I would have never expected “art” to be a thing of the Internet as early as December 1995. I know that sounds strange, but my previous background knowledge on anything Internet related would support my claim. JavaScript, the language that backs the functionality of the internet’s UI/UX came out on December 4th 1995. This was almost at the exact same time that Vuk Cosic received that spam email with the phrase net.art. Secondly, my understanding was that the very early internet was primarily used by governments, intelligence agencies (Hi ARPANET) and by a select number of universities for academic reasons.
However, it seems that I couldn’t have been any more wrong. But then again, my perception of what constitutes to “art” might have been restricted to a very narrow domain of content.
One of the most striking features of internet art (and the internet in a broader sense) is its ability to bring people together from different backgrounds and cultures to collaborate and create new and exciting pieces of work that would have otherwise not been possible. Once such example was the “Net.Art Per Se” conference in Italy in 1996 where a group of net.artists met up. Another important feature of the internet is the fact that it gave underrepresented groups and minor artists a platform to share their work and make their voice heard. Many female artists such as Rachel Baker, Beth Stryker, Josephine Bosma, amongst many others, were able to garner a commendable audience through the work that they published on the Internet. But, above all, the key feature of the Internet is the fact that it is ungoverned and there is no central entity that controls what goes on it. The democratization of a medium is what allows individual freedom and autonomy, and this is a feature of the World Wide Web that every single individual should fight to protect.