Written by Racheal Greene, “Web Work: History of Net Art” explores the meaning behind internet art. It starts with how it become to be. At first, I don’t understand why Greene mentions that “The term ‘net.art’ is less a coinage than an accident” (162). However, when I continued reading it further explain this statement. Net art wasn’t made purposefully as an artistic behavior. It did not start from artists wanting to create net art. But rather, people see what was created and thus give those online arts and communication a term such as ‘net art’.
Net art has distinct characteristics that make it differ from traditional art. First of all, it is in completely new media, the internet. Secondly, net art is not like traditional art because it does require interactions among artists and viewers. Why net art is so successful is because it is meant for interactions, “it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critiques trading ideas, sustaining one another’s interest through ongoing dialogue” (126). Without interactions between the web and the audience, net art could barely exist. Some examples of net arts are videos, games, comics, and etc that are posed through the webpage.
From the article, I realized that the internet does play a huge role in the advancement of the net arts. Without the development of the internet, the net art movement would not be this rapid. In addition, the advancement of technologies will also provide net arts with more opportunity to expand their type of arts. For instance, I could picture that before it might be constrained to only comics that are posted on the internet but when the technologies develop something else evolve such as videos games. Since we are strictly putting ourselves in the era of the internet, as the internet progresses, net art would definitely progress as well.
Before Professor Chen introduce us to the idea of ‘net art’, I have no idea what it is and what is considered as ‘net art’. From reading this writing and also doing my own research on net art, I found that I have been interacting with net art a lot but it is only that I don’t know that it is defined as net art. Therefore, I am looking forward to the new kinds of net art that will evolve.