Internet Art

By analysing a series of exhibition projects responding to central changes in web technology since its public unveiling (1991), this study identifies a historical trajectory for discussing the evolution of curating on the web. Such evolution highlights how curators have devised exhibition models that operate as platforms for not only displaying art specific to the web, but also for producing and disseminating it in a way that responds to the developments of web technology—and its socio-cultural and economic impact. With the massification of web tools, in fact, these platforms have generated distributed systems of artistic production free from the physical and conceptual limitations of the gallery and museum space. They have not only become spaces for displaying art, but also platforms that nurture its production, different modes of audience engagement and critique the canons of the institutionalised art world. Originating from the desire to reduce the historical fragmentation of this field of work and its partial mapping, this study follows a periodisation that starts from the early internet, with its BBS-enabled platforms such as ARTEX (1980), to introduce the 1990s experimentations with the web browser and the developments of projects like äda’web (1995). It then dives into the Web 2.0 when, with the platformisation of the technology, curators developed an array of approaches for adopting existing web services, as in the instances of CuratingYouTube (2007–present) and #exstrange (2017). Lastly, it outlines the trends of today’s web, which saw the birth of projects like
the blockchain-enabled cointemporary (2014), to then draw conclusions about the relevance of this historical trajectory in the field of curatorial studies and the production of web-based and digital art.

Digital language has meant a revolution in the methods of production, distribution and conservation of contemporary art. The purpose of
this paper is to reflect on the new status of museums within the digital age. Works using new media must be understood as spaces of nonhierarchical
communication where an artist’s role is diluted and the public becomes a user that completes an open process. Therefore, the function
of the museum is challenged, being no longer a moral authority or a place of storing physical works. Because of its instability and obsolescence, the
only valid method for the conservation of digital art is permanence through change.

An interactive artwork takes on the shape of an event. An artist does not make a final, completed piece of art, instead produces an area of activity for the receivers, whose interactive actions bring to life an artwork-event. Regardless of what shape the final product of an artist's activity takes on, an interactive artwork finds its final formation only as a result of participative behavior of the viewers. The latter ones in that way become participants, performers, executors, or (co)creators of an artwork-event. What I consider the basic area of research in interactive art are the strategies organizing fields of activity for the receivers-participants. They can be understood as scores that project the interactive behavior of the receivers. The typology I put forward in this essay distinguish eight strategies of interactive art: strategy of instrument, game, archives, labyrinth, rhizome, system, network, and spectacle. The analysis of individual strategies reveals that all the common elements that occur there and characterizing an interactive experience en globe are organized differently each time. These elements are interface, interactions, data (database), data organization (hypertext, cybertext), software/hardware system, relations among participants, and performance/spectacle. In every strategy, a different factor takes a position superior to others and plays the basic role in the process of organizing interactive activities of the receivers. This means that it is not the occurrence within the frames of individual strategies of elements that are different each time, but their organization and hierarchy different each time that play a decisive role in providing strategies with their specific character. Discussing all strategies I shall distinguish their basic characteristic features but also pay attention to their range and variety of their forms observed so far. The latter aim I shall realize by pointing out to various actual examples of artistic usage of particular strategies.

This article addresses the complex relationship between digital activism and Internet art, from the initial proposals in the 1990s up to the present day. The analysis focuses on those projects that have most impacted the convergence of net art and "net-activism" during this period, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between artistic practice and hacktivism. Likewise, phenomena such as virtual sit-ins, DDOS-based strategies and several others that have emerged in the new context of social networks and participatory online platforms (memes, flash mobs, etc.) are analysed, in order to reflect on the new practices of social media art and their potential for specific critical action.


[es] Cultura red y estéticas de la disensión Resumen: En este artículo se aborda la compleja relación entre el activismo digital y el Internet art desde los inicios de este en la década de los noventa del pasado siglo hasta la actualidad. El centro del análisis lo constituyen las propuestas que de forma más intensa han reclamado a lo largo de este periodo la confluencia entre net art y "net-activismo", poniendo especial énfasis en las relaciones entre práctica artística y hacktivismo. Asimismo, se analizan fenómenos como las virtual sit-ins, las estrategias basadas en DDOS, los surgidos en el nuevo contexto de las redes sociales y de las plataformas participativas en línea (memes, flash mobs, etc.) para, finalmente, abordar la capacidad de actuación crítica específica de las nuevas prácticas de social media art. Palabras clave: Internet art; net art; hacktivismo; activismo digital en red; arte de medios sociales; sentada virtual. Summary: 1. Internet art and social criticism; 2. Online activism as "performance art" on the Internet?; 3. The "anti-system" possibilities of the "network-system"; 4. The critical manifestation of the connected multitude; 5. Hacktivism and artistic practices; 6. Social media art and dissent; 7. Bibliography. How to cite: Martín Prada, J. (2020) "Network culture and the aesthetics of dissension", en Escritura e Imagen 16, 271-284.

This paper is about the research component of a digital art methods class, where preservice teachers and art students encounter art making and art learning as a conversation with materials, history, and peers. The conversation happens over the internet with social media and web images, animations, typography, and code. My goal in the course is that students engage with research itself as a material dialog, a complex materiality with specific affordances and potentials.

J8?g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 [...] Nel dicembre del 1995, la Rete forniva dunque a C´osic´un nome per l'attività in cui era coinvolto. Eccitato ed emozionato, l'artista iniziò a divulgarlo immediatamente. Pochi minuti dopo aver ricevuto l'e-mail, C´osic´la inoltrava a un suo amico di Zagabria, Igor Marko-vic´, chiedendogli di decodificarne il contenuto. Il testo era in realtà un manifesto piuttosto vago che se la prendeva con le istituzioni artistiche tradizionali, reclamando una generica libertà di espressione per gli artisti su Internet. Il frammento sopracitato, decodificato da Markovic´, recitava: "All this becomes possible only with emergence of the Net. Art as a notion becomes obsolete...". 2 Così, anche se il testo non sembrava rivestire un interesse particolare, il termine era stato creato, o meglio, come notava un altro net.artist della prima ora, il russo Alexei Shulgin, "si era autocreato per opera di un pezzo di software malfunzionante". Si trattava dunque di un ready-made prodotto da una macchina, che non aveva avuto neanche bisogno dell'aiuto di un'artista per materializzarsi. 3 Né forse poteva essere altrimenti, per una pratica fondata sulla manipolazione di assemblati pre-esistenti come software e pezzi di codice.

Thinspiration images, meant to inspire weight-loss, proliferate online through platforms that encourage the circulation of user-generated content. Despite numerous alarmist critiques in mass media about thinspiration and various academic studies investigating ‘pro-anorexia’ sites, surprisingly little attention has been given to the processes of creation and the symbolic potential of thinspiration. This thesis analyzes the formal hybridity of thinspiration, and its use as an expressive medium. The particularities of thinspiration (including its visual characteristics, creative processes, and exhibition) may be considered carefully constructed instances of self- representation, hinging on the expression of beliefs regarding the mind and body. While these beliefs are deeply entrenched in popular body management discourse, they also tend to rely on traditional dualist ideologies. Rather than simply emphasizing slenderness or reiterating standard assumptions about beauty, thinspiration often evokes pain and sadness, and employs truisms about the transcendence of flesh and rebellion against social constraints. By harnessing individualist discourse and the values of mind/body dualism, thinspiration becomes a space in which people struggling with disordered eating and body image issues may cast themselves as active agents—contrary to the image of eating disorders proffered by popular and medical discourse.

This chapter charts the outcome of a 1 0-year collaboration, which has sought to develop alternative software, and network artifacts to those promoted by mainstream technology providers. 'System Poetics and Software Refuseniks' is split into three sections. In the first part, 'positior;s/(we present a number of overlapping arguments that situate our work as critical practice. In the second part, 'practices_,;(four projects are discussed 5) that relate to these positions and in the third part, 'processes,' we provide a case study of a project made between 1996 and 2000. The approach taken in this final section is descriptive and reflective. It is offered as a form of mapping that lays bare creative approaches, and highlights the serendipitous processes that evolve in computer-based artwork-an approach that appears to conflict with a technological discourse that places the computer as the apogee of the measured and the rational. Positions Technology is not merely instrumental Our overarching position is that artists need to develop software and network technologies that go beyond the narrow instrumental and utilitarian focus described by technologically deterministic discourses. In doing so artists can reveal both how technology operates in social and cultural contexts in complex and sometimes hidden ways and also suggest alternative technological forms that are inclusive of emotional, political and reflexive structures. Networks induce hybrid practice Networks pervade and cut across disciplines. This layered horizontal aspect allows us to relate and mix differing intellectual and aesthetic domains with relative ease and in doing so develop hybrid artifacts. In particular we connect avant-garde traditions concerned with the use of found (data} objects, with approaches borrowed from computer science concerned with simulating biological complexity. These relationships allow us to develop new ways of thinking about how works operate perceptually; which leads to our next position.

This article investigates the relationship between art and technology, pointing the constants of a process of cultural digestion which is mediated by the very sovereign technological environmentthe Internet. Relying on the multiplicity and hybridization of the content formats, and also on the user involved interactivity as constructive vectorrelationships, new media art and the internet art are natural consequences of the artistic practices of creative appropriation of contemporary technological media. As the complexity of the relationship between art and the technological environment becomes richer than ever, we assist to the creation of a contemporary ultra-technological culture, structurally dependent on the media and responsible for relativizing the critical positioning of the art consumer. Defining the premises of the interaction with a technologically interfaced world of art, the user (reader) of the Internet as a medium of expression isequallya consumer, and a producer of information (content).

Our reality is now integrally determined and dependent on information technology. Phenomena such as social media, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, skeuomorphism, cryptocurrencies, the metaverse and related issues of convergence, immersion, alienation, and surveillance are now public knowledge and usual areas of investigation for visual artists. However, in light of the acceleration of digitization processes induced by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, even within the field of contemporary art history is emerging an increasingly pressing need to identify the origins and trace the evolution of the impact of electronic culture on the visual arts, in line with the more recent goals of other research fields such as visual studies and media archaeology.

While many of these phenomena are characteristic of our time, their origins date back to the so-called information age, an era that extends from the advent of cybernetic culture with the invention of the transistor in 1947, to the processes of computerization in the 1960s, from the spread of personal computers in the late 1970s to the birth of the Internet in the early 1990s. Discussions on electronic art in the information age are usually traced back to exhibitions such as Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA, London, 1968), Software (Jewish Museum, New York, 1970) or Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985) and to publications by art historians and curators such as Jasia Reichardt and Frank Popper, but a global history of computer art, in its multiple articulations, still has to be written.

This issue of piano b aims to be a first attempt to map and reflect on the birth and early evolution of computer art and computer science in visual culture in Italy. The Italian situation is a peculiar one, characterized by continuous exchanges between the arts and industry, intermedia and collective productions, radical forms of bottom-up technological appropriation, visionary approaches to electronic devices as tools for liberation – in cyberpunk and cyberfeminist terms – and pioneering reflections on the haptic dimension of virtual reality and the new ideas of “community” introduced by the Internet. Some of these areas have recently been the object of studies, but the convergences between art and computers in Italy have not yet been examined from a unitary perspective.

Along with the identification of case studies and pivot points, the call wants to stimulate a process of contextualization of these phenomena in light of the Italian peculiarities, both in social and economic terms and in cultural terms. The objective is also to consider the visual artists’ acquisition of specific technological skills, as well as their withdrawal from the traditional logic of the contemporary art system, as part of a process of empowerment, or a growing awareness of the impact of their work on the collective imagination. The main contribution of computer art, in fact, on a global scale and so also in Italy, seems to concern less the application of information technology than its imagination and continuous questioning.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

– Programmed Art
– Art, design and the computer industry
– The interweaving of sounds and visions in electronic music
– The artist as a programmer
– Personal computer art
– Postmodernism and computer science
– Relations between computer art and video art
– Electronic art festivals
– Computer graphics, videographics and creative industries
– Cyberpunk between liberation and dystopia
– Cyberfeminism: electronics and gender identity
– Haptic issues in interactive art and virtual reality
– From BBS to Internet: community and sharing

Internet usage began to shift towards mass participation from the first years of the new millennium, which was identified by the neologism of “Web 2.0”. This study points out that the concept used in diverse ways by IT, business, and cultural discourses indicates both technological and cultural change. According to the author, however, we can get closer to understanding Web 2.0 if we look at the surrounding ideologies instead of strict definitions. Therefore, the second part of the argument examines the utopias and dystopias of Web 2.0 using the methods of ideological criticism. The paper identifies the common denominator of utopias generating Web 2.0 in their desire to extend democracy, but argues that actual practice has enabled building up centralized and decentralized structures simultaneously.

Az internet használatmódja az új évezred első éveitől kezdett tömeges méretekben a részvétel felé eltolódni, amit a "web 2.0" neologizmusával illettek. Ez a tanulmány arra kíván rámutatni, hogy az informatikai, üzleti és kulturális érdekeltségek által különböző jelentésekben használt terminus egyszerre jelöl technológiai és kulturális változást. Álláspontom szerint azonban a web 2.0 megértéséhez akkor kerülhetünk közelebb, ha szigorú definíciók helyett az azt körülvevő ideológiákat fürkésszük. Ezért a dolgozat második része ideológiakritikai szempontokat alkalmazva a web 2.0 utópiáit és disztópiáit vizsgálja. A web 2.0-t életre hívó utópiák közös nevezőjét a demokrácia kiterjesztésének vágyában azonosítja, ugyanakkor azt állítja, hogy tényleges működése egymással párhuzamosan tette lehetővé a centralizált és decentralizált struktúrák kiépülését.

The complexity of the relationship between art and the technological environment is richer than ever, in the context of a contemporary ultra-technological culture, structurally dependent on the media and responsible for relativizing the critical positioning of the art consumer. Defining its informational behavior and the premises of the interaction with the technologically interfaced world of art, the user (reader) of the Internet as a medium of expression is, equally, a consumer and a producer of information-content. In this paradigm, the present study specifies the constants of the relationship between art and theology, identifying the conditions of the cultural digestion process mediated by the informational structure of the Internet, accepted as a sovereign technological environment. Relying on the plurality and hybridization of the formats of content, and also on the interactivity and the collaboration as constructive vector-relationships, the internet-art is a natural consequence of the professional artistic practices of integration and creative appropriation of the specific contemporary media.

Bu makalede internet çıkışlı bir alt kültür estetik akımı olan Vaporwave ve bu akımın geçmiş zaman ile olan yakın ilişkisi çeşitli açılardan araştırılacak, sosyoloji, psikanaliz ve sanat tarihi felsefesinden referanslarla temellendirilecektir. Bu araştırma nostalji ve benlik üzerine çalışmış teorisyenler ile popüler kültür ve kapitalizm eleştirileri gibi geniş bir skala üzerinden ilerleyecektir. Nostalji durumunun yaratıcı etkileri saptanacak ve Vaporwave estetiğinin bu yönleri nasıl benzersiz bir form altında toparladığı netleştirilecektir. Vaporwave’in geçmiş zamana yönelik yaratıcı bakışı, benzer pratiklerin kullanıldığı çağdaş sanat alanından iş örnekleri ile karşılaştırılacak, böylece ortak bir estetik yorumlamanın özellikleri saptanacaktır.

This paper examines the use of appropriation in contemporary internet art-postinternet art-in terms of internet technology and web content. The paper suggests that postinternet art reflects our cultural reality through the ubiquity and fluidity of internet services. This results to novel artistic practices that draw on the cultural connections made online by appropriating found web content and internet technology. The paper presents a study of 190 artworks from the ArtBase Rhizome's digital archive between 2010-2015 to provide evidence on how and to what extent postinternet art appropriates the internet.

This paper examines the role of Internet technology as an important factor in the creative processes of art making. The paper’s focus is on digital time, the physical life of internet art and the artist’s choices relating to that. By examining the physical life of internet art, the paper highlights the time-based element of internet art and how internet art essentially unfolds and evolves over time. This raises issues on how internet art is being both preserved and experienced online and how its aesthetic, conceptual and historical identity evolves alongside the technological medium. The paper continues with an examination of the artist’s decision making process relating to the artwork’s digital time conditions from a political point of view. By choosing its present online conditions, artists can manipulate the artwork’s past and future, gaining unprecedented control over the artwork itself. Specific examples of artists are being presented and discussed throughout the paper to provoke and support the paper’s concept of digital time in internet art, as a very important factor that allows us to rethink how art operates within our contemporary conditions.

Learning To Love You More (2002-2009), a creation by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, is a collective and contemporary online artwork piece. In this multimedia website, Fletcher and July gave assignments addressed to the public in general. The audience response was overwhelming and the website is considered a model among collaborative artworks. This paper examines the reasons for the positive reception and audience involvement in the website. The nature of the assignments, the use of creative writing and the community's online expression are taken into consideration. The website's connections to dialogical art and relational aesthetics are also examined. Finally, we assessed intermediality and the manner in which it appears in the assignments, in relationship to the public and as an inherent feature of the project.

In an essay for the catalog of Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age, an exhibition installed most recently at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn, Josephine Bosma announces that the wilderness is back. Though modernity provided the means for humans to sequester themselves safely in comfortable houses, sheltered from nature's seasons and its bad moods, Bosma points out that the boundaries between the indoors and outdoors, between the private and the public, have been broken down by digital technologies. As data slips into our most intimate spaces, the way rain and wind once ripped through primitive shelters like caves and huts, we return to "a rather basic form of humanity"-an uncanny "21st century version of ancient cultures and traditions." Sorting through an "erratic, uneven mess" of information, human beings are once again hunters and gatherers. Yet if hunting and gathering are back in digital form, the foraging is not taking place in a scarce economy. We are not looking across vast space for some edible calories, stalking after evasive prey. Instead, we are flooded with resources in an official archive that grows at almost unfathomable speeds. In his catalog essay, curator of Collect the WWWorld, Domenico Quaranta writes, "Every time we access a web page… the browser memorizes certain data on our computer… whatever we don't deliberately delete, we keep. In the cache era, Nadir / Furtherfield Review 2 / 6 accumulating data is like breathing: involuntary and mechanical. We don't choose what to keep… but what to delete." [2] My Generation, Eva & Franco Mattes, 2010

RESUME
Cette oeuvre d’art web (Net Art), est une performance d’art relationnel où un joueur ou interacteur entre dans un dialogue, par le jeu, avec l’interface. Mon dispositif enligne est accessible sur le site http://www.genevievegilbert.com. Ce jeu-parcours interactif se veut être une expérience sociale à partir de certaines actions de la vie quotidienne.

En explorant ce téléjeu (Chevassu, 1995, p.136), l’interacteur apprend à connaître les participants à des performances filmées pendant trois rituels banals de la vie de tous les jours. Dans un esprit ludique et participatif, l’interacteur peut choisir d’interagir et d’écouter les rencontres entre les trois protagonistes et moi-même. Il côtoie Pascale, Patrick ou Simon et les observe passer par des étapes d'attente, de toilettage et enfin, de rendez-vous : des actions banales qui mènent à un échange souvent drôle, spontané et inattendu. Les participants ont accepté d’être les cobayes de mon investigation sur les processus opératifs du désir dans le quotidien. Au sein du ludiciel, l’interacteur peut choisir dans quel ordre franchir les scènes. Il accumule des points en manipulant
des éléments visuels et sonores, et découvre quelques vignettes vidéo cachées derrière un certain nombre d’artefacts. Il peut donc expérimenter le jeu dans le but d’accumuler des points ou simplement en déambulant de manière exploratoire dans chacun des trois mondes.

Cette oeuvre interactive utilisant les techniques et supports reliés à l’Internet à été précédée de plusieurs prototypes, et testée par des groupes témoins. Un rapport d’enquête a été mené à terme et le public cible de choix se trouve âgé de treize à trente-trois ans.

MOTS-CLEFS: INTERNET, NET ART, WEBART, JEU, LUDICIEL,
COMMUNICATION, INTERACTION, PARTICIPATION, RELATION, ART,PERFORMANCE, THÉÂTRE QUOTIDIEN, MULTIMÉDIA, DESIGN, VIDÉO.

The development of the use of computers and software in art from the Fifties to the present is explained. As general aspects of the history of computer art an interface model and three dominant modes to use computational processes (generative, modular, hypertextual) are presented. The "History of Computer Art" features examples of early developments in media like cybernetic sculptures, computer graphics and animation (including music videos and demos), video and computer games, reactive installations, virtual reality, evolutionary art and net art. The functions of relevant art works are explained more detailed than usual in such histories.  The German version was completed in December 2012. The last chapter of the English translation was published in June 2014. First update: September 2015 (English version as PDF, 16 MB, 384 p., c. 300 ill.: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA.pdf).

This chapter offers an overview and analysis of the virtual art gallery and museum constructed by the Brazilian and internet and digital artist and curator, Regina Célia Pinto. The Museu do Essencial e Além Disso (The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That) displays digital writing and art works by a community of Brazilian and international artists, all engaging with larger global realities brought about by virtual and electronic networks. This is also true of  Pinto's own cyberart, housed in the museum. The chapter focuses more closely on one of these creations, The Great Earth Mother Cyborg, a blog converted into a  'space of poeisis' which takes the trope of the cyborg to  debate narratives of the creative process and the relationship of the human with nature and technology, integrating ideas drawn both from Western science and 'evolution' as depicted through creation narratives - principally those of the Maori - of the Global South.

Wikipedia Art is many things: an open-ended concept, an immanent object, a collaborative text, and a net-work that complicates the very possibility for these distinctions. This chapter most specifically explicates and unfolds the performance of Wikipedia Art as an intervention into, and critical analysis of, Wikipedia: its pages, its system, its volunteers and paid staff. Both the art work and our chapter use and subvert Wikipedia itself – the definitions it puts forward, the discourses engaged by its surrounding community on and off the site, and as a venue/space ripe for intervention. In the chapter, we briefly unpack how the art work speaks back to the structure and performance of Wikipedia, online consensus, the mythologies behind Wikipedia, and Wikimedia’s power more generally.

The aim of the research is to create a software musical instrument that allows for an aware exploration of the self, through self-refection in music. The investigation is interdisciplinary and operates across the fields of musicology, software development and composition. The study focuses on specific logics of compatibility between human agents and technology. These are then implemented, at the design stage, in a software tool. Finally, the piece of software is tested within art projects to validate the implementations or to correct the theoretical assumptions and, therefore, to further improve the framework. This software musical instrument is VIVO (Video Interactive VST Orchestra). This paper illustrates the main features of VIVO, the theories behind the implementations and the evidence that was gathered from tests within two specific art projects.