It’s interesting that from the beginning Net Art had a few distinct ideas that only could have existed via the net. They seem obvious now but must have been very exciting back in the early 90s. The first being that net artists had access to each other, anywhere in the world, at any time and immediately! This is so completely different than any collectives or movements that have come before. The other thing completely unique to Net Art was how easily they could go under the radar. Since the whole world wasn’t on the internet yet, they could be free of the art world and any bureaucracy that went with it. I can’t imagine how freeing and amazing that must have felt, considering everything we do now online seems to be closely watched and linked to making money. The comparison made to Warhol’s factory is an interesting one because it talks about how people as well as what they do were crucial to the movement. I feel like now it has turned just into individual identities on the internet and is not at all related to what you do but who you are as evidenced in your profile on various social media sites. I’d like to go back to a time where content was just as valuable as your face.
A project I really loved from the article was the King’s Cross Phone-In organized by Heath Bunting. I thought it was cheeky and fun, and at the heart of it had the idea of connecting people together with no other real agenda. Since these early art sites did not generate money, the content they provided was purely from a passionate place and I appreciate this more and more when it seems like everything online is for sale now.
Another interesting “piece” that I had never heard about before is Heritage Gold software. The software, based on Adobe photoshop, allows you to change your photos in a loaded way. You can apparently use the Heritage Gold software to modify or change race, to enlarge or shrink features, etc. This software reminded me of the article Program or be programmed in which Rushkoff was urging people to understand and exploit the biases of technology and not just ignore them. Heritage Gold exposes some biases of editing programs and offers a comment on them. Brilliant!
There is no date on this article but since everything is pre 2000 I can imagine it’s over ten years old at this point. While it was very interesting, it left me wanting to know more about net art post 2000! After all, things only became more commercial on the net. I’m curious to whether art got less “manifesto-y” and more personal, or people became uninterested in learning the necessary software to even participate in this kind of art.
After reading the article on DevArt, some of my previous questions were answered. Written this year, it discusses a two month long exhibition called Digital Revolution, encompassing the last 40 years of technology's effect on art.
What’s really great about this exhibition, besides being a comprehensive review of digital art, is that it appears to be completely interactive. It’s not often that people go to a gallery and are able to “touch” the art but in this show, you are supposed to. All three of the large-scale artworks by the most talented digital artists contain interactivity in which the visitors supply information to inform the final piece. In no other traditional art show are you allowed to do that. I can’t even imagine going to the Louvre and drawing on a painting to make a new piece altogether. In fact, in the traditional art world of “fine-arts”: ie, painting, ceramics, sculpture, you are nearly always a certain stance away from the art. And you can get in serious trouble for touching art and even more trouble for modifying it. Not so with this exhibition.
In fact, there is even more interactivity than just being able to supply the artists there with content. Google is having a competition to feature a piece next to the major artists inthe show and feature on a website they are developing for this purpose. They link users toa popular coding website and from there, apparently regardless of experience, anybody can get started making digital art and submitting it. If we want to get more people involved in the process of coding, I think the incentive of showing in a huge exhibition is a good one. But I still wonder about the rest of the population. If I had not read this article, I wouldn’t have known about this exhibition, and I consider myself pretty tech-savvy and interested in the art world. There is going to need to be even more awareness about coding for the future of our own benefit and not just to win a prize and be featured out there in the world, and I still don’t know what is going to cause that awareness.
Back Home