HISTORY OF NET.ART
Net. Art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. Some of the early adopters and main members of this movement include ︎︎︎Vuk Ćosić, ︎︎︎Jodi.org, ︎︎︎Alexei Shulgin, ︎︎︎Olia Lialina, ︎︎︎Heath Bunting, Daniel García Andújar.
Pit Schultz curated an exhibition entitled Net. Art in Berlin in 1995. This exhibition is considered to be the first Net. art exhibition and is widely considered to be the starting point of Net. art. The artists such as Vuk Cosic, Heath Bunting and JODI were involved in this exhibition. These artists are listed on an email list called Nettime, and more about ︎︎︎Nettime.
“He asked that each of us to give him I forget eight or 16 screenshots of some web-based work. And then he made those little slides, you know, physical slides for Caruso projector, no dire positives, what's the word called the machines. And then she put that machine in a club in Berlin, owned by his brother, who was a big boy at the time Berlin club guy. And he was just shooting those screenshots at the wall at the maximum speed.”
︎︎︎Vuk Cosic Interview ︎︎︎Image
For a more visual experience of the first Net. Art exhibition, panke. gallery has reproduced screenshots of the artists' early works in 2019, here is a link to information about this exhibition ︎︎︎here
︎ Important works in Net.Art History
︎︎︎the digital hijack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . etoy, 1996 The artist Etoy carried out a project called "the digital hijack" from 31 March to 1 August 1996. The project used software to generate thousands of fake virtual pages by crawling over 2400 keywords such as porsche, madonna. These trapped pages are searched for in search engines and intervene in the user's search process. The theme of this project is a popular topic that Net. Art has been discussing. Intrusions, hijackings or program errors on the Internet, which interfere with users like some kind of "virus", are also an area that many Net artists are keen to study and reflect on.
︎︎︎Documenta done by Vuk Cosic (1997) Vuk Cosic is one of the pioneers of Net. art and a member of Nettime. In 1997, he curated a copy of the Documenta X website, which contained exactly the same information as Kassel Documenta 1997, such as the schedule and staff list. It was an act of piracy in which Vuk Cosic challenged the security of online archives and artistic work in a bold and avant-garde act, and provoked critical thinking about the security of the Internet in terms of individuals, institutions, art and more.
︎︎︎Easylife XXX, by Alexei Shulgin,1997 Alexei Shulgin is one of the first artists to create Net. Art. His work, Easylife XXX, is a website containing explicit sexual content. The site includes two channels, one for over 18s and one for minors. When entering the adult channel, users are presented with explicit sexual content, while if they enter the underage channel they are presented with a page consisting of computer characters. The design of the two pages corresponds, with the characters in the underage channel forming the same image as the adult channel, but using characters to form the image. Shulgin's work provokes a deeper discussion on the language of the internet in terms of restrictive censorship and explores the boundaries of internet language.
︎︎︎ASCII, by Vuk Cosic (1998) ASCII, American Standard Code for Information Interchange, it is a character code for use in computers and contains a variety of codes such as English letters, numbers, punctuation and so on. Vuk Cosic's work ASCII uses this character encoding to create figurative, vivid images, and about the work ASCII, Vuk Cosic talks more in the interview about:
“ ASCII was my let's call it second stage, like the blue period. There was a period before which is like pure net art. ASCII was actually my exit from that art. With the very first weeks and months of availability of the web, or whenever each of us came across this this platform, we should have been asking ourselves exactly, these super fundamental questions that leads to the questions that you've asked.
Majority of us early practitioners that also had some ambitious conceptual, let's say, backgrounds and also intentions. We understood ourselves as refugees from the art system. We understood that one component of our ethos was also that we were not accepting the existing A relationships of power in the art world we were born into.”
Majority of us early practitioners that also had some ambitious conceptual, let's say, backgrounds and also intentions. We understood ourselves as refugees from the art system. We understood that one component of our ethos was also that we were not accepting the existing A relationships of power in the art world we were born into.”