Make a piece of Net Art

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

Internet mediums tend to be technologically promiscuous: video can be streamed from within a Web page, Web pages can be sent via e-mail, and it's possible to rearrange and re-present images and text from several different sites on a new Web page. These artist-made mutations are not just stunts performed by mischievous hackers; they serve as vivid reminders that Internet has evolved far beyond the print metaphors of its youth.

Internet art is not a form of Web design.
It may be fashionable to view artists as "experience designers," but there is more to art than design. The distinction between the two does not lie in differences in subject matter or context as much as in the fact that design serves recognized objectives, while art creates its objectives in the act of accomplishing them. The online portfolios of Web design firms may contain dazzling graphics, splashy Flash movies, and other attractions, but to qualify as art, such projects must go beyond just visual appeal. Design creates a matrix of expectations into which the artist throws monkey wrenches. Just as a painter plays off pictorial design, a net artist may play off software design. Design is a necessary--but not sufficient--condition for art.

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. In the early 90s, artists affiliated with the popular artist-run website Alt-X [1] began publishing and exhibiting net art. One of the first-ever online Internet art shows, Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace [2], was co-curated by Alexander Galloway and Mark Amerika and was released on Alt-X in 1997. 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, 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 1996 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, although some cultural producers linked this form to other contemporary art practises, such as ØtherLands, Humbot 1999 and UNMOVIE docs by collaboratives of artists, hackers, architects and writers. An example of the individual artist using video art and new media techniques to create unique internet art can be found at the 2005 Webby Award nominated site Dreamies where electronic artist Bill Holt displays daily flash video compositions expressing his internet art vision of the world around us.

Art in and around computer networks has a much older history though, which can be traced back to the early 1980s, and back to the late 1960s and the "Software" show at the Jewish Museum in New York. 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 Gruppo A12, E-toy, Axel Heide, G. H. Hovagimyan, Knowbotic Research, Joseph Nechvatal, Udo Noll, Philip Pocock, Felix Stephan Huber, Wolfgang Staehle, Gregor Stehle and Florian Wenz.

Haddock Directory
Contagious Art
Whitney Artport
Dia Art Center Web Project
Turbulence
Net Art Exhibitions