Category: Cici Liu

Rachel Greene discusses web art from the very beginning of its age and gives an example of an image of what old net art used to look like. Seeing its raw form in a pixelated manner really shows how far internet art has come since it first made an appearance in December 1995. Net art created a new community of artists to form and  communicate with each other in a manner that combined typical art into a multimedia platform. 

What was most interesting to me was the impact that net art had after the neo-liberal movement, allowing people to artistically express their feelings on a much larger scale, which is on the internet, allowing anyone from around the world to have the chance to see one’s story and art. Internet art is easily shareable and accessible to anyone around the world, and is able to be seen and shared in the blink of an eye. 

The presence of net art is very significant to me because it allows people to create any art form they want on a platform with no boundaries. Having art being created on the internet serves another purpose for the computer or any electronic device that proves that these tools are not just tools used for information or searching databases. It allows people to interact with their art in their own way, creating a personal and fun way for others to interpret others’ creation while making it their own. It is crazy to think that internet art started out with something with such little detail and with just a few pixels. Internet art grows with the ever growing rate of the advancement of the internet, improving and outdoing itself every decade. 

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. 

Web Work is a work written by  Rachel Greene which explains the history of art on the internet and the term net.art. It explores the illustrious history of the many pieces which affected art on the internet today.  Rachel gives many examples of important pieces of net art such as Buy One Get One and Jodi.Org. This piece inspired me to look into older pieces of internet artwork which gave me ideas for my own project. Just like looking at older paintings can help modern artists develop their own art style, I believe that reliving older pieces of internet art can help me develop my own web art style as well. 

Upon reading Rachel Greene’s article on net.art, I knew very little the type of art that is distinctively born on the internet- the type that lives and thrives off the interaction that the internet allows. Although these internet art conceptions are no longer in their developing stages, I still have not grouped these new-media art types into their own category. In other words, when net.art is mentioned, nothing popped up in my mind that is conclusively clear or concrete. However, I read Greene’s exposition on the history: “This [email] 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” (162). This introduction made two things clear to me. One, internet art has existed earlier than my birth year of 1998, which means that it has been around for a while now. Two, the collective goal and ideal to uphold communication among the community of internet artists through email must have been very significant and unparalleled to how communication was delivered and received throughout other art periods.
The passage that stuck out to me the most in this article was the on Name.Space, which was a project that intended to give more freedom in domain names so that corporations or individuals will not monopolize Web addresses. This stood out to me because I was concerned about how can companies and individuals handle the medium that is the web. In a way, the web is like a public space, which means that we are responsible for how we conduct ourselves on it, especially if we choose to be net.artists.