present early Networked art. In 1974, Canadian artist Vera Frenkel worked with the Bell Canada Teleconferencing Studios to produce the work String Games, the first artwork from Canada to use telecommunications technologies.
However, as Greene and others note, with spread of the desktop computer in the 1980s and the advent of the Web in the 1990s, a much broader spectrum of artists entered the field, often completely independent from art institutions—and often purposely at odds with institutional culture.
Between 1994 to 2000, several public venues formed to archive, disseminate and promote Internet art. Key organizations included The Thing
The Thing (art project)
The Thing is an international net-community of artists and art-related projects that was started in 1991 by Wolfgang Staehle. The Thing was launched as a mailbox system accessible over the telephone network in New York feeding a Bulletin Board System in 1991 before their website was launched in...
; Adaweb, directed by Benjamin Weil; Alt-X, founded by artist Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika
Mark Amerika is an American artist and author.- Career :Amerika received his MFA from Brown University. After publishing two cult-novels, and , he turned his energy towards net art. His goal is to expand the concept of writing so that it includes writing in and with new media technologies. He...
; Rhizome
Rhizome
In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes...
, initiated by artist and curator Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe is an American artist. He is the founder of Rhizome, a not-for-profit arts organization based in New York City....
; and FILE Electronic Language International Festival
Electronic Language International Festival
FILE - Electronic Language International Festival is a New media art festival that usually takes place in three different cities of Brazil: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre and it has also participated in others events around the world...
, founded by artists Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto.
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 of American Art featured 'Netomat' (Maciej Wisniewski) and 'Apartment' (Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg
Martin M. Wattenberg
Martin M. Wattenberg is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. Along with Fernanda Viégas, he worked at the Cambridge location of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the Visual Communication Lab, and created Many Eyes...
, which used search queries as raw material. Golan Levin
Golan Levin
Golan Levin is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression.-Biography:...
'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.
See also
- Digital artDigital artDigital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
- Tradigital artTradigital artTradigital art most commonly refers to art that combines both traditional and computer-based techniques to implicate an image. It is related to digital art, traditional art, information art, new media art, video art, interactive art, and internet art.-Background:Artist and teacher Judith Moncrieff...
- CybercultureCybercultureCyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities,...
- Net.artNet.art"net.art" refers to a group of artists who worked in the medium of Internet art from 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting...
- Net-poetryNet-poetryNet-poetry is a development of net.art, involving poetry. This kind of experimental art was born in several different cities around 1995.-Authors:...
- CyberformanceCyberformanceCyberformance 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 collaborative software such as UpStage...
- Art sales
- Hypertext fictionHypertext fictionHypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a...
- Virtual artVirtual artVirtual art is art practice using virtual reality, augmented reality or mixed reality as a medium in a digital environment..-Form:It can be considered a post-convergent art form, containing all previous media as subsets...
- ArtmediaArtmediaArtmedia, Seminar and Laboratory of the Aesthetics of Media and Communication, 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...