(2005) Net.Art is Dead

Net.art is dead, long live net.art!
Within Impakt Online, Impakt promotes and supports net.art projects that use the technology and characteristics of the internet to explore the potential of the world wide web as a platform for art. Impakt supports and commissions several net.art projects that address the same topic. These projects are then launched to remain online for one year. The topic for this launch is "Net.art is dead, long live net.art".

“Forms of media that have originated in the past one hundred years have appeared to abide by a kind of "thirty-year rule" of development, starting with the invention of a medium and ending with its effective operation and widespread appearance in culture at large.” Alex Galloway

If we take a good look at net.art, we see the ‘thirty year rule’ doesn’t apply anymore. Ten years after the emergence of net.art, this artform looks like it’s on it’s way back. Net.art pioneers exchanged the internet for other other media, ranging from game (de)constructions to GPS systems and offline worlds. Still technological, social and political structures are subject to research, but it seems the revolutionary elan of the past has faded. Are the current net.artists reinventing the wheel or did net.art developed, expanded and moved into new areas ?

Net.art pioneers were especially interested in fundamental criteria of this new medium, and it’s formal aspects. Together the networked structure, binairy code language and endless virtual space formed an inspiration for some years. Also, artists focussed on the function of the internet as a social or activist medium, involving interesting experiments in new languages (hypertext) which led to new ways of interaction (virtual global culture) and eventually led to new artforms such as software art, browser art and database art. These approaches now are part of the common vocabulary of this medium.

During the dot.com generation net.art works mainly focussed on the hyperreal universe of the net. This virtuality apparently offered multiple possibilities to take on new identities (through VR and avatars), develop push-button art and develop worldwide networks that brought McLuhans utopian vision of a global village closer. Net.art also became a transcendent fusion of man and machine which would eventually be capable of downloading our consciousness into a computer, thus living on as pure information, free of the limitations of our vulnerable bodies.

Nowadays net.artists work more from the notion that virtuality “is not about living in an immaterial realm of information, but about the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated with informational patterns." The thought behind this is that we are living in surroundings that are increasingly filled with intelligent systems that gather, process and send information. Human development cannot be seen as a separate process from this technological development. The humans in question can be regarded as what Katherine Hayles calls “posthuman”: “an emergent phenomenon created in dynamic interaction with the ungraspable flux from which also emerge the cognitive agents we call intelligent machines.” The ongoing insights in the chaos theory, artificial intelligence and neurobiology discuss the controlled, computerized society and replace this with systems that are self-organized, nonlinear and dynamic, creating complex patterns from simple basic rules mergence).

Net.art reacts to this dynamic world of information. This means the focus has moved from virtuality and immateriality to relations between informationsystems and the material reality.
This creates a diversity in symbiotic relationships between people and the information technology they use. Net.art is being used to investigate these relations by defining the context of the location, discovering hidden mythologies and describe the personal relationship to the location (located media, derive , psychogeografie).
Deconstructions of information systems break out of the limitaions of the terminal. Pervasive gaming (games that have a part in reality) expands the scope to fit in the entire physical world.

These experiments prove net.art is not yet dead, but only shifted it’s focus of attention. Recent developments call for some urgent questions though: what is the added value of the internet in existing artdisciplines when these are more and more engaging in a symbiosis ? Is the combination of on- and offline worlds really a new artform, and do new problems rise? Are these developments changing the idea of internet artworks, or can we suffice with the name ‘internet art’ incorporating netwerk art, computer art, mobile art, located media etc?

Impakt poses these questions by supporting a new series of artoprojects that investigate these new developments in net.art. Impakt also stimulates the cooperation between artists with a history of internet projects that are willing to collaborate with artists who are involved in similar works in the offline world.


Time Based Text
Jaromil (works)
Time Based Text can be considered software art, but above all it is a new form of digital poetics. Time Based Text offers a creative, experimental, joyful ...

 

 

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