Web Work: A HISTORY OF INTERNET ART

ArtForum, May, 2000 by Rachel Greene

THE TERM "NET.ART" is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term--"net.art"--which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts and images, referring to and merging into one another; it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another's interest through ongoing dialogue. Net.art meant online detournements, discourse instead of singular texts or images, defined more by links, e-mails, and exchanges than by any "optical" aesthetic. Whatever images of net.art projects grace these pages, beware that, seen out of their native HTML, out of their networked, social habitats, they are the net.art equivalents of animals in zoos.

From the very beginning, net.artists had grand ambitions. For much of net.art's brief history, its practitioners have been self-consciously staking out their collective goals and ideals, exploiting the characteristics peculiar to the Internet, like immediacy and immateriality. E-mail, the dominant mode of communication among and within net.art communities, enabled anyone who was wired to communicate on equal ground, across international boundaries, instantaneously, every day. This was of paramount importance to those talking about net.art in the mid-and late '90s. Building an equitable community in which art was conspicuously present in one's everyday activities was a collective goal.

In the years between 1994 and 1998, when many of the extant art-oriented communities formed, the Internet allowed net.artists to work and talk independently of any bureaucracy or art-world institution without being marginalized or deprived of community. The online atmosphere was lively and gregarious, and there was an eager audience for net.art, including the subscribers to mailing lists like Rhizome (www.rhizome.org), one of the first sites dedicated to new-media art; Syndicate (www.v2.nl/syndicate), a list focused on Eastern European politics and culture; and Nettime (www.nettime.org), a politically and theoretically oriented platform that has been important to many in the technoculture intelligentsia.

Not unlike the Surrealists and Situationists, net.artists had from the beginning a penchant for publishing manifestos and firing off polemics-- which were often made available through publications such as Nettime's ZKP Series (www. nettime.org/pub.html) and Read_me (which refers to the instructions one consults after installing software); an anthology of writings posted on the latter site was published last year as ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. Perhaps much of the energy being poured into art and communications was released by the broad political changes taking place in Europe in the mid-'9os, just as net.art was beginning to take shape.

While the Internet has recently become dominated by American corporations, Europe--especially Eastern Europe--and Russia were crucial to its early years as an artistic medium (just as the military and the academy were critical to its early years as a communications tool). The birth and development of "civil society" (read "post-Communist and neo-liberal") in Eastern Europe during the early and mid-'9os was characterized by media openness and pluralistic politics. During this period, for Eastern European artists and new-media types, the Internet had a utopian halo. George Soros's Open Society Institute and other NGOs had funded media centers--such as Ljudmila in Ljubljana, Slovenia, an Open Society initiative where Vuk Cosic still works--and software and computer education programs, making it relatively easy for motivated enthusiasts to participate in the brave new world of international communications. As Eastern European markets opened up to the West, media centers and the technology they espoused were ofte n held up as proof positive of political and cultural reform and international collaboration.

In 1994, the Internet was still comparatively uncluttered. Populated largely by homepages flaunting hobbies and personal histories, advertising technology companies, or promoting online communities of all stripes, the Net was far removed from the asceticism of white-cube galleries or the high ironies of neo-Conceptualism. Indeed, the exhausted, commercially exploited art culture that had soared in the '80s and crashed in the early '90s was in recovery when the Internet began to take off. Very few people associated with art-world institutions were logged on at that time.

In 1994 and 1995, small cadres of leftist intellectuals, tech whizzes, subversives, and artists had begun congregating at online nodes like The Thing, Echo, Nettime, and The Well. Mailing lists and the BBS (bulletin board system) were more than structures for distribution and promotion: They were simultaneously content and community. Like Andy Warhol's Factory, the people as well as the methods of production and distribution were all part of the project's meaning.