Week 11 – Response to Web Work: A History of Net Art – Milly Cai

In this article, Greene introduces the history of internet art to us. By listing many organizations and individual artists, he tries to form up a basic picture of how the art integrated into the medium of internet and the procedure that the expressions of art concept changed since the very beginning of the internet art. 

One interesting perspective about internet art is that this new medium of art creates a stronger connection between art and social and political tensions. For example, the cyberfeminism, which does remind me that the net artwork does provide a chance to a new way of artistic experiment with “internet tools and space” (166). Besides, I’m also curious about how it has happened on the website: if this art is produced partly because of the special medium internet. In addition, like the filmmaker Cheang’s projects on the topics of technology and access in Asia and a website on the life of Brandon for the Guggenheim, which apparently shows that internet art is powerful to create a dialogue around prevalent social, cultural, and even political issues. Though traditional art could also approach this goal, however, none of them could be as interactive and persuasive as this one.

But, internet art does not always mean good. Just like Greene said, “the internet began to take off when the exhausted, commercially exploited art culture had soared in the 80s” (163). There is a concern that the internet would soon be someday be “colonized by mainstream media and the corporate juggernaut” (165). Internet art might end up with the unavoidable fate of commercialization. Besides, from my previous reading related to digital design, people are also questioning the relationship between art and computer. How much does the computer take part in the art creating process? Is that still art or just some generated data from the machine. I think this is still a question we need to think about. Where the balance point between technology and art is, for many of the net art examples do seem to be far different from the art we would feel and understand.

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