Greene guides us through the history of internet art in his article. By introducing several organizations and artists, I can get a rough image of how the art is flourished in the medium of internet and how different artistic ideas are expressed at the very beginning of the internet era.
One interesting perspective is to put the development of the internet in the context of the development of different mediums. As Greene said, it is when “the exhausted, commercially exploited art culture had soared in the 80s” that the internet began to take off (163). And later, in the world of internet art, there was a growing concern that “the internet would soon be colonized by mainstream media and the corporate juggernaut” (165). Looking at the 1980s, the appearance of the internet seems to offer a way to escape from the previous art culture and refresh the art world. But when taking into account what happened in the following decades, it seems that internet art may also fall in the inevitable fate of “traditional art” being commercialized and controlled.
Going back to the content carried by the medium of the internet, the net artwork does provide a chance to experiment with internet tools and space. I’m impressed to read the example of cyberfeminism and I’m also curious about the reason why it has happened on the website. Is it related to the uniqueness of the medium (internet)? Or is it because of their assumptions of the internet as the place where gender equality is highly facilitated or the opposite?
With the development of technology, net art is also experiencing rapid evolution. In two decades we can see tremendous changes happening on the net artworks, at least from my perspective. Though so far I only know limited net artwork, I can feel that now the technique enables more interactions between the web and the audience and between different art forms, for example, introducing video, audio, and game to the interaction on the web.