Net art (or Internet art) describes work made in the 1990s through the early 2000s that uses the Internet as a primary medium. With the popularization of web browsing in the 1990s, artists began to circumvent traditional modes of display in institutional art settings by creating interactive, interconnected viewing experiences. Often used interchangeably with “new media art”, net art includes a wide range of works created by artists using web browsers, developer codes, scripts, search engines, and various other online tools.
The History
The result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term—“net.art”—which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities.The above image is acutally one of Cosic's pieces- the beginning of internet porn!
History Continued...
Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts and images, referring to and merging into one another; it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another’s interest through ongoing dialogue. Net.art meant online détournements, discourse instead of singular texts or images, defined more by links, e-mails, and exchanges than by any “optical” aesthetic.
What is ASCII?
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages.
Net Artist- Jodi (Art Collective)
Jodi, is a collective of two internet artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, created in 1994. They were some of the first artists to create Web art and later started to create software art and artistic computer game modification. They are noted for their inticate html net.art website "jodi"
Net Artist- Vuk Ćosić
As mentioned before he is one of the pioneers of net art. His work is well known in the field of net.art because of this. His work is characterized by a mix of philosophical, political, conceptual network-related issues and underground aesthetics.
Net Artist- Olia Lialina
From regions of the former U.S.S.R., where the rise of Internet access and the fall of the Soviet Union coincided almost perfectly and the freewheeling nature of early Web communities proved to be especially attractive to those who had been living under repressive regimes. Lialina’s 1996 piece My Boyfriend Came Back From the War is a browser-based, hyperlinked “netfilm” (to use her preferred term) that tells the fictional story of an unnamed beau returning from an unspecified conflict, with black and white images and simple bits of text. One of her most recognized pieces. "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War"
Final Thoughts
I believe that Net.Art is an interesting medium that I had actually never heard of before this class. After researching it further I believe it has been influencial and essential in pushing digital art forward. I love the aethetic of the 90s ASCII art and made a piece on this website here.
