Net.art

net.art is a group of artists who worked in internet art from 1994. The members are usually referenced as Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting. This group was united as a parody of avantgarde movements by writers such as Josephine Bosma and Hand Dieter Huber but their individual works have little in common.
net.art is also used as a synonym for net art or internet art and covers a much wider range of artistic practices. In this wider definition, net.art means art that uses the internet as its medium and that cannot be experienced in any other way. Often net.art has the internet as (part of) its subject matter but this is certainly not required. See Net art.

Associated Names

ASCII Art Ensemble (Walter van der Cruijsen, Luka Frelih, Vuk Ćosić; Netherlands)
Heath Bunting (UK)
Vuk Ćosić (Slovenia)
Martin Sjardijn (the Netherlands)
Jodi (Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk; Belgium/Netherlands)
Olia Lialina (Russia)
Alexei Shulgin (Russia)

Landmark in Net Art history

In the development of Internet Art, defined by art projects which are "materializations of social networks about communication, about the Internet" (Lev Manovich, "Internet, modernisation and net.art" ^*),net.art (with a dot and a small 'n') is a particular moment. net.art is less a category than a movement, less a genre than a critical and political landmark in Internet Art history.

Lev Manovich at the same time disparaged the Internet as a Totalitarian medium in his text from 1996 ON TOTALITARIAN INTERACTIVITY in which he makes the personal statement: "I cannot but see Internet as a communal apartment of Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, always present line for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen. Or I can think of it as a giant garbage site for the information society, with everybody dumping their used products of intellectual labor and nobody cleaning up."

"net.art" is an expression that was coined by Pit Schultz (one of the founders of the Nettime mailing list) sometime in 1995, but is generally attributed to Vuk Cosic through Alexei Shulgin. It was forged after coming across "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term 'net.art')" (Rachel Greene, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, 2004). It was first used on the occasion of the "net.art per se" series, a meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste, Italy in May 1996, to point to a group of people who worked closely in the first half of the 1990s (and into the 2000s) . These meetings gave birth to the online website net.art per se/CNN Interactive ^*, which is a fake CNN website commemorating the event. Rachel Greene sums up the core ideas discussed at this meeting, ideas that were to become the basis for the works related to net.art: "a serious engagement with popular media, a belief in parody and appropriation, a skepticism towards commodified media information and a sense of the interplay of art and life."

The birth of net.art as a geographically and historically defined movement is usually related to the creation of the Electronic Photogallery by Alexei Shulgin in 1994, which evolved into the Moscow wwwartcentre [http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart/index1.htm, as initiated by Alexei Shulgin, Tania Detkina, Alexander Nikolaev and Rachel Baker.

Social networks

Net.artists have built digital art communities through an active practice of web-hosting and web art curating. A number of the projects related to the net.art community can be found on the following websites:

http://museum.kalamiteit.nl/world/museum (The Virtual Groninger Museum)
http://museum.kalamiteit.nl/world/proposal/proposal.html (ArtSpaceLab)
http://irational.org (Heath Bunting)
http://easylife.org (Alexei Shulgin)
http://www.teleportacia.org/ (Olia Lialina)
http://www.incident.net
http://www.ljudmila.org/ (Vuk Ćosić)
http://www.desk.nl/
http://www.diacenter.org/
http://www.thing.net
http://0100101110101101.org
http://www.adaweb.com
http://pleine-peau.com (Frederic Madre)

net.artists have defined themselves through an international and network mode of communication, an interplay of exchanges, collaborative and cooperative work. They have a massive presence on several mailing lists such as Nettime (see their archives with Olia Lialina and Alexei Shulgin) and Eyebeam ^*)

net.artists like Jodi developed a particular form of e-mail art, or spam mail art, through text reprocessing and ASCII art interventions: a list of all their actions on the Eybeam mailing list for the year 1998 can be found here. The term "spam art" was coined by Frederic Madre to describe all such forms of disruptive interventions in mailing-lists. A bridge can be made to the e-mail interventions of "Codeworks" artists such as Mez or mi-ga. ("Codeworks" is a term coined by poietician Alan Sondheim to define the textual experiments of artists playing with faux-code and non-executable script or mark-up languages).

Tactical Media Net Art

net.art developed in a context of cultural crisis (Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990's 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 to the idea of democracy as a modern capitalist myth. The Internet, often promoted as the democratic tool per excellence, but largely participating to the rules of vested interests, is then targeted by the net.artists: 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 the public space.

By questioning structures such as the navigation window (or dialog boxes) and challenging their functionality, net.artists have shown that what is considered to be natural by most Internet users is actually highly constructed, even controlled, by corporations. Company browsers like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer display user-friendly structures (the "navigation", the "exploration" are landmarks of our social practices) to provide the user with a familiar environment. Net.artists try to break this familiarity. An early experiment in that field is the "BlahBlah" search Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work. Their experiments have given birth to what could be called "browser art", which has been expanded by the British collective I/O/D's experimental navigator WebStalker [http://bak.spc.org/iod/" target="_blank" >^*, to choose one example among many.

Alexei Shulgin (Link X 1996) and Heath Bunting (_readme or Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible [http://irational.org/heath/_readme.html, 1996) have played with the structure of advertisement portals by establishing lists of keywords unlikely to be searched for but nonetheless existing on the web as URLs or metadata components: they use this relational data to enmesh paths of navigation in order to create new readable texts. The user (and especially the art-interested user that is likely to be the first audience) is not exploring one art website that has its own meaning and aesthetic significance within itself, but rather they are opened up to the entire network as a collection of socio-economic forces and political stances that are not always visible.

Rachel Greene has associated net.art with Tactical media as a form of Detournement. She writes: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media'."

In this perspective, the duo 0100101110101101.org Christophe Bruno (The Google Ad Word Happening ^* have emerged among others as a new generation of Internet artists with goals closely connected to those of the early net.artists.

Hacker culture

The Jodi collective works with the aesthetics of computer errors, which has a lot in common, on both the aesthetic and pragmatic levels, with hacker culture. Questioning and disturbing the browsing experience with hacks, code tricks, faux-code, and faux-virus, critically investigates the context in which they are agents. In turn, the digital environment becomes concerned with its own internal structure. The collective 0100101110101101.org ^* expands the idea of "art hacktivism" by performing code interventions and perturbations in art festivals such as the Venice Biennale.

"We can point to a superficial difference between most net.art and hacking: hackers have an obsession with getting inside other computer systems and having an agency there, whereas the 404 errors in the JTDDS (for example) only engage other systems in an intentionally wrong manner in order to store a 'secret' message in their error logs. It's nice to think of artists as hackers who endeavour to get inside cultural systems and make them do things they were never intended to do: artists as culture hackers." (Brett Stalbaum, http://www.thing.net/eyebeam/msg00527.html)

Institutional critique

net.art interventions tackled with the praxis of art business and digital culture institutions, from the perspective of curating. net.artists have actively participated in the debate over the definition of net.art within the context of the art market. net.art promoted the modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making. But the question of how this process should be presented and accessible within the art world, either sold in the art market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works made for the web. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical. All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment addressing such issues. The WWWArt Award [http://www.easylife.org/award/ competition initiated by Alexei Shulgin in 1995 suggests to reward found Internet works with an "art feeling".

Some projects, such as Joachim Schmid's Archiv Hybrids or Copies by 0100101110101101.org ^* on 1997.

Olia Lialina has confronted the issue of digital curating. In 1998 she set up the web platform Teleportacia.org , an online gallery of promotion and selling of net.art works. Each piece of net.art has its originality protected by a guarantee constituted by the web address of its location (the URL), presented as a barrier against reproducibility and/or forgery. Lialina claimed that this allowed the buyer of the piece to own it as they wished: controlling the location address as a means of controlling access to the piece. This attempt at giving net.art an economic identity and a legitimation within the art world was critically questioned, even within the net.art sphere, though the project was often understood as a satire (see "Net Art Market: What Happens Next?" Teleportacia.org ^*" target="_blank" >collective, who, under the pseudonym of "Luther Bissett", cloned the content of Teleportacia.org in 1999 and came up with an unauthorized mirror-site, showing the net.art works in the same context (the clone of Teleportacia.org) and the same quality as the original. The Last Real Net Art Museum [http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru/ is another example of Olia Lialina's attempt to deal with the issue.

net.artists on Post-Modernism

"It’s too complicated to in any way criticise or analyse postmodernism because it’s totally unclear what it is. But here we are, I’m looking at the positive effects of the introduction of this ideology. What it did was it levelled the unsustainable pluralism of before, unsustainable for the lazy. . . I think that absolute freedom of expression or appropriation got institutionalised and canonised and all possible meanderings, all possible developments in a linear history of development, somehow got sanctioned and a priori incorporated into the post-modern point of view." (Vuk Cosic. ‘All Art is Useless’, 1999)

"There is no Genius isolated from the world and inspired by the Muse – culture is made by people exchanging information and re-working on what has been already done in the past, it has always been like that." (‘Luther Blissett’, 0100101110101101.org : art.hacktivism)