There are several terms in common usage that can describe artistic practice on the internet. Net art itself is a branch of digital art that involves the internet in the creation of art work. It can also be included under the banner of new media art, or more recently, media art. There are other frequently used terms including net.art (with a full stop between the “net” and “art”), netart, web art, internet art and browser art. As previously highlighted in Chapter 1, these terms originate from a variety of sources and whilst they are often used interchangeably, there are some differences between them.
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Firstly, the term “net.art” was used to describe all net art but has more commonly become used to describe a particular time, 1994 – 1999, and is associated more with specific artists. Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Natalie Bookchin and Heath Bunting, to name some of the more prominent practitioners at the time. The term “net.art” was purported by Alexei Shulgin to be an accident. He claimed that Vuk Ćosić coined the term after he received an anonymous email which had been corrupted, leaving only a mass of undecipherable characters with the only readable term being
“net.art”. This story has been quoted many times in various formats over the years (see Greene 2004:55) but has recently been denied by Ćosić himself. In an interview with Régine Debatty on the site, We Make Money Not Art42, he states that it was Pit Shultz who coined the term in 1995 and that “Alexei Shulgin told that silly story about me for fun” (Debatty 2006). He goes on to say “…that e-mail is still the most frequently referenced work of net.art”
(Debatty 2006).
The group of net.artists did not consciously band together as a group, it was more that a sense of propinquity developed through their mutual working environment, as Greene remarks:
Vuk Ćosić knew critic Josephine Bosma; Bosma knew Olia Lialina:
Lialina knew and had collaborated with Heath Bunting. Colleagues,
42 We Make Money Not Art is a popular arts blog that focuses on the intersection between art, science and social issues. The site can be accessed here http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/
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regardless of their opinions or behaviour, were just an email away, and likely to be seen at a festival in the near future.
(Greene 2004:129)
The term net.art is now almost exclusively used to describe this early period in net art history.
The actual demarcation of the term “net.art” as a historical notion did not occur overnight, taking several years and prominent theorists, critics, artists and curators to inform us of its diachronic status. Tilman Baumgärtel
suggested the era was at an end as early as 1998, he remarks that “The first formative period of net culture seems to be over” (1998a). Ironically, despite the reluctance of galleries and institutions to include net art, institutional
acceptance is cited as one of the reasons why many began to consider net.art redundant. Around the turn of the century some institutions began to
incorporate net art into collections and exhibitions. Amongst others, ZKM43 hosted “net_condition” an exhibition of net art in 1999, Tate Britain and Tate Modern began commissioning net art, Whitney Museum included net art in their 2000 Biennial, and the Guggenheim commissioned net art pieces.
Patrick Litchy states whilst performing a Q&A session in 2002 that net.art was
“dead” (Litchy 2004:1), however, he later clarifies this by suggesting that due to institutional acceptance the genre “has been chiseled into art history and so has been drained of its dynamism (sic)” (Litchy 2004:1). Huber also implies the historical relegation of the term “net.art”:
43 The Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany is a New Media interdisciplinary research institution. See here for more information: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/
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We can already regard net.art as a very special, extremely limited, historical artistic movement that took place during the second half of the 1990s.
(Huber 2002)
The artist Cory Arcangel concurs with the above by commenting in the New York Times that “Internet art’s golden age pretty much seems to be dead”
(Sisario 2004). The language used to describe net.art often lionises this
period, “golden age” (Sisario 2004) and “very special” (Huber 2002). However, not everyone looks upon this time as the apotheosis of net art. The artist Rafaël Rozendaal says of net.art:
its all very boring stuff, that somehow defined art online. to me its very flat and obvious work, making your browser crash, converting movies into ascii files, not exciting at all (sic).
(R. Rozendaal. Email. 27 July 2007 17:34)
To suggest there is no longer any excitement or dynamism with internet art is to belie the framework it exists on. The internet itself is expanding; the
possibilities and technologies are becoming increasingly broad, as are the possibilities for producing art. The author and programmer Alex Galloway brings the whole issue of the end of the net.art period into perspective:
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As computers and bandwidth improve, the primary physical reality that governed the aesthetic space of net.art begins to fall away
(Galloway 1999)
Galloway clearly highlights the idea that it is not internet art itself which is moribund, but the art form that was previously known as net.art. Ultimately, he suggests here that there was a definite look and feel to this early work, which by the very nature of the technological advances occurring, is no longer, or becoming increasingly less observed. Due to “net.art’s” historical
connotations, the term “net art” has become dominant throughout the
community. “Internet art” and “netart” are also used as variations of “net art”
and can be seen as direct synonyms.
“Browser Art” is another term with a distinct meaning which the Tate Online Glossary defines as art that transforms “the structure of the websites and the links between servers into visual material”44. This essentially refers to the practice of rendering the HTML of web pages in a particular non standard way through the creation of a bespoke browser. “WebStalker” (I/O/D 1997) is a classic example of the manifestation of “browser art” which saw the creation of a custom built web browser that creates an unusual map like interface of the links found on a page. The Tate Online glossary also suggests that
“browser art” is a “sub-genre of Net art”45. It is also possible to use the term
“browser art” to be suggestive of works that appear within the browser frame, in this sense the term is applicable to the vast majority of net art.
44 See http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=577 for the Tate Online definition of Browser Art
45 Ibid.
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Technically, using the term “web art” (see Tisma 2002) has its own distinct meaning. It is common practice to use the terms “world wide web” (or WWW) and the “internet” interchangeably, however, there is a difference between these two terms. Essentially, the “internet” refers to the physical structure of the connected hardware, including computers, wires, servers and so on. It is the physical network of computers. The WWW on the other hand, refers to a method of accessing the data kept on these computers or devices, which it does via the HTTP protocol46. Prior to the WWW there were other protocols that facilitated this, Telnet, for example. Email protocols (SMTP47) are also not part of the WWW (which gives us another form or sub-genre of net art, “email art”). Therefore, “web art” strictly refers to art works that make use of the WWW and would not include email (SMTP), FTP48, Instant Messengers and other methods of accessing information over the internet that are not part of the World Wide Web.
Despite there being several terms with their own distinct meanings, these are all used interchangeably to describe net art. Unless clearly stated to be
referring to the idiosyncratic version of the term, they can be used to describe net art as a whole.
46 A protocol is a format or set of instructions that determine how data is to be transmitted between connected devices.
47 SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is used for sending emails between servers
48 FTP or File Transfer Protocol is used to exchange files over the internet, often used to upload web pages to a server.
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