This is part one of a two-part series about net art. To learn more about theories of circulation and the current landscape, read here.
A State of Hyper Competition and Anxiety
With more critiques of large internet companies gaining traction, people are beginning to question the hegemonic nature of the internet and the power structures that exist on the web, both of which define net art as school of thought. An apt starting point for understanding this perspective as well as looking at some examples of net art is the website topexiringnetartists.com, a project of Guido Segni that first started in 2013.
Figure 1: Screenshot of Guido Segni’s website. Source: Today's top 25 expiring internet artists.
Above the title, the current date is displayed followed by the website heading “Today’s Top 25 expiring internet artists.” The expiration date attached to each site, with the current date providing a point of reference, most likely references the day that the domain must be renewed. Often, the artists’ sites still remain active on the web after the names “expire” and disappear from the list.
The first sentence of the subheading reads, “A daily updated chart list of the most influential internet artists based on the expiring date of their website.” As the days go by and names work their way up the list, the opacity of the hyperlinked names begins to increase until it disappears from the top of the list without any record or archive. This concept of the transient nature of web-based art is one of the many challenges net artists create in rejection of traditional means of communicating and preserving art. Some net art projects were never archived in their original form and only later editions remain accessible. Original net art of this form exists as web-based performance—existing for those at the right time and place, gone once that specific combination of time and place passes us by.
The second sentence of the subheading describes an alternate reading of this display of information: “Or just a representation of the state of hypercompetition and anxiety of contemporary artists inside (and outside) of the Internet.” This description demonstrates the absurdity of artistic production in the age of the internet or late-stage capitalism—two concepts which, from the perspective of net artists, have become completely enmeshed. Topexpiringnetartists.com points to the hypocrisy behind the consumption of art on the internet: through Spotify’s top played albums or through who is trending on social media, there is a constant state of urgency. This urgency extends to the individual, obliging us to continually consume and participate in web-based interaction. Geert Lovnik describes this feeling:
Our disenchantment with the internet is a fact. Yet again, enlightenment does not bring us liberation but depression. The once fabulous aura that surrounded our beloved apps, blogs, and social media has deflated. Swiping, sharing, and liking have begun to feel like soulless routines, empty gestures. We’ve started to unfriend and unfollow, yet we can’t afford to delete our accounts, as this implies social suicide.
Topexpiringnetartists.com is a meta-commentary on the relationship between art production and distribution in the age of the internet. The website is in itself a piece of net art, made by Guido Segni. Like topexipiringnetartists.com, net art as whole is as much about the social, political, and economic conditions that the internet produces as it is about the internet itself.
Overview of Net Art
This leads us to the topic of this research: how do net artists understand our current digital material conditions, and in turn, what is a net artist and what is net art? For the sake brevity, here are ways I have come to understand net artists and net art.
Net artists: artists (who are sometimes theorists or scholars) who critique the stage of capitalist development that has produced the culture of the internet
Net art: to engage in critique of digital material conditions using networks as a.) source material for research or b.) a platform, often by means satirical or subversive in nature
Whether this is an interpersonal, ecological, or class-based critique, to name a few categories, the work involves using and living on these platforms to create work.
In the 2006 text Network Art: Practices and Positions, Tom Corby attempts to provide some boundaries for defining net art:
...network art is inclusive of practices that are formally complex but also works in which technology is not a necessary and present condition for the realization and dissemination of the work—such as books and performance. That is not to say that network art is inclusive of all forms of creativity that have a passing relationship to the Net or deal with the consequences of informational processing. This definition does not include approaches that uncritically exploit networked technologies as a marketing opportunity for older forms of art—but rather is inclusive of practices that thoughtfully respond to the emergence of and widespread social, cultural, and economic impact and take up of networked information technologies.[1]
This analysis, while a pertinent foundation, was written more than a decade ago. In terms of the internet’s history, a decade is a very a long time. Examining exhibitions, interviews, and essays written by net artists, this research will provide an opportunity to peer into the complex world of net artists and internet critique today.
In attempting to provide some defining traits of net art, this article relies on a chronological framework from 1997 to present, relying most on content produced within the last five years. Throughout this chronology, the concepts discussed in reference to exhibitions, interviews, and essays remain adjacent to at least one (if not all) of the following topics:
Web development and design, including technologies separate from the web but still existing in some version on the web, such as virtual reality (VR) or machine learning algorithms
Cultural studies, be it in the form of critical analysis or radical leftist theory
Net art in relation to the formerly central media, photography, and theories foundational to the photographic practice
These topics provide a foundation for understanding net art. Through this overview published in two parts, I hope to illustrate the bounds that can exist in defining this genre while illuminating the lack of bounds that exist in understanding the work’s applicability. To quote from James Baldwin’s essay The Creative Process, “The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge.”[2] It is the work of net artists to develop, critique, and re-imagine the development of human experience as it relates to and exists on the web. While we remain complacent to the disillusionment we experience on the internet, it is the task of net artists to identify it, unpack it, and challenge it.
EARLY NET ARTISTS
In the 1990s, manifestos began to appear, proclaiming the birth of a movement. Particularly notable is Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin’s Introduction to Net.Art. Published 1994-1998, it begins with the following definition:
a. net.art is a self-defining term created by a malfunctioning piece of software, originally used to describe an art and communications activity on the internet.
b. net.artists sought to break down autonomous disciplines and outmoded classifications imposed upon various activists practices.
The first section of this definition can be well illustrated by the MTAA piece, Simple Net Art Diagram (SNAD), seen below:
Figure 2: Simple Net Art Diagram. Source: Net Art Anthology.
An early example of the meme, this GIF has circulated widely on the internet over the years, being manipulated and recycled by net artists in different contexts. MTAA, the artistic duo that originally created the piece has welcomed this repurposing, releasing SNAD under a creative commons license that allows this reproduction. Re-reading the beginning of Shulgin and Bookchin’s definition of net.art while examining SNAD, the parallels will reveal themselves to the viewer.
The second aspect of Shulgin and Bookchin’s definition alludes to the utopian idealism that came out in the humble beginnings of the net art movement. There was a hope among artists that the internet could be a space of autonomous, egalitarian world-building. Bookchin reflects on this historical moment in her contribution to 2006 text Network Art: Practices and Positions, an essay called “Grave digging and net art: a proposal for the future.”[3]
The early and international net art community began receiving attention as a collective in 1996 for their ideas regarding the web as a space where ideas could be put into the universe without hierarchy, physical limitations, or government control. Bookchin references Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone as one the movement’s handbooks.[4] However, by the year 2006, Bookchin was describing how the “refutation” of this idealistic vision of the internet was “now as commonplace as the original promise.”
Today’s net artists attribute much of this utopian collapse to the tech companies of Silicon Valley, which today have an iron grip on which content is discoverable and accessible one the web. That being said, there was a brief period before all this: while Google and Facebook (founded in 1998 and 2004, respectively) were in stages of infancy, net artists at the turn of the century took advantage of the utopian possibilities of the web.
In 1998, the net artist group Electronic Disturbance Theatre collaborated with the Mexican revolutionary group the Zapatistas to create Flood Net. Similar to the work of the Yes Men, Flood Net took advantage of the lack of cybersecurity and required authenticity on the web at this time to draw attention to social and political issues. The home page to Flood Net’s website reads, “The Flood Net application of error log spamming is conceptual Internet art. This is your chance to voice your political concerns on a targeted server. You can make a statement in your own words.” The site used a Java applet to engage a targeted cyberattack on a number of institutions unfavorable in the eyes of the artists. This included the U.S. Department of Defense and former Mexican president, Ernesto Zedillo. More backstory on the Zapatistas and explanation of this work as tactical poetics can be found here.
Eva and Franco Mattes, also known as 0100101110101101.ORG, are another example from the early days of the net art movement. In 2001, they took the private to the internet’s public, turning the notion of privacy on its head. In the project Life Sharing, the artists gave unrestricted access to their home computer through the website domain HTTP://0100101110101101.ORG. As one of the project’s collaborators explains:
Life Sharing is an anagram of file sharing. Life Sharing is a computer running linux, sharing its hard-disk with the whole world, making all its contents accessible via Internet. Since January 2001 we give free and unlimited access, 24 hours a day, to all the contents of our computer: ‘All’ means not a directory of the hard-disk but the whole content of the computer: programs, system, desktop, archives, tools, ongoing projects, mail and so on. You can literally get lost in this huge data maze. Life Sharing is a brand new concept of net architecture turning a website into a hardcore ‘personal media’ for complete digital transparency. They can rummage our archives, search for texts of files they’re interested in, check what kind of software we work with, watch the ‘live’ evolution of our projects and even read our private mail. At the end of the 90s we used to work exclusively re-using, stealing and mixing other people’s work. In 2000 we inverted this perspective starting to share everything we were working on with everybody, freely and in real time. Privacy is stupid.[5]
In many ways, Life Sharing was a foreshadowing of different aspects of the web which had yet to exist—social media and open-source software being two wildly different things that this project connects to. The essence of this project, taking the internet as a tool to communicate an idea about the internet and the social conditions relating to the internet, is at the core of net art. In this context, Eva and Franco Mattes engage in critique of digital material conditions, using networks as a platform by satirical and subversive means.
In the last twenty years, the landscape of media has drastically shifted. Cybersecurity and oligarchic social media platforms inhibit and make obsolete work such FloodNet or Life Sharing. We live in the era of “Top 25 net artists,” who expire a bit more as each day passes. Part two of this research will go on to explore In Defense of the Poor Image by Hito Stereyl, an essay written in 2011 that caused tectonic shifts in the cultural understanding of images and media, followed by a dive into contemporary net art as it appears in 2021.
Supplementary resources
Unable to provide a comprehensive synthesis of all relevant artists and their work, I have created a web-based visual network (please excuse the irony), which is a helpful starting point. The graph maps the major exhibitions, artists, and interviews that are relevant to the topics discussed here. Links to artists’ website, exhibition documentation, and web-published interviews can all be found here. If you find that you’re fascinated by this topic and would like to stay engaged, I recommend following my are.na channel “innet/art/survey” where I will continue to collect website-based information and resources which I consider interesting and relevant.
References
[1] Network Art: Practices and Positions, Ed. Tom Corby, (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 1.
[2] James Baldwin, “The Creative Process.”
[3] Bookchin, Natalie, “Grave digging and net art: a proposal for the future,” in Network Art: Practices and Positions, Ed. by Tom Corby (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 68.
[4] Bookchin, “Grave digging and net art: a proposal for the future,” 69.
[5] 0100101110101101.ORG, “Life Sharing:a real-time digital self-portrait,” in Network Art: Practices and Positions, Ed. by Tom Corby (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 188-189.
Briers, Anna. “Conflict in My Outlook: Exhibition Essay.” University of Queensland Art Museum, 2020. https://www.conflictinmyoutlook.online/exhibition-essay.
Electronic Disturbance Theatre and the Zapatistas. “Flood Net.” Rhizome, 1998. https://sites.rhizome.org/anthology/floodnet.html.
Lovnik, Geert. “Overcoming Internet Disillusionment: On the Principles of Meme Design.” E-flux, June 2017. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141287/overcoming-internet-disillusionment-on-the-principles-of-meme-design/.
MTAA. “Simple Net Art Diagram.” Rhizome: Net Art Anthology, 1997. https://anthology.rhizome.org/simple-net-art-diagram.
Shulgin, Alexei and Natalie Bookchin. “Introduction to net.art.” Rhizome, 1994-1998. http://variants.artbase.rhizome.org/Q4308/index.html.
Web Design Museum. “Web Design History Timeline: Explore the timeline of milestones in the history of web design from 1990 to the present.” https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history.
Zuboff, Shoshana. “Pokemon Go: A Gateway to Surveillance Capitalism,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2019. https://mondediplo.com/2019/01/06google.