Internet Art - Forms and Presentation

Forms and Presentation

Internet art can be created in a variety of media: through websites; e-mail projects; Internet-based original software projects (sometimes involving games); Internet-linked networked installations; interactive and/or streaming video, audio, or radio works; and networked performances (using multi-user domains, virtual worlds such as Second Life, chat rooms, and other networked environments). It can also include completely offline events, like Alexei Shulgin's 1997 Vienna performance, Real Cyberknowledge for Real People. Shulgin printed out copies of 'Beauty and the East' / ZKP4, published online by the mailing list nettime, and handed the booklets out to passers-by on the streets of Vienna. Internet art overlaps with other computer-based art forms such as new media art, electronic art, software art, digital art, telematic art and generative art.

The terms Internet art, net-based art, net art, Net.art, Web art, and even networked art have all been used to classify this type of work. However, the term networked art has a history of usage for artworks that were connected through closed networks before the Internet's popularization and commercialization in the early 1990s, such as many Telematic art projects. Net.art (pronounced "Net-dot-art") was a more popular term in the 1990s, often referring to some of the first net artists who were critiquing the structures of the Internet.

Critic Rachel Greene states that the term originated "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." Greene lists several artists as early experimenters of the form: Vuk Ćosić, Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Shu Lea Cheang, VNS Matrix and Olia Lialina. In her book Internet Art, Green places the inception of Internet art after 1993, with the popularization of graphical web browsing.

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