Internet art
Internet art is art or, more precisely, cultural production which uses the Internet as its primary medium and, more importantly, its subject, much like video art uses video as its medium - but is also very much about video, although many artists working with the Net view video as only a component in a Software Art or meta-art system, which is very much "about" code. Quoting a definition by Steve Dietz, former curator in new media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis: 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.
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 media art and electronic art. A few sub-genres of Internet art are software art, form art, net.radio, browser art, web-specific art, spam art and code poetry. Internet art as a subgenre is a dubious construction really, since the internet is used by all kinds of artists in many different ways. Art in general has changed or expanded through the use of the internet.
There is no established terminology for Internet art yet. 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 Cosic, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting. This can be misleading, however, as other artists were working at the same time: Superbad (Ben Benjamin), Graham Nicholls, Snarg, Zuper (Michael Samyn), Artcontext (Andy Deck), I/O/D (Collective), Philip Pocock 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 and prefer project-based rather than catagorical terminology.
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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, 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; broad public attention and acclaim for Internet art at that time were largely related to the dot-com mania, although some cultural rpoducers linked this form to other contemporary art practises, such as [ÃÂtherLands], [Humbot 1999] and [UNMOVIE docs] by collaboratives of artists, hackers, architects and writers. 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 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, Knowbotic Research, Joseph Nechvatal, Udo Noll, Philip Pocock, Felix Stephan Huber, Wolfgang Staehle, Gregor Stehle, Florian Wenz.
History and context
Artists and projects
See also
References