Why?
The internet is a vast environment that has evolved slowly over time into what we have today. Imagine the early days of the internet when there were just a few hundred sites, no images, just text, and there was no control over the aesthetics of a site. It is important to understand the roots of the web, so you can also see missed potential, possibilities, and historical foundations for work that is developed for, within, and inspired by the internet. This week’s reading will give you a glimpse.
Required
Response Questions
Remember to cite specific instances from the text to support your views.
- Consider how a medium helps to dictate the aesthetics of its art. There are limitations and possibilities that are part and parcel of each medium. How might the internet dictate the aesthetics of what is made within and for it?
- Rachel Greene wrote, “Originally conceived as an alternative social field where art and everyday life were merged, net.art may now seem threatened by its own success—that is, likely to give in to its own increasing institutionalization.” Is institutionalization anathema to art like net.art? Why or why not?
Supplementary Readings
- The Internet
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Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
“Legendary master filmmaker Werner Herzog examines the past, present and constantly evolving future of the Internet. Herzog conducts original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as PayPal and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Internet protocol inventor Bob Kahn, and famed hacker Kevin Mitnick. These provocative conversations reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.”
Birth of the Internet, @theU
“In 1968, the nation’s top computer scientists and members of the U.S. government gathered inside the Rustler Lodge atop the Alta Ski Resort in Salt Lake County, Utah. They were about to change the world. It was during that meeting that this group talked about the novel idea of connecting computers together into the world’s first far-reaching communications network. A year later, four institutions—UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah—became the first “nodes” to that network, then known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was the precursor to what we now call the internet.”
- Hypertext
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The Secret History of Hypertext, The Atlantic
“In the years leading up to World War II, a number of European thinkers were exploring markedly similar ideas about information storage and retrieval, and even imagining the possibility of a global network—a feature notably absent from the Memex. Yet their contributions have remained largely overlooked in the conventional, Anglo-American history of computing. Chief among them was Paul Otlet, a Belgian bibliographer and entrepreneur who, in 1934, laid out a plan for a global network of “electric telescopes” that would allow anyone in the world to access to a vast library of books, articles, photographs, audio recordings, and films.”
As We May Think, The Atlantic
“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, ‘memex’ will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.“The Godfather, Wired
“Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology - from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web - and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, ‘To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush.’”
The Curse of Xanadu, Wired
“It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing—a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.” - Internet Art
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Digital Desire — Post-Internet Art, Do Not Touch
Note: This is a bit NSFW.
“Laura is back! Today she’s giving me a glimpse into Post-Internet Art. Looking at art that hasn’t made the history books yet is uncharted territory for all of us. What will stand the test of time and how will we remember this era? Laura shows me how artists are responding to and being shaped by the internet in their art.”Art in the Age of the Internet, Tech Weekly Podcast
“In some ways the internet has made artists of us all. Whether we’re updating Instagram or filming on our smart phones, technology has given us new avenues for creativity. But what do the fine arts have to say about technology and it’s impact on global culture? How do artists use their skills to engage with the huge social challenges arising from the web and how our personal data is used online?”
The GIF’s Obsession With Compression, Peer Pressure: Essays on the Internet by an Artist on the Internet
pp 19–24
“The GIF’s straightforward looping mechanism revels in its own simplicity and the manner in which it professes to be nothing more profound than what 3 seconds of your time can possibly allow for as a work of visual art. In an online environement that exalts immediacy and ease of use, the GIF is not a fetishization of the past or WEB 1.0 culture—as many have argued—but a fetishization of the internet’s propensity for compressing information to the furthest degree possible.”Digital Transformations of Time: The Aesthetics of the Internet, Leonardo
Considering that the internet launched publicly on August 6, 1991, this reading was addressing an internet that was just five years old.
“Current discussion of digital culture is dominated by the metaphor of space--beginning with the very term "cyberspace." Time is, however, not merely an inconvenience online, but constitutive of digital experience. The digital culture of time is transforming our sense of the aesthetic, as documented in sections on the museum click-visit, where the focus is not on the images but on the time-based activity of the visit; and on the time-based aesthetics of downloading. In encouraging digital artists, let us expand our notion of what the new medium in fact is and shift from digital art objects to digital art activities. Examples are taken largely from the collective online work of "Blast", in which the author participates.”
Internet Aesthetics, The International Handbook of Internet Research
“Central to the discussion was the dawning realisation among curators and artists that digital artworks built a mere decade or two earlier were already falling into disrepair, and in many cases were not capable of being restaged in their original forms at all. This was not so much a result of faults in construction as it was a matter of the accelerating reconfiguration of the computing environment.”
#mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation
“What is Net art? Does its name refer to the medium it uses? Is it the art of the Netizens, the inhabitants of the internet? Is it an art movement or an art form? This book aims to provide a starting point in the search for answers to these and similar questions concerning the existence of Internet art. Edited by Marie Meixnerová, a Czech curator and scholar, #mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation approaches Internet art as a developing art form, through five thematic sections that map the “chronological” stages of this development. Featured authors include Katarína Rusnáková, Dieter Daniels, Marie Meixnerová, Domenico Quaranta, Natalie Bookchin, Alexei Shulgin, Piotr Czerski, Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, Ben Vickers, Jennifer Chan, Gene McHugh, Gunther Reisinger, Matěj Strnad, Lumír Nykl.”
Art Beyond Digital
“Digital technology has interfered in all the spheres, private, public and professional, of our society and shaped them. Artists have always used the techniques or technologies of their time to express themselves. To each appropriated innovation thus corresponds a range of works. Yet, it takes time for the art world to integrate new practices and new media. Impatient, the most fervent advocates of digital art have structured themselves into international communities by organizing dedicated events. Their practices have now matured and the public is culturally ready to welcome their creations as it already does in festivals. At the same time, we notice the first signs of digital acceptance in art, both in institutions and in the contemporary art market. The purpose of this book is to study the works of current practices without focusing on their shared use of digital technology; to analyse them in the context of their presentation by assembling them so that together they create a dialogue. Objective: to demonstrate that digital technology is a medium of contemporary art, but that it is important to consider specificities.”
Peer Pressure
“Peer Pressure is a collection of essays previously published online between 2010 and 2011. In the author’s words, “each essay is an impassioned description or prescription to understand the digital space we inhabit differently.” Most of these writings have been highly influential for the (relatively) small community the author addresses, eliciting many heated debates. The texts idealistically address creative platforms, image aggregators, relational practices, internet memes and much more.”