Internet Art - History and Context

History and Context

Internet art is rooted in disparate artistic traditions and movements, ranging from Dada to Situationism, conceptual art, Fluxus, video art, kinetic art performance art, telematic art and happenings.

As the art form develops, its historical context is continually re-evaluated. Amsterdam-based critic Josephine Bosma defines Internet art as having "five generations", where the first generation of artists did not work with the Internet proper, but with electronic interconnectivity—precursors to the Internet, such as fax, slow scan television and videotex. These earlier forms are often defined more broadly as Networked art.

An early telematic artwork was Roy Ascott's work, La Plissure du Texte, performed in collaboration created for an exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, using a closed-network of invited artists on the ARTEX network. Media art institutions such as Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, or the Paris-based IRCAM (a research center for electronic music), would also support or present early Networked art. In 1974, Canadian artist Vera Frenkel worked with the Bell Canada Teleconferencing Studios to produce the work String Games, the first artwork from Canada to use telecommunications technologies.

However, as Greene and others note, with spread of the desktop computer in the 1980s and the advent of the Web in the 1990s, a much broader spectrum of artists entered the field, often completely independent from art institutions—and often purposely at odds with institutional culture.

Between 1994 to 2000, several public venues formed to archive, disseminate and promote Internet art. Key organizations included SITO; The Thing; Adaweb, directed by Benjamin Weil; Alt-X, founded by artist Mark Amerika; Rhizome, initiated by artist and curator Mark Tribe; and FILE Electronic Language International Festival, founded by artists Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto.

With the rise of search engines as a gateway to accessing the web in the late 1990s, many net artists turned their attention to related themes. The 2001 'Data Dynamics' exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art featured 'Netomat' (Maciej Wisniewski) and 'Apartment' (Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg, which used search queries as raw material. Mary Flanagan's 'The Perpetual Bed' received attention for its novel use of 3D nonlinear narrative space, or what she called "navigable narratives." Her 2001 work in the Whitney Biennial, 'collection' collected items from hard drives around the world and displayed them in a 'computational collective unconscious.' Golan Levin's 'The Secret Lives of Numbers' (2000) visualized the "popularity" of the numbers 1 to 1,000,000 as measured by Alta Vista search results. Such works pointed to alternative interfaces and questioned the dominant role of search engines in controlling access to the net.

Nevertheless, the Internet is not reducible to the web, nor to search engines. Besides these unicast (point to point) applications, suggesting that there is some reference points, there is also a multicast (multipoint and acentered) internet that has been explored by very few artistic experiences, such as the Poietic Generator.

The emergence of social networking platforms, understood to be “web-based services that allow individuals to… construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system… articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and… view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system,” facilitated a transformative shift in the distribution of internet art. Early online communities were organized around specific “topical hierarchies,” whereas social networking platforms consist of egocentric networks, with the “individual at the center of their own community.” Artistic communities on the Internet underwent a similar transition in the mid-2000s, shifting from Surf Clubs, “15 to 30 person groups whose members contributed to an ongoing visual-conceptual conversation through the use of digital media” and whose membership was restricted to a select group of individuals, to image-based social networking platforms, like Flickr, which permit access to any individual with an e-mail address. Internet artists make extensive use of the networked capabilities of social networking platforms, and are rhizomatic in their organization, in that “production of meaning is externally contingent on a network of other artists’ content.”