Net Art (net.art)

(Adapted from Wikipedia, http://www.easylife.org/netart/)

net.art (derived from internet art) was first introduced in 1994. It is a self-defining term created by a malfunctioning piece of software, originally used to describe an art and communications activity on the internet. net.artists sought to break down autonomous disciplines and outmoded classifications imposed upon various activists practices.

The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet Art. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet Art history, than a specific genre. Early precursors of the net.art movement include the international fluxus (Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (Mark Amerika) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site.

The term “net.art” was probably coined by Pit Schultz in 1995, but is also attributed to Vuk Cosic, and stems from “conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term ‘net.art’)”. It was first used with regard to the “net.art per se” meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste in May 1996, and referred to a group of artists who worked together closely in the first half of the 1990s. These meetings gave birth to the website net.art per se/CNN Interactive, a fake CNN website “commemorating” the event.

net.art developed in a context of cultural crisis in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990s after the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The artists involved in net.art experiments are associated with the idea of a “social responsibility” that would answer the idea of democracy as a modern capitalist myth. The Internet, often promoted as the democratic tool par excellence, but largely participating in the rules of vested interests, is targeted by the net.artists who claimed that “a space where you can buy is a space where you can steal, but also where you can distribute”. net.artists focus on finding new ways of sharing public space.

~ by itechsquad on March 14, 2009.