net.art refers to an artistic movement that emerged in the context of Internet art in the mid-1990s. The artists most commonly associated with the movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting. Although they shared an interest in the Internet as an artistic and communicative medium, their individual practices differed considerably. The term "net.art" is also used as a synonym for net art or Internet art and covers a much wider range of artistic practices. In this wider definition, net.art refers to art that uses the Internet as its medium. Typically, net.art has the Internet and the specific sociocultural context it spawned as its subject matter, although this is not required. The German critic Tilman Baumgärtel, drawing on the ideas of American critic Clement Greenberg, has argued for a "media specificity" of net.art. According to the introduction to his book net.art. Materialien zur Netzkunst, the specific qualities of net.art are "connectivity, global reach, multimediality, immateriality, interactivity and egality".
History of the net.art movement The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet art in the mid-1990s. The term came to be associated with a loose group of artists using the Internet both as an artistic medium and as a space for communication and collaboration. In 1996, while Nettime co-founder Pit Schultz was preparing a project in Berlin with artists he had met online, the term net.art came into use. The project was subsequently presented as part of the new-media exhibition Files, curated by Oliver Schwarz at the Bunker in Berlin. In 1996, the net.art per se meeting of artists and theorists took place in Trieste. The event was commemorated by a fake CNN website entitled Specific Net.art found possible. In March 1997, Alexei Shulgin circulated an account of the term's origin on the Nettime mailing list, according to which Vuk Ćosić had encountered the expression "net.art" in a garbled email rendered largely unreadable because of incompatible software. Ćosić later stated that Shulgin had invented this account, and recalled instead that Schultz had suggested the term during discussions among the group around 1995 or 1996.
Online social networks net.artists built digital art communities through practices of web hosting, web art curating, collaboration and online communication. They were active on mailing lists and online platforms such as Rhizome, File festival, Electronic Language International Festival, Nettime, Syndicate and Eyebeam. net.artists like Jodi developed a particular form of e-mail art, or spam mail art, through text reprocessing and ASCII art. The term "spam art" was coined by Frederic Madre to describe forms of disruptive intervention in mailing lists in which seemingly nonsensical texts were generated by simple scripts, online forms or typed by hand. Related practices included the "Codeworks" of artists such as Mez or mi ga, as well as robots such as Mailia, which analyzed emails and replied to them. "Codeworks" is a term coined by poet Alan Sondheim to describe textual experiments involving faux-code and non-executable script or mark-up languages.
Tactical media net art By questioning structures such as the navigation window and challenging their functionality, net.artists drew attention to the conventions through which users interacted with the Internet. Artists such as Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, and the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser-crashing applets, engaged directly with the materiality of navigation. Such experiments became associated with what was described as "browser art", which was further developed by the British collective I/O/D through its experimental navigator WebStalker. Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting played with the structure of advertisement portals by establishing lists of keywords unlikely to be searched for but nonetheless existing on the web as URLs or metadata components. They used this relational data to create paths of navigation and new combinations of readable text. Rachel Greene has associated net.art with tactical media as a form of Detournement. Greene writes: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media'."
Hacker culture The Jodi collective's work uses the aesthetics of computer errors, code tricks, faux-code and faux-virus. Such works question conventional browsing experiences by foregrounding the internal structures of digital environments. The collective 0100101110101101.org expanded the idea of "art hacktivism" by performing code interventions and perturbations in art festivals such as the Venice Biennale. The collective irational.org likewise carried out interventions in physical and social spaces. In a 1998 Eyebeam mailing-list discussion, Brett Stalbaum distinguished hacking from net.art while describing artists as "culture hackers" who enter cultural systems and make them do things they were not intended to do. A direct intersection between net.art and malicious software occurred with Biennale.py, a computer virus created by 0100101110101101.org and the hacker group EpidemiC for the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Presented in the Slovenian Pavilion, the virus functioned both as executable code and as an artwork, with its source code displayed and distributed as part of the project.
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