Week 11: A Response to a History of Net Art – Hannah

Reading this article I was struck by the novelty surrounding the net in its early art work. Many projects, which I suppose is true also of today, center around the idea of connectivity on the web. I especially liked the idea of Kings-Cross Phone In because it takes the connectivity of the web and applies it outside of it. Much of the web art, such as the cyberfeminist manifesto and the web art piece I viewed last week (http://www.no-limit.org)  also used strong language against the status quo, suggesting a sort of revolutionary changing-the-future mindset enabled by the web. The prevalence of anti-capitalist rhetoric also surprised me, since I presumed net art to be relatively unpolitical like many other forms of art or spaces on the web (not that these can’t also be political). The article show-cased the way in which we view the web as a vector for spreading an idea and a mission to a greater extent than I had realized before. Personally I view the value of the web to be more for providing information of a less biased nature than for persuading people of an idea, and I wonder how in the coming years the use of the web will change. Will the culture of web art become more casual or light, or will more sinister? And how does the web evoke different ideas of use from its artists? Or the time period require a different usage of the web?

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