Net.art Presentation Link and Sources

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CmsGwd5ZZtljYPdbGFbSQU5bh51VIknCmwdDnPHBbm0/edit?usp=sharing

Sources:
cyberhouse.arted.psu.edu/visualculture/history_net_art.pdf

 https://theawl.com/a-suitably-bizarre-interview-with-the-early-web-provocateurs-at-jodi-org-f1035a1d78ac#.ckra9bwfc

 http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/digart-jodi-makes-art-online-but-don%E2%80%99t-call-them-net-artists

Net Art Presentation Outline

Net Art

Net art (commonly referred to as net.art) is a form of New Media Art that uses the Internet as its primary means of creation and distribution, as well as the name of the movement that constituted the first wave of artists to work in this medium. The medium reached the peak of popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, though it will continue to exist just as long as the Internet continues to exist, under different movements and iterations.

Net art uses the Internet as the canvas to create art using a variety of techniques, such as coding, HTML, scripts, digitally generated visuals and sound, text processing, and ASCII. Works of art in this form, especially ones that were created during the first movement, were often political in nature, highlighting, critiquing, and embracing the sociopolitical implications of a society growing increasingly dependent on technology and the world wide web. Artists working in the medium usually collaborate and correspond with each other through the Internet, dismissing the stereotype of the “lone artist”. They often worked under aliases and collectives.

The term “net.art” was founded by total accident, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic discovered the phrase in a garbled email. During 1994 and 1995, a group of subversive, internet-savvy artists began to congregate and chat on various mailing lists and message boards. A number of influential net art websites popped up in this period.

One of the most important ones was jodi.org. Developed by the JODI art collective, the external appearance of the site is cryptic and nonsensical, consisting of scrambled green text that hyperlinks to dead end pages that in turn lead to more of the same. However, if you open up the source code of the text, it reveals an ASCII image of a hydrogen bomb. The site is a perfect example of the playful and sometimes confounding nature of net art as it emphasizes the internal coding and hardware of the internet, the hidden side of the web that few people see or care about.

The JODI collective, which consists of two artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, has a multitude of other websites that are just as puzzling and cryptic if you are not aware of their artistic background. Some, like globalmove.us, use preexisting software, in this case Google Maps, to create artwork, while others, such as oss.jodi.org, use visual tricks to convince the user that their computer is breaking dow. For example, oss.jodi.org, which is still online to this day, simulates a malicious virus taking over your computer to the point that your browser will truly shut off, infuriating the user.

By 1996, net art was a globally known phenomenon, even as the wider mainstream art world refused to acknowledge its existence as art. To remedy this, the artists involved took matters into their own hands, creating their own organizations, like Rhizome, which was founded in 1996 by artist Mark Tribe, to serve as a platform and a showcase for net art projects.

Other influential net projects during this period include Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, which uses non-linear hyperlinks to tell a narrative, Martine Neddam’s mouchette.org, which purports to be a site belonging to a fictional prepubescent girl, and Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon, which explored the topics of gender and the 1993 rape and murder of trans man Brandon Teena.

Expanding on the use of net art to highlight and influence social causes, a group of Australian women founded the group of VNS Matrix, who were instrumental in the development of the cyberfeminist movement, which explored the possibilities of feminism in relation to technology and the Internet.

After the turn of the century, several artists started bringing net art into the real world. One example is Cory Arcangel, a young Brooklyn artist who primarily works in video game modifications. One of his most famous works in Super Mario Clouds (2002), a hack of the original Super Mario Bros. NES game where only the clouds appear, simulating the appearance of a real sky. Seen in the original physical gallery installation, the work is quite beautiful and calming, an intermingling of the digital and the real. Although his more recent sculptural work can not be called true “net art”, it definitely carries over the super conceptualism, playfulness, irony, and association with technology that the original net art had.

Another artist that appeared at the tail end of the original net.art movement who is still influential in the medium as a whole is Petra Cortright, a Los Angeles artist who, after graduating from design school in 2007, began posting a ton of experimental webcam videos onto her YouTube channel. Although these videos seem quaint and of little interest today in the social media-oriented internet of 2016, back then they had a revolutionary DIY spirit that brought her international attention in the art world. Like Arcangel, her recent work has little to do with net.art, and yet it carries the spirit of the movement into the new era, as seen in her beautiful digital paintings.

Montage Animation Final

https://youtu.be/Idd__4c_EzA