Introduction
Both everyday and exotic, public and private, autonomous and commercial, this internet is a chaotic, diverse and crowded form of contemporary public space. Internet art is intertwined with issues of access to technology and decentralization, production and consumption, and demonstrates how media spheres increasingly function as public space. Internet art is part of a continuum within art history that includes such strategies and themes as instructions, appropriation, dematerialization, networks, and information and therefore is important to explore parallels between net art and ideas in the work of earlier artists and movements.

The Internet’s History and Pre-History
Central to the evolution of the internet are the intertwined histories of the computer and electronic data. Early visionaries such as Charles Babbage, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Augusta Ada King, all played parts in the inspiration of creating the internet. In 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), became the first digital computer and was used by the US Army to calculate tables for shell trajectories. In 1981, IBM released the first personal computer to the public. The problem with these however was that users had to type in instructions to access PC interfaces. It wasn’t until 1984 that Macintosh introduced clickable icons on the screen.In the early 1960’s, Theodor Nelson coined the terms ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’ to describe texts, images, and sounds that could be interconnected within a ‘docuverse’ called ‘Xanadu’. Using information and models from an earlier visionary named Vannevar Bush, Nelson’s concepts, especially hypertext, became important blueprints of what would become the internet. It wasn’t until 1989 however that Briton Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project named the World Wide Web. Only able to display text at first, by 1994, two companies: Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, became the first two graphic browsers allowing for the display of digital images, video, and audio.
The Art-Historical Context for Internet Art
Many net artists feel a strong connection to the works of Marcel Duchamp (a French artist) as well as the participants in Dada (the international arts movement that began as a reaction to WWI) because of their art practices that shifted away from the traditional forms of pictorial representation. By the 1960’s, one initiative that prefigured internet modes of collaborative production – in which an artist might work with programmers, designers, or other specialists – was EAT. Formed by Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver in 1966, EAT involved an array of artists such as Andy Warhol, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Cage, and David Tudor to extend into scientific engineering and expand into interdisciplinary spaces that can be considered a mise en scene for current practices like hacking, net art, and software art.
Other artists such as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, and Tony Oursler had explicit imports for internet art. They explored the ‘colonization of the flesh by electronic technologies of communication’ using video and installation. Other works by Perry Hoberman and Ken Feingold made the claim that consumer technologies and daily life are intertwined in complex ways – a claim that has been easier to sustain and illustrate as more internet culture and technologies have been developed.

Early Internet Art

Early internet art is very much inextricable from the technology and politics of the 1990’s and early twenty-first century. It is buoyed by the technological, economic, and social specifications of it’s medium with its dominant tools as email, software, and web sites. In the early 1990’s internet art was just one small part of widescale proliferations of media and consumer technology. From its earliest moments, the ways in which commercial and governmental interests were obvious. The internet became emblematic of the increased access to information and opened up international borders.
Artists such as Heath Bunting, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin, and Vuk Cosic all worked as offline artists in mediums such as photography, film, and graffiti writing before experimenting with art online. Instead of film or paint, they used low-fi net production tools such as HTML, digital graphics, and Photoshop. These artists were able to draw on the work of earlier adopters of the internets most basic offerings. These net artists were watching net culture evolve on their screens as they were helping to shape it.
Participation in Public Spaces
Heath Blunting’s 1994 piece entitled King’s Cross Phone In; belies the significance of what net artists aim towards: an opening up of web page capabilities to extend into public spaces. Blunting’s piece involved providing phone booth telephone numbers around London’s King’s Cross station with a specific time in which to call one these numbers in the hope of opening up communication among complete strangers. In essence, it was one giant cyber café. This participatory and playful aesthetic was significant to early net artists as it invoked interest in instigating activity, replacing passive consumption of a medium, and engaged response.
New Vocabularies
Because of the net’s casual climate of constant development, information sharing, and communication, new terms often sprung up into the vernacular. The “handshake” for example is a term used to describe the noisy process that occurs when two modems interact; it establishes mutually beneficial transmission speeds and other related information exchange metrics.
Tools servicing internet protocols provided inspiration for artists by propelling them towards more medium-specific work, work dependent on and inseparable from its online location. As site-specific sculpture operates vis-à-vis the particular components and ideologies of a place, so do many works of internet art derive in significant ways from their location within a networked public field of vision and consumption.
Travel and Documentary Modes
Many artists and curators involved in media art of the 1970’s and 1980’s extended their work and interests easily into the internet space. Many projects that emerged from these networks were highly accessible and well known to the small net art scene, publicized by the media centers where the artists worked and/or technoart festivals such as Ars Electronica and Transmediable. Frome the webs inception, HTML pages hosted text and images easily and, consequently, the format lent itself to the documentary. One of the earliest projects in this vein was Akke Wagenaar piece entitled The Hiroshima Project.
The Hiroshima Project brought together information about the bombing – including evidence of denial and ignorance of the event – by aggregating links. It employed sequences of data that were often contradictory and presented a broad spectrum of opinions. Due to the webs plethora of information and its ability to post data fast, the role of Wagenaar as an artist became that of a cultural documentarian.
Other examples of online documentation are Heath Buntings works titled A Visitors Guide to London and Communication Creates Conflict. A Visitors Guide to London simply represents the culmination of a year spent as a new resident of London using photos and observations captured on the web site. Communication Creates Conflict features a poem outlining a more complex version of globalized communication. This simple format addressed certain candid and uncomfortable aspects of communication and shows as sense skepticism and curiosity while documenting a trip to Japan. Both of Blunting’s projects shifted the focus to interaction.
Net.art
Net.art is a fairly comprehensive statement of the ideas that were critical at that stage of development in internet art. At Net.art, meetings were held to consider how net artists should distribute and control work, how the modernist romantic perception of the “artwork” applied to the internet, and how artists could deal with global audiences when topics and premises were not universal.
Net.art takes materials from fields of mass media and equates them with both ideological and contingent sensibility. It is absorbed by the system of communication and distribution by which it published and addressed. It is a conjoining of artistic and communication fields of the internet and suggests an art practice was that was rooted in net culture.
Cyberfeminism
Among these discursive networks, the scrutinizing of politics and the analysis of how gender, race, and class informed technoculture, cyberfeminism was a field of practice. With a decentralized, connection-dependent matrix as the crux of net culture, theorists like Sandie Plant (with whom the Australian collective VNS Matrix coined the term cyberfeminism) found the net to be inherently female and feminizing. It describes the position of women in technological disciplines and labor within industries and addresses women’s experience of technoculture to include its effect on work, domestic life, social life, and leisure.
VNS Matrix was formed in 1991 and as a technoart group, stated their goals of using an manipulating technology to create digital spaces in which identity and sexual politics could be addressed. These goals were named A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. This Cyberfeminist Manifesto is sexual, graphical, and technical with explicit language that evokes the “cun art” of the 1970’s. Establishing its historical weight, the manifesto itself traveled as a graphic, inscribed in a circle defying linear trajectory as an allusion to the argument posed by feminist. The VNS Matrix also made optimistic theorizations of network technology (cyber, sexual, feminist) popular in the mid-1990’s.
Corporate Aesthetics
Critical consciousness of power imbalances took many forms in net art circles, and one persistent articulation of political frustration online has been anti-capitalists sentiment. The Dotcoms were often the focal points of this frustration. The Dotcom’s of course being the suffixes of new media companies trying to cash in on the rise of internet usage and culture, was often marked by expanding uses of satire and parody provoking this critical consciousness.
In net art circles, commercial dotcoms were viewed as both a positive and a negative. Commercially minded work was thought to exhibit exciting and constructive artistic qualities as many internet artists supported themselves as professional designers, producers, or even program developers in this new media. Many artists began working online in the mid-1990’s and launched web sites to showcase their art and design work. These grand spectacles, created as experiments, however, were unable to reconcile the tensions between aesthetic and commercial and isolated some of the net’s more desirable and glamorous possibilities.
Telepresence
A term derived from virtual reality describing the sensation of feeling in a different place or time by virtue of technologies and coordination, “telespace” is a characteristic of much internet behavior in that reading an email from an overseas friend produces a kind of intimacy that belies geographical distances. This sensibility has encouraged fantasies that internet industries and culture are virtual, existing in an almost fantastic realm.
The Telegarden, created by Ken Goldberg, Joseph Santarromana, George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris, Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley, and Eric Berger in 1995, articulates a link between natural processes and communication networks is symbolic and mechanical terms. In this installation work, worldwide internet users are able to tend a living garden by giving commands to a robotic arm via a the web site. This project highlights a sense of community by getting visitors, in dispersed locations, the opportunity to manage this one garden.
The other side of “telepresence” then, alluded to by The Telegarden, is the physical and vital reality easily missed in the context of new media culture in the haze of press about the revolutionary capabilities of the internet. The extent that internet networks amidist the media and economic hype seemed to occlude the realities of life offline which led artists, both literally and figuratively, to recognize the net as just one network of natural phenomena.

Isolating the Elements
By 1997, net art had become an established pocket of relatively autonomous art-making but had not succeeded in reaching a wider public. The tradition of using basic HTML and images to make art had fallen by the wayside and parody, appropriation and formal explorations, as well as email, music, and animation emerged.
Email-Based Communities
The emergence of email has changed the nature of work and communication in technological cultures since its widespread adoption during the 1990s. Though this format initially limited users to text and streamlined graphics, its advantages were its ease as a method for spontaneous expression and international accessibility.
While email offered immediate communication with anyone regardless of location, for many net artists working in the 1990s, actual face-to-face meetings were vital. In-person discussions are less apt to create misunderstandings and provided a sense of taking part in a meaningful and productive discussion about culture. The artists involved were by and large marginal in the contemporary art field but shared a lifestyle of shared artistic interest with a network of other artists.
Despite a virtually non-existent net art market in the 1990s, new media art festivals such as ‘Beauty and the East’ conference were consistently well attended by significant artists in the field. Even as these gatherings thrived, the fundamental limits of email-based communities were beginning to manifest.
The art project ‘Net Criticism Juke Box’ made for the ‘Beauty and the East’ conference pokes fun at the endless streams of serious discourse circulating online and addresses these tensions. Put together by Vuk Cosic in 1997, the work uses a very simple interface to remodel and redistribute art discourse. The work was modeled after a jukebox but instead of selecting songs, the viewer selects criticisms. Like a mailing list, the Juke Box’s format prevents any one theme or opinion from dominating by the use of multiple viewpoints, interviews with both subjective and responsive elements, as well as musical interludes.
Exhibition Formats and Collective Projects
The visibility and influence of international net art meetings and conference such as ‘Beauty and the East’ coincided with large-scale online exhibitions launched by individuals and a handful of curators associated with various international museums. In addition, Universities from Colorado to Sao Paulo were expanding their research and started teaching new media art practices and theory.
Offline galleries remained generally uninterested in internet art for a number of reasons. Internet art was difficult to sell and it was ephemeral and prone to technical obsolescence. It also had unfamiliar display aesthetics and the projects were too technical. On the positive side, web-based expositions were extremely cheap to produce, as long as one had access to programming resources and server space. In addition, it made it possible for curators and consumers to view artwork without being restricted by geographical distance or gallery hours.
Artists were among the earliest to aggregate artworks on web sites and develop exhibitions while their curatorial practices were able to encourage new aesthetic experiments. Two such shows were Form Art and Desktop Is, both produced by Alexei Shulgin in 1997. Both shows turned the internet art community spotlight on previously unexamined formal ingredients.
Form Art included works using ‘forms’ as a dominant motif. Forms are HTML conventions that appear in the guise of menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, dialogue boxes and labels, and are often used when filling out web-based applications, surveys, or questionnaires. In small interactive sections of web documents ‘forms’ have a conceptual appeal since their content is often submitted into the mail server or web server. Form Art shows a varied exploration of the possibilities and properties of ‘forms’.
Desktop Is took the computer desktop as its central theme. In this piece, participants followed a doctrine of goal-directedness with each one using the desktop as a dominant feature in a work. The desktop is then rendered as well as the material of the exhibition and often its stage. Desktop Is found some meaning in-between the discrete works that compromise it, striking a balance between artists working in an individualist mode and within communities or networks.
Browsers, ASCII, Automation and Error
Up until 1997, almost all users viewed the web through Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, products designed according to corporate interests, Inspired by the free-software movement that had been operative since the 1970s, Matthew Fuller, Colin Green, and Simon Pope started to develop an artistically orientated web browser in 1997 and went on to create The Web Stalker. The Web Stalker offered and alternative to conventional browsers and was designed to map data differently by explaining connections between web sites and offering views of web neighborhoods. It produced reading of HTML limited to text and links enabling the user to view web pages and content on an entirely different interface.
The Web Stalker made a dramatic impact on its audience and opened up programming as an artistic practice. It was capable of both production (of images) and distribution. The analogy the project makes between day-to-day reception of information and experimental composition brings a new perspective to works in different media that sought to create apparatuses for production and reception.
During the same period, a number of artists made important contributions to the field by isolating other pictorial or internet devices. ASCII (The American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is one of these forms. Computers often use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another. Vuk Cosic combined programming and formal analysis to create projects that elaborated the pictorial possibilities and aesthetics that had already been established. He coded two freeware players that convert moving images into ASCII text and speech. The best known example of this is Deep ASCII. In this piece the legendary porno film, Deep Throat, was converted into a large text file.
Parody, Appropriation and Remixing
The collective ÒTMARK, pronounced ‘art mark’, supports the sabotage – or as they put it, the informative alteration – of corporate products by channeling funds from investors mutual funds that are set up to pay for the production of specific art projects. The group says its bottom line is to improve culture rather their own pocketbook; it seeks cultural profit not financial.
ÒTMARK projects frequently stake fresh ground for iconoclastic and anti-corporate activity such as producing a documentary linking the increasingly harsh realities of the American workplace and economy to the rise in mental illness within the American population.
A signature tactic of ÒTMARK is that its artists present themselves with fake names and bureaucratic job titles. One reason for this is the shift identities or hide their aesthetic practices declaring that what they are doing is non art. Another reason is that invoking anonymity is a way to underscore the protections accorded to corporations. Since their inception in the mid-1990s, ÒTMARK representatives have shown a genius for deploying graphics, publicity, parody, and confusion.
Leveraging existing art as recyclable data was also an aesthetic strategy of the Italian collective 0100101110101101.org (also know as the 01s). The 01s poached not only some of the most recognizable art sites online, but also merged iconic graphics from well known works by artists Alexei Shulgin and Olia Lialina. In the 01s Hybrids, the use of materials from the net.art oeuvre is itself reused, and copying is conjoined with making. Underlining this work are the software concepts of ‘cutting’ and ‘pasting’ which are two of the most basic capabilities in computer operations.
Mapping Authorship
Various attempts to assert authorship form the same period as Darko Maver suggest that the internet, in which images and text can be copied freely, required new methods for describing authorship and separating information from misinformation. In the plagiaristic environment of the Net, where anyone can clone any website, the artist’s URL is the only guarantor that one is viewing the original most up-to-date and uncompromised version of the work.
Hypertext and Textual Aesthetics
The narrative capabilities endowed by software an internet protocols underwrite many text-based works as well. The intersection of virtual and narrative dimensions rely on the interactive architectures of words, known as hypertext. Hypertext precedes the dawn of the web altogether and is strongly linked to the historical evolution of electronic archives.
Hypertext works are non-sequential writing and are characterized by multimedia and narrative options. Hypertext works generally extend a narrative over multiple pages, spatializing the text by its irregularity and dispersal across web pages. Hypertext works can also emphasize the relationships between sites, object, and people.
Remodeling Bodies
Bodies Inc. a project created by Victoria Vesna, Robert Nideffer, Ken Fields, and Nathan Freitas, and in association with Viewpoint Data Labs, sought out to revalue and represent avatars by offering an online marketplace within a loosely corporate structure. A company structure without body or material substance, and united within one body. Bodies Inc. suggests that the production of self and representation on the net can be closely linked to apparatuses of community and commerce.
The Biotech Hobbyist, created by Heath Bunting and Natalie Jeremijenko, was created as perverse tribute to home pages and the net’s manifestations of the weird and wonderful range of personal obsessions. For example, the site offers project guides for growing one’s own skin as well as cloning. Biotech Hobbyist also offers a mailing list, a Q&A section, editorials, and links.

New Forms of Distribution
Other fragments of cultural data began to circulate in new ways courtesy of internet tools and applications. Between 1997 and 1998, music started to emerge in new online distribution channels and formats, dismantling boundaries between the internet and traditional broadcasting principles and platforms. As a result, would-be online broadcasters now only needed encoders and servers to set up their own radio stations. The transformation of music files and their distribution on the net constituted large-scale acts of intervention and piracy. As a result, not only were record sales affected, but communities of alternative radio practitioners were able to grow.
Sexual Personae
BRANDON (created by Shu Lea Cheang) was the first web site to be commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum. Its title was inspired by Teena Brandon, genetically a woman, who was murdered in 1994 by two boys for living and loving as a man. This story went on to inspire the film Boys Don’t Cry as well. BRANDON explored issues of gender, identity, crime and punishment, and challenged the viewer’s ideas through multiple interfaces. Probing text such as a question and answer section as well as a fictional narrative, was supported by various striking images such as pierced nipples and tattoo-covered bodies. It was an ambitious and international project that used the strategies of repetition and disassembly of bodies to span virtual surfaces.
Bindigirl was another piece that used these strategies. Created in 1999 by Prema Murphy, Bindigirl is premised on a literal pun on the notion of ‘avatar’. The piece consists of an array of photos of the artist and other South Asian women nude and in sexual poses. In each photo, strategically placed bindis are superimposed on the private parts of the body with taboo and external forms of Hindu observance. This piece crossed technical and religious failures, in the feminist context, to help confront certain stereotypes.

Conclusion
In varying ways the artists in this chapter drew distinctions between internet art and other practices by focusing on its defining materials and traits. Increasingly, art of the internet would derive from its ability to create a shared public space and cultural arena. The equivalences between the net and public space would motivate some of the most interesting and high-profile internet artists.