Net.art
Encyclopedia
"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
(irational.org, Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Minerva Cuevas, Daniel García Andújar
and Marcus Valentin). Although this group was formed as a parody
of avant garde movements by writers such as Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber and Pit Schultz, their individual works have little in common.
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. Often net.art has the Internet as (part of) its subject matter but this is certainly not required.
. 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.
The term "net.art" most probably had been coined by Pit Schultz in 1995, but also is attributed to Vuk Cosic
. Net.art stems from "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch
(a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term 'net.art')". It was first used with regard to the "net.art per se" meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste
in May 1996, and referred to a group of artists who worked together closely in the first half of the 1990s. These meetings gave birth to the website
net.art per se/CNN Interactive, a fake
CNN
website "commemorating" the event.
One of the best known (and much speculated about) net.art websites remains Hell.com
. Many artists have continued in the spirit of net.art; an example is Aaron Koblin
, whose pieces based on crowdsourcing combine whimsy, elegance, and subversiveness.
communities through an active practice of web-hosting and web art curating. net.artists have defined themselves through an international and network mode of communication, an interplay of exchanges, collaborative and cooperative work . They have a large presence on several mailing lists such as Rhizome
, File festival, Electronic Language International Festival
, Nettime, Syndicate and Eyebeam
. The identity of the net.artists is defined by both their digital works and their critical involvement in the digital art community, as the polemical discussion led by Olia Lialina that occurred on Nettime in early 2006 on the "New Media" Wikipedia entry shows
net.artists like Jodi
developed a particular form of e-mail art, or spam
mail art, through text reprocessing and ASCII art
. The term "spam art" was coined by Frederic Madre to describe all such forms of disruptive interventions in mailing-lists, where often texts were generated by simple scripts or typed by hand.
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 poietician Alan Sondheim to define the textual experiments of artists playing with faux-code and non-executable script or mark-up languages.
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 Netscape Navigator
or Internet Explorer
display user-friendly structures (the "navigation", the "exploration" are landmarks of our social practices) to provide the user with a familiar environment; net.artists try to break this familiarity. Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. or the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work. Their experiments have given birth to what could be called "browser art", which has been expanded by the British collective I/O/D's experimental navigator WebStalker.
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 . The user is not exploring one art website that has its own meaning and aesthetic significance within itself, but rather they are exposed to the entire network as a collection of socio-economic forces and political stances that are not always visible.
Rachel Greene has associated net.art with Tactical media
as a form of Detournement
. Greene writes: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media'."
. On the other hand, the collective irational.org expands the idea of "art hacktivism" by performing interventions and perturbations in the real world, acting on it as on a possible ground for social reengineering.
"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."
. Edited by writer and artist Armin Medosch, the work published at Telepolis featured American artist and net theorist Mark Amerika's "Amerika Online" columns. 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 U.S. awareness of electronic artists in Europe, and may even contain an element of jealousy."
These net.art interventions and transcontinental PR campaigns can be understood as more than simple guerrilla marketing
tactics . Many 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 (the first on-line project commissioned by the Tate Modern) 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 Britain
website.
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 modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making . The presentation of this process within the art world - whether it should be sold in the market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works created for the Internet
. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical . All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment addressing such issues. The WWWArt Award competition initiated by Alexei Shulgin in 1995 suggests rewarding found Internet works with what he calls an "art feeling."
Some projects, such as Joachim Schmid's Archiv, Hybrids, or Copies by 0100101110101101.org are examples of how to store art-related or documentary data on a website. Cloning, plagiarizing, and collective creation are provided as alternative answers, such as in the Refresh Project.
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. 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
. On the other hand, Teo Spiller
really sold a net.art project Megatronix to Ljubljana Municipal Museum in May 1999.
Teleportacia.org became an ambiguous experiment on the notion of originality in the age of extreme digital reproduction and remix culture
. The guarantee of originality protected by the URL was quickly challenged by the 0100101110101101.org collective, who, under the pseudonym of "Luther Bissett", cloned the content and produced an unauthorized mirror
-site, showing the net.art works in the same context and the same quality as the original. The Last Real Net Art Museum is another example of Olia Lialina's attempt to deal with the issue.
Internet art
Internet 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...
from 1994. The main members of this movement are 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.org
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...
, Olia Lialina
Olia Lialina
Olia Lialina is a pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator...
, and 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...
(irational.org, Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Minerva Cuevas, Daniel García Andújar
Daniel García Andújar
Daniel García Andújar is a visual media artist, activist and art theorist from Spain. He lives and works in Barcelona. His work has been exhibited widely, including Manifesta 4 and the Venice Biennale...
and Marcus Valentin). Although this group was formed as a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of avant garde movements by writers such as Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber and Pit Schultz, their individual works have little in common.
The term "net.art" is also used as a synonym for net art or Internet art
Internet art
Internet 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...
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. Often net.art has the Internet as (part of) its subject matter but this is certainly not required.
History of the net.art movement
The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet ArtInternet art
Internet 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...
. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet Art
Internet art
Internet 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...
history, than a specific genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
. Early precursors of the net.art movement include the international 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,...
(Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (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...
) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site.
The term "net.art" most probably had been coined by Pit Schultz in 1995, but also is attributed to Vuk Cosic
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....
. Net.art stems from "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch
Glitch
A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot...
(a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term 'net.art')". It was first used with regard to the "net.art per se" meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
in May 1996, and referred to a group of artists who worked together closely in the first half of the 1990s. These meetings gave birth to the website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
net.art per se/CNN Interactive, a fake
Fake
Fake means not real.Fake may also refer to:In music:* Fake , a Swedish synthpop band active in the 1980s*Fake?, a Japanese rock band* Fake , 2010 song by Ai featuring Namie Amuro...
CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
website "commemorating" the event.
One of the best known (and much speculated about) net.art websites remains Hell.com
Hell.com
Hell.com is an internet domain which has achieved a degree of notoriety due to its name, and an intentionally mysterious website that existed there from August 1995 to 2009 created by the first registrant of the domain, artist Kenneth Aronson....
. Many artists have continued in the spirit of net.art; an example is Aaron Koblin
Aaron Koblin
Aaron Koblin is an American digital media artist best known for his innovative uses of data visualization and crowdsourcing. He is currently Creative Director of the Data Arts Team at Google Creative Lab in San Francisco, California....
, whose pieces based on crowdsourcing combine whimsy, elegance, and subversiveness.
Online social networks
Net.artists have built digital artDigital 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...
communities through an active practice of web-hosting and web art curating. net.artists have defined themselves through an international and network mode of communication, an interplay of exchanges, collaborative and cooperative work . They have a large presence on several mailing lists such as 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...
, File festival, 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...
, Nettime, Syndicate and Eyebeam
Eyebeam
Eyebeam may refer to:*I-beam, a beam with an I- or H-shaped cross-section* Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, a not-for-profit arts and technology center based in New York City* Eyebeam , a daily comic strip written and illustrated by Sam Hurt...
. The identity of the net.artists is defined by both their digital works and their critical involvement in the digital art community, as the polemical discussion led by Olia Lialina that occurred on Nettime in early 2006 on the "New Media" Wikipedia entry shows
net.artists like 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...
developed a particular form of e-mail art, or spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
mail art, through text reprocessing and ASCII art
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
. The term "spam art" was coined by Frederic Madre to describe all such forms of disruptive interventions in mailing-lists, where often texts were generated by simple scripts or typed by hand.
A connection can be made to the e-mail interventions of "Codeworks" artists such as Mez
Mez Breeze
Mez Breeze is an Australian-based artist who works with net.art. Born Mary-Anne Breeze she uses a number of avatar nicknames. She received degrees in both Applied Social Science [Psychology] at the Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia in 1991 and Creative Arts at the Wollongong...
or mi ga or robots like Mailia which analyze emails and reply to them. "Codeworks" is a term coined by poietician Alan Sondheim to define the textual experiments of artists playing with faux-code and non-executable script or mark-up languages.
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 UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and the fall of the Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
. 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
Public space
A public space is a social space such as a town square that is open and accessible to all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age or socio-economic level. One of the earliest examples of public spaces are commons. For example, no fees or paid tickets are required for entry, nor are the entrants...
.
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 Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
or Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
display user-friendly structures (the "navigation", the "exploration" are landmarks of our social practices) to provide the user with a familiar environment; net.artists try to break this familiarity. Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War. or the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work. Their experiments have given birth to what could be called "browser art", which has been expanded by the British collective I/O/D's experimental navigator WebStalker.
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 . The user is not exploring one art website that has its own meaning and aesthetic significance within itself, but rather they are exposed to the entire network as a collection of socio-economic forces and political stances that are not always visible.
Rachel Greene has associated net.art with Tactical media
Tactical media
Tactical media is a term coined in 1997, to de note a form of media activism that privileges temporary, hit-and-run interventions in the media sphere over the creation of permanent and alternative media outlets. Tactical media describes interventionist media art practices that engage and critique...
as a form of Detournement
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
. Greene writes: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media'."
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 hacker culture. Questioning and disturbing the browsing experience with hacks, code tricks, faux-code, and faux-virus, critically investigates the context in which they are agents. In turn, the digital environment becomes concerned with its own internal structure. The collective 0100101110101101.org expands the idea of "art hacktivism" by performing code interventions and perturbations in art festivals such as the Venice BiennaleVenice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
. On the other hand, the collective irational.org expands the idea of "art hacktivism" by performing interventions and perturbations in the real world, acting on it as on a possible ground for social reengineering.
"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."
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 TelepolisTelepolis
Telepolis is the name of a German Internet magazine, published by the Heinz Heise Verlag since the beginning of 1996. It was founded by journalists Armin Medosch and Florian Rötzer and deals with privacy, science, culture, internet-related and general politics and media.Telepolis received the...
. Edited by writer and artist Armin Medosch, the work published at Telepolis featured American artist and net theorist Mark Amerika's "Amerika Online" columns. 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 U.S. awareness of electronic artists in Europe, and may even contain an element of jealousy."
These net.art interventions and transcontinental PR campaigns can be understood as more than simple guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla warfare is about waging small intermittent attacks on different territories of the opponent with the aim of harassing and demoralising the opponent and eventually securing permanent footholds....
tactics . Many also tackled the issue of art as business and investigated mainstream cultural institutions such as the Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
. Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective, in his work Uncomfortable Proximity (the first on-line project commissioned by the Tate Modern) 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 Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
website.
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 modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making . The presentation of this process within the art world - whether it should be sold in the market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works created for 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...
. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical . All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment addressing such issues. The WWWArt Award competition initiated by Alexei Shulgin in 1995 suggests rewarding found Internet works with what he calls an "art feeling."
Some projects, such as Joachim Schmid's Archiv, Hybrids, or Copies by 0100101110101101.org are examples of how to store art-related or documentary data on a website. Cloning, plagiarizing, and collective creation are provided as alternative answers, such as in the Refresh Project.
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. 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
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
. On the other hand, Teo Spiller
Teo Spiller
Teo Spiller, Born on December 4, 1965 in Ljubljana, is one of four Slovenian net.artists, active on-line since 1995.-About:Teo Spiller, Born on December 4, 1965 in Ljubljana, is one of four Slovenian net.artists, active on-line since 1995....
really sold a net.art project Megatronix to Ljubljana Municipal Museum in May 1999.
Teleportacia.org became an ambiguous experiment on the notion of originality in the age of extreme digital reproduction and remix culture
Remix culture
Remix culture is a term used to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Remix is defined as combining or editing existing materials to produce a new product. A Remix Culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix...
. The guarantee of originality protected by the URL was quickly challenged by the 0100101110101101.org collective, who, under the pseudonym of "Luther Bissett", cloned the content and produced an unauthorized mirror
Mirror
A mirror is an object that reflects light or sound in a way that preserves much of its original quality prior to its contact with the mirror. Some mirrors also filter out some wavelengths, while preserving other wavelengths in the reflection...
-site, showing the net.art works in the same context and the same quality as the original. The Last Real Net Art Museum is another example of Olia Lialina's attempt to deal with the issue.
See also
- Digital culture
- History of the InternetHistory of the InternetThe history of the Internet starts in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of computers. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, expanded to point-to-point connections between computers and then early research into packet switching...
- Internet artInternet artInternet 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...
- 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:...
- Surfing clubSurfing clubAn internet Surf Club is a group site where artists and others link to "surfed" or "surfable" items on the Web and also post some of their own creative work. "Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club" was the first to use the words "surfing club"...