SM2263 > class 05 > net.art Natalie Bookchin made a timeline (1994 – 2000) of Net Art in...

SM2263 > class 05 > net.art

Natalie Bookchin made a timeline (1994 – 2000) of Net Art in

http://www.calarts.edu/~line/history.html


Martin Wattenberg made an Idea Line (1993 – 2001) of Net Art in Whitney

Artport.

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/idealine.shtml


What has happened over the years from 1990 – 2000?



The thing we called Net Art.



The thing we called Net Art.

What is the difference between Net Art and Net.Art?


The origin of Net.Art

In December 1995, an artist, Vuk Cosic got an email. Because of the

incompatible software, the text appeared to be unreadable. The only fragment

that he can make sense of is:

[…] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 […]


The origin of Net.Art

After a few months, with the help from Igor Markovic, Vuk Cosic managed to

decode the message.

[…] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 […]

All this becomes possible only with emergence of the Net. Art as a notion

becomes obsolete …


The term Net.Art has then been widely used by those artists creating medium

specific artworks in the Internet in that period.




A significant number of them are from Eastern Europe and Russia.




A significant number of them are from Eastern Europe and Russia.

Open Society Institute – Soros Foundations Network


CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council

for Nuclear Research, is a provisional body founded in 1952 with the mandate

of establishing a world-class fundamental physics research organization in

Europe.

How is it related to Net.art?


The first proposal for the WWW was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in

1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990.


The first International Conference on the World Wide Web was held in CERN,

Switzerland in 1994.

Awards are granted to a number of ‘good’ websites. No category for art was

offered at that moment.


National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), in 1993, released

Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Projects/mosaic.html

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Projects/mosaic.html


The first net art symposia was held in Graz, Austria, OnLine: Kunst im Netz,

organized by Robert Adrian X and Gerfried Stocker in 1993.

In 1995, Ars Electronica had the theme, Mythos Information: Welcome to the

Wired World.


• Net art has always been a tactical one.

• It doesn’t simply mean using browsers and HTML, but instead is an

aesthetic defined by its oppositional position vs. previous, often inadequate,

forms of cultural production.

• The greatest struggle of Internet art has been to prove its autonomy as an

artistic practice – in the same way that video longed to be different from TV.

• Medium specific – the Net.

• Medium is the message.

• Ask not what the content is. Ask how and why to do it.


Features

•Formation of communities

•Collaboration

•Privileging communication

•Process based action

•Play & performance

•Expansion of real life network

•Vanishing boundaries between private & public


Some properties

• Connectivity

• Global

• Multimedia

• Immaterial

• Interactive


Formation of a number of mailing lists.

• Nettime

• Syndicate

• 7-11

• Rhizome


Formation of a number of web based art initiatives.

• C-Theory

• Adaweb

• The Thing

• Public netbase

• Internationale Stadt

• The DIA Center

• Telepolis

• Metamute


The case of Hell.com

Remember the group 0100101110101101.ORG? In 1999, they copied the

whole websites of a number of web art organizations, jodi.org,

art.teleportacia.org and hell.com.

Hell.com, a portal for web designers, immediately threatens with an

international lawsuit for copyright violation.

http://0100101110101101.org/home/copies/index.html


The case of CNN Interactive

Net.art per se with Vuk Cosic in 1996 – a serious engagement with popular

media, a belief in parody and appropriation, a scepticism towards commodified

media information and a sense of the interplay of art and life.


The case of Documenta X

In 1997, the management of a world wide famous German art event,

Documenta, decided to remove its website from public access. A Slovenian

artist, Vuk Cosic, copied the whole website and hosted it somewhere else for

public access.


VNS Matrix

Cyberfeminism – describes position of women in technological disciplines and

labour; addresses women’s experiences of technoculture; comments on the

gendering of technologies.


VNS Matrix

VNS Matrix emerged from the cyber-swamp during a Southern Australian

Summer circa 1991...

• The impetus of the group is to investigate and decipher the narratives of

domination and control which surround high technological culture, and

explore the construction of social space, identity and sexuality in

cyberspace.

• They believe that by hijacking the tools of domination and control those

groups which have been traditionally alienated from high technologies by

virtue of class, race or gender can introduce a rupture into a highly

systematised culture.


VNS Matrix Manifesto


Old Boys Network


Cornelia Sollfrank

In the artwork Female Extension, Sollfrank submitted to a Net.Art

competition called Extension, by the Hamburg Art Museum with

faked female name and information. She wrote a software to

randomly generate text and images from existing websites.

The organizer announced that 2/3 of the submissions came from

female but none of 3 prizes were awarded to female participants.

It is the discrimination that Sollfrank intended to critique in Female

Extension, a key work in the history of Cyberfeminism, a movement

that emerged in the mid-1990s to address the dominance of men in

the online world and the technology industries as a whole.


Heath Bunting, King’s Cross Phone-in, 1994

Bunting posted on a Web page and several mailing lists the phone numbers of

36 phone booths in and around London’s Kings Cross train station, inviting

people to ring those phones at any time on a given day.

http://www.irational.org/cybercafe/pubtel/pubtel.html


®TMark

www.rtmark.com

• ®™ark is a U. S. Corporation whose stated goal it is, to curtail the power of

corporations.

• Lies in virtual realm between artistic mediation and hactivist activism

• Net-based, though also create physical installations

• Information service provide for art-activism, utilizing humor, parody, and

hactivism to attack a wide range of issues from gender to surveillance to

war.


®TMark


Zapatista Movement

A new approach to social conflict – social net-war.

Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) occupied 5 towns and a city on New

Year’s Day 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement was in

effect. EZLN declared war on the Mexican government, vowed to march on

Mexico City, proclaimed a revolutionary agenda, began an international media

campaign and invited foreign observers & monitors to come to Chiapas.


Zapatista Movement


Zapatista Movement

• Basically a COMMUNICATION project

• Get together for situational awareness

• Working with Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), EZLN flood and block

Mexican government’s web site.

• That is, the FloodNet, a denial of service hacking tool.


Electronic Disturbance Theater

EDT is a small group of cyber activists and artists engaged in developing the

theory and practice of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD), organized by

Ricardo Dominguez.

The group has focused its electronic actions against the Mexican and U.S.

governments to draw attention to the war being waged against the Zapatistas

and others in Mexico.

Electronic Disturbance Theater, working at the intersections of radical politics,

recombinant and performance art, and computer software design, has

produced an ECD device called Flood Net, URL based software used to flood

and block an opponent’s web site.


Counter Strike

A computer game about killing terrorist after Sept 11.


Velvet Strike

A game modification for Counter Strike to insert peace message into the

original game.

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