Bringing the Internet Back From the Dead: Rediscovering Net.Art

Marshall McLuhan, seen by many as the father of media studies, famously said that „the medium is the message“. McLuhan, of course, could not have been talking of the internet, since his passing preceded the invention of the World Wide Web by nine years. And yet, his words would never ring more true, than they would in the context of net.art. By net.art I do not mean simply art posted online. To artists familiar with the genre, the internet constitutes much more than just a platform. It is at the same time a tool, a medium, an ideology and, more often than not, the topic. But let's start from the beginning...

With Tim Berners-Lee's groundbreaking invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, the 1990s saw a massive uptick in purchases of personal computers with access to the internet. What needs to be understood here, however, is that the internet at the time was a radically different space, than what we have now become accustomed to. Still uninhabited by traditional media or major social media companies, the "net" felt more intimate and personal. It consisted mostly of small personal web pages, where people wrote about their hobbies and interests, and on-line communication took place through mailing lists and bulletin board systems. There was something intrinsically democratising about the internet at the time. It was in that context that net.art started developing around the mid-1990s. The genre challenged traditional values of artistic production, distribution and authorship, while also encouraging audience participation as a key element of the art itself. Early net artists, like the Dutch/Belgian duo JODI, used HTML code to create purposely glitchy websites, packed with hidden hyperlinks, inviting (or tricking) the user to experience the work through types of interaction that were, at the time, intrinsic to the internet. Others, like the Russian artist Olia Lialina, used net.art's interactive capabilities for storytelling practices.