Net Art 1.0
An Add-Art Exhibition
Curated by Steve Dietz
February 12-26, 2009
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Net Art 1.0
It is little more than a decade since artists first began using the Internet as the "medium" of their art. Net Art 1.0 uses the Web 2.0 platform of Add-Art to present "ads" -- sedimentary reminders -- for a handful of the early works of net and related art, which pressaged the present with uncanny precision.
Vuk Cosic, ASCII art
According to Wikipedia ASCII art consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). ASCII has been used since the earliest days of the computer to make images.
Similarly, Vuk Cosic experimented with ASCII in the early days of the World Wide Web as a way to present images on then-slow networks. More significantly, Cosic used ASCII as an aesthetic strategy to recapitulate a history of the moving image with high tech but primitive-looking online versions of Eisenstein, Star Trek, Psycho, and Deep Throat among other sources. It also allowed Cosic to épater la bourgeoisie and infiltrate the staid seriousness of the Internet with trademarked, pop culture content and pornography, which is what everyone really wanted to see, as YouTube and its Web 2.0 ilk arguably prove.
Vuk Cosic is a true classic of net.art. Most recently he did game flags that you can see here.
Links:
ascii history of moving images
Art Entertainment Network
Vuk Cosic (old)
See all the images
Graham Harwood, Rehearsal of Memory
Rehearsal of Memory is not a net art project per se, but as a collaboration created by the patients and staff of Ashworth Hospital in association with Harwood, it is a prototype of the kind of Web 2.0 "community storytelling" that has become commonplace on the Internet. It also remains as one of the most powerful, interactive storytelling experiences yet produced.
Graham Harwood was a founder of the acclaimed group Mongrel and with Yokokoji and Wright, his most recent project, Tantalum Memorial--Reconstruction was awarded first prize at the 2009 transmediale festival.
Links:
Rehearsal of Memory
Download Rehearsal of Memory
Mongrel
See all images
Lisa Jevbratt, 1:1(2) and Migration Project
Working within the arist group C5, in 1999 Jevbratt set out to map every single IP address and then create different interfaces to the database of results. According to Jevbratt, her spider programs were only able to search "approximately two percent of the spectrum . . . and 186,100 sites were included in the database." She resampled these sites in 2001 and 2004 and created different interfaces or maps by which to both navigate the World Wide Web and to make comparisons of it over time with, for example, many .mil sites becoming inaccessible since 1999.
Lisa Jevbratt is associate professor in the Art Department and the Media Art Technology program at University of California, Santa Barbara, who's work, ranging from Internet visualization software to biofeedback and interspecies collaboration, is concerned with collectives and systems, the languages and conditions that generate them, and the exchanges within them. She is currently working on ZooMorph - plug-in filters for image and video software simulating how non-human animals see, generating pictures that help us experience the world through the eyes of another species.
Links:
1:1(2)
Migration Project
Database Imaginary
Lisa Jevbratt
see all the images
Jodi, map
Jodi is the name of the collaboration between artists JOan Heemskerk and DIrk Paesmans, who have been working on the Internet since 1994, along with Cosic and a relatively small group of practitioners. It is often remarked by veterans of net art that despite the phenomenal increase in the number of people on the Internet over the past decade, when net art first started appearing, it was almost easier to get people to participate in online projects. During this period, around 1997, Jodi used a map of the Internet backbone and replaced the names of major providers with, according to them, "alternative and art sites on the net, with links to these sites." It was both a mental map of "Jodi's Internet" and a conceptual conflation of this personal map as the "mission-critical" backbone of the Internet.
JODI's 5 words acceptance speech at SF Webby Awards 1999: "%Ugly%corporate%sons%of%bitches!" Their most recent project: self.map.addOverlay(new GPolyline([point0, point], '#ff0000',8,0.8)); http://geogoo.net
Links:
map
Beyond Interface
jodi
See all the images
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Airworld
Airworld was commissioned in 1999 by the Walker Art Center. In their application for the commission, the McCoy's wrote: "AIRWORLD is a distributed network that posits itself to be anywhere and everywhere. An important strategy for articulating this state will be AIRWORLD banner ads." And in an essay about the project, cultural theorist Felix Stalder wrote:
Much of the Internet’s glitz is underpinned by an invention so unimaginative that I hesitate to call it an invention at all: the banner ad, cluttering up screens and slowing down surfing. As the Internet changes from an elite, publicly funded research network to a socially more diverse commercial environment, the economics of content production are changing with it.
Add-Art is testament to the ongoing desire to divert people's eyeballs to something other than ads, but a decade ago, the McCoys had to fantasize their own system of distribution, Airworld.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are artists from New York who work with conceptual media practices. In their latest video "I'll Replace You", they replaced themselves with fifty actors who perform them enacting minute gestures of everyday life.
Links:
Airworld
Felix Stalder, Internet Retrograde: The Rise of Infomercials
Josephine Bosma, Interview
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
See all the images
Melinda Rackham, line
line is "subtitled subjectivity in the cyberpolis, the experience of living on-line" is about the virtual relationship between two people, nomadic and physically separated. According to Rackham, "On-line their intimate communications and private images become public property, their fantasy of each other fuelled by a lack of physical reality, their personal boundaries blurred in the virtuality of the screen domain." Like many of the projects in this exhibition, this work pressaged what is commonplace in the Web 2.0 era, but with remains an uncommon aesthetic.
Melinda Rackham makes things happen across time, space and media/ums, then often writes about it. In her most recent project "stringr", she wove, wrapped, glued and tied personal tribal adornments for and with a gaggle of 25 creatives, documenting the resultant intimate narratives and objects into an online artefact museum.
Links:
line
Beyond Interface
Melinda Rackham
See all the images
Vivian Selbo, Vertical Blanking Interval
Selbo played a crucial role in the conceptualization and design of one of the most remarkable websites in the brief history of net art, ada'web. She also produced her own online artwork, including Vertical Blanking Interval, which was both a prediction about the technical future of information delivery and an example of using the strategies of advertising to highlight and undermine the messaging of ads. Vertical blanking interval is a technical term describing the largely untapped portion of the video spectrum that is part of any television signal, and according to Selbo at the time "this portion of the signal is where high speed internet access will soon be transmitted" allowing for the transformation of the Internet, historically a "pull" medium into a push medium, like television.
Vivian Selbo is an artist living in New York.
Vertical Blanking Interval
About Vertical Blanking Interval
ada'web
Vivian Selbo
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Paul Sermon, Telematic Vision
With many of Sermon's projects, he "connects" two spaces via the network by using green screen technology to overlay what is happening in one space onto another. In Telematic Vision, you sit down on a couch to watch TV. Only the people on the TV in front of you are on an identical couch at the other end of the network, and it looks on the TV as if you are sitting on the couch with them. The interaction, even though mediated, is remarkably visceral.
Paul Sermon is a pioneer of telematic artworks. His most recent project, AVATARIUM – A Consumer Paradox was inspired by Slavoj Zizek’s semiotic account of John Carpenters 1988 sci-fi classic “They Live." In it, Sermon combines the actual "first life" City's Nisantasi Shopping Mall in Istanbul with a deconstructed derelict shopping mall in the virtual world of Second Life. Through a live video link between first and second life, the installation allows both real and virtual life visitors/customers to converse, interact and confront the consumption driven aesthetic and architecture of contemporary shopping spaces.
Telematic Vision
Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace
Paul Sermon
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About the curator
Steve Dietz is the artistic director of the 01SJ Biennial and executive director of Northern Lights. He founded the new media art department and Gallery 9 at the Walker Art Center. Past exhibitions he has curated include: Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net, Art Entertainment Network, Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, and, with Sarah Cook, The Art Formerly Known As New Media. In March he will present at the 3rd Inclusiva-net meeting: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH). The Evolution of Artistic Creation in the Net-system on Beyond 'Beyond Interface': Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Networking.
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