CategoriesStyles and Movements
Net Art
Art made for the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s, using browsers, code, email and online networks as both material and venue.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Net Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Artists began treating the web as a medium as soon as graphical browsers reached the public. The tongue-in-cheek label net.art circulated among a loose, mostly European circle including Vuk Ćosić, Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting, whose work lived in the browser, open to anyone with a modem. Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) told a fractured story through nested frames, and JODI, the duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, turned broken code and blinking HTML into material.
Much of this work is hard to see as first made. It depended on particular browsers, plug-ins and servers, so dead links and discontinued software have made preservation a discipline of its own, championed by Rhizome in New York. Later artists carried the approach into social media and animated GIFs: Eva and Franco Mattes opened their own computer to the public, and Lorna Mills builds dense, looping GIF compositions.
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