Internet art

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Internet art (often called net.art) is art or cultural production which uses the Internet as its primary medium (but not necessarily its subject, though this is often the case). Artists using this medium are sometimes called net.artists.

In many cases there might be an analogy to video art, which uses video as its medium - but is also very much about video. Many net.artists view video as only a component in a Software Art or meta-artistic system, which is very much "about" code. As such the medium of internet art might be a number of hypertext markup codes.

Internet art projects are art projects for which the Net is both a sufficient and necessary condition of viewing/expressing/participating. Internet art can also happen outside the purely technical structure of the internet, when artists use specific social or cultural traditions from the internet in a project outside of it. Internet art is often, but not always, interactive, participatory and based on multimedia in the broadest sense.

— definition by Steve Dietz, former curator in new media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

Forms

Internet art can take concrete form in artistic websites, e-mail projects, artistic Internet software, Internet-based or networked installations, online video, audio or radio works, networked performances and installations or performances offline. Internet art as a "movement" is part of new media art and electronic art. A few sub-genres of Internet art are software art, generative art, net.radio, browser art, web-specific art, spam art, click environments and code poetry.

In literature, the terms Internet art, Internet-based art, net art, net.art, Web art and "artists working with networks" are used together; not any of those names has predominated until now. Some feel the term net.art refers to a specific group of artists working on the medium from 1994-1999; these are usually referenced as Vuk Ćosić, Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Fred Forest Olia Lialina, Valéry Grancher, and Heath Bunting. This can be misleading, however, as other artists were working at the same time: Jim Andrews, Ted Warnell, Mark Amerika, Jaromil, Superbad (Ben Benjamin), etoy / the etoy. CORPORATION, Snarg, mez, Zuper (Michael Samyn), I/O/D (Collective), G. H. Hovagimyan, Agricola de Cologne, incident.net, Frederic Madre, Eryk Salvaggio, Annie Abrahams, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield.org) and Antiorp to name but a few. Some culture producers on the Internet liken the term "net art" or net.art to a pun, a recapitulation of the consumerist ideals of Pop Art.

History and context

Internet art is rooted in a variety of artistic traditions and movements. Some Internet art projects are particularly related to conceptual art, Fluxus, pop art and performance art. Internet art is also historically related to the interdisciplinary field of technology-centered or electronic art which has developed since the 1970s in research institutes and specialized art centers throughout Europe, Japan and the United States - outside the regular, "non-technological" museum and gallery circuit. Examples are the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz,FILE Electronic Language International Festival in Sao Paulo, the LA Freewaves new media film festival, early network radio experiments at ORF Kunstradio, and Paris-based IRCAM, a research center for electronic music. The fact that both the computer and the internet have become a common, accessible technology has opened this formerly high tech art circuit up to a much broader field of artists.

Internet art was most visible and witnessed its peak from 1995 to 1998 with successful public venues such as Adaweb directed by Benjamin Weil and documentaX curated by Simon Lamuniere; broad public attention and acclaim for Internet art at that time were largely related to the dot-com mania; the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive on 1999 (Valéry Grancher, Ken Goldberg) or La Maison Européenne de la Photographie MEP (2000) (Valéry Grancher). Otherwise some cultural producers linked this form to other contemporary art practises. However, art in and around computer networks has a much older history, which can be traced back to the early 1980s, and back to the late 1960s. Currently, there is a stronger tendency to look at Internet-related artworks in a wider context of technological art, while artists working with networks usually prefer to be contextualized within the general contemporary art discourse, bridging real and virtual space, such as E-toy, Valéry Grancher, G. H. Hovagimyan, Knowbotic Research, Igor Stromajer, Joseph Nechvatal, Philip Pocock and Agricola de Cologne.

See also

External links

References

  • Baumgärtel, Tilman (2001). net.art 2.0 – Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst / New Materials towards Net art. Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst. ISBN 3-933096-66-9.
  • Wilson, Stephen (2001). Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-23209-X.
  • Grau, Oliver (2003). Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Leonardo Book Series). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-07241-6.
  • Net Art Review a daily updated site that tries to keep pace with what is happening in the world of netart: netartreview
  • The syndicate network for media culture and media art : http://anart.no/~syndicate
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