Internet art


Internet art is a form of digital artwork distributed via the Internet. This form of art has circumvented the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering aesthetic experiences via the Internet. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.
Internet art can happen outside the technical structure of the Internet, such as when artists use specific social or cultural Internet traditions in a project outside it. Internet art is often—but not always—interactive, participatory, and multimedia-based. Internet art can be used to spread a message, either political or social, using human interactions.
The term Internet art typically does not refer to art that has been simply digitized and uploaded to be viewable over the Internet. This can be done through a web browser, such as images of paintings uploaded for viewing in an online gallery.
Rather, this genre relies intrinsically on the Internet to exist, taking advantage of such aspects as an interactive interface and connectivity to multiple social and economic cultures and micro-cultures. It refers to the Internet as a whole, not only to web-based works.
Theorist and curator Jon Ippolito defined "Ten Myths" about Internet art in 2002. He cites the above stipulations, as well as defining it as distinct from commercial web design, and touching on issues of permanence, archivability, and collecting in a fluid medium.

History and context

Internet art is rooted in disparate artistic traditions and movements, ranging from Dada to Situationism, conceptual art, Fluxus, video art, kinetic art, performance art, telematic art and happenings.
In 1974, Canadian artist Vera Frenkel worked with the Bell Canada Teleconferencing Studios to produce the work String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video, the first artwork in Canada to use telecommunications technologies.
An early telematic artwork was Roy Ascott's work, La Plissure du Texte,
performed in collaboration created for an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983.
Media art institutions such as Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, or the Paris-based IRCAM, would also support or present early Networked art. In 1997 MIT's List Visual Arts Center hosted "PORT: Navigating Digital Culture," that included internet art in a gallery space and "time-based Internet projects." Artists in the show included Cary Peppermint, Prema Murthy, Ricardo Dominguez, and Adrianne Wortzel. In 2000 the Whitney Museum of American Art included net art in their Biennial exhibit. It was the first time that internet art had been included as a special category in the Biennial, and it marked one of the earliest examples of the inclusion of internet art in a museum setting. Internet artists included Mark Amerika, Fakeshop, Ken Goldberg, and ®™ark.
With the rise of search engines as a gateway to accessing the web in the late 1990s, many net artists turned their attention to related themes. The 2001 'Data Dynamics' exhibit at the Whitney Museum featured 'Netomat' and 'Apartment', which used search queries as raw material. Mary Flanagan's ' The Perpetual Bed' received attention for its novel use of 3D nonlinear narrative space, or what she called "navigable narratives."
Her 2001 work in the Whitney Biennial, 'collection' collected items from hard drives around the world and displayed them in a 'computational collective unconscious.' Golan Levin's 'The Secret Lives of Numbers' visualized the "popularity" of the numbers 1 to 1,000,000 as measured by Alta Vista search results. Such works pointed to alternative interfaces and questioned the dominant role of search engines in controlling access to the net.
Nevertheless, the Internet is not reducible to the web, nor to search engines. Besides these unicast applications, suggesting that there is some reference points, there is also a multicast internet that has been explored by very few artistic experiences, such as the Poietic Generator. Internet art has, according to Juliff and Cox, suffered under the privileging of the user interface inherent within computer art. They argue that Internet is not synonymous with a specific user and specific interface, but rather a dynamic structure that encompasses coding and the artist's intention.
The emergence of social networking platforms, understood to be "web-based services that allow individuals to... construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system... articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and... view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system", facilitated a transformative shift in the distribution of internet art. Early online communities were organized around specific "topical hierarchies", whereas social networking platforms consist of egocentric networks, with the "individual at the center of their own community". Artistic communities on the Internet underwent a similar transition in the mid-2000s, shifting from Surf Clubs, "15 to 30 person groups whose members contributed to an ongoing visual-conceptual conversation through the use of digital media" and whose membership was restricted to a select group of individuals, to image-based social networking platforms, like Flickr, which permit access to any individual with an e-mail address. Internet artists make extensive use of the networked capabilities of social networking platforms, and are rhizomatic in their organization, in that "production of meaning is externally contingent on a network of other artists' content".

Artists