An Introduction to Net Art

Prof. Dr. Trebor Scholz, The New School

Artist as Curator

Artist as Educator

Artist as Writer

Artist as Facilitator

The model of the well-informed expert advances to that of the cultural editor who channels the perspectives of other cultural producers.

Today, artists can generate platforms such as mailing lists, and websites. They can independently organize exhibitions to circulate their ideas and set up platforms from which they can interact with an audience.

The Participatory Turn in Media Art

performance tool maker context provider

user/producer
participant

user/customizer
conceptual

consumer

1980s

1990s

2004

2006

20012

Cultural Context Providers

People interact with networked computer systems and artifacts evolve out of experimental relationships between several people.

Participation

Marcel Duchamp: a work is made entirely by those who look at it or read it and who make it survive by their accolades or even their condemnation.
Marcel Duchamp in a letter of 1956 to Jean Mayoux (published in his book La Libert une et divisible: Textes critiques et politiques, Ussel, 1979).

(1952)

The Postmans Choice, by Ben Vautier, 1967. Its a double-sided postcard. You put a different address on each side - and it instructs the postman to choose where to deliver it.

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Electronic Caf devised for the 1984 for Olympic Games in Los Angeles

Les Immateriaux by J. Lytoard and Chapot (1985)

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/lesimmateriaux/

1993

Net Art 1994-1999

http://bookchin.net/history.html

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

http://waxweb.org/

http://adaweb.walkerart.org/home.shtml

http://www.diacenter.org/km/index.html

http://text.jodi.org/

http://text.jodi.org/

http://name.space.xs2.net/

http://www.irational.org/heath/skint/

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/wara.htm

http://www.irational.org/tm/desktop.gif

http://rtmark.com/

gatt.org

http://scream.deprogramming.us/

http://scream.deprogramming.us/media/bushscreams2avi.mpg

http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/oodnet.html

http://www.potatoland.org/riot/

http://theyrule.net/

From Art on Networks to Art on Platforms

by Olga Goriunova, Alexei Shulgin

What is a platform? [S]omething in between a content management system, online web site, library, and a club ... A platform is a website organized in a special way: as a relatively simple database with artefacts, or a more complex portal built around the database. -Runme.org -Udaff.com (self-identied counter-cultural writing) -Micromusic.net

The 1990s were dominated by art on networks and celebration of communication via internet, 2000-s are marked by the development of platform-based art trends and cultural currents. -From Art on Networks to Art on Platforms by Olga Goriunova, Alexei Shulgin

www.micromusic.net

13.000 registered users

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50.000 visitors a day, 700.000 pages

Runme.org is a software art repository, launched in January 2003. It is an open, moderated database to which people are welcome to submit projects they consider to be interesting examples of software art. Software art is an intersection of two almost non-overlapping realms: software and art.

Conceptual Art and the Social Web

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User-Generated Fiction on Amazon.com

Kevin Killian: 1525 reviews (as of January 7th, 2006) He reviews everything from sweet potato baby food, Pasternak's lm Doctor Zhivago, Michael Kors khaki shorts, and The Black & Decker Crossre Auto Level Laser, to Giorgio Agamben's book State of Emergency. These are the reviews of Kevin Killian who is a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, critic, and playwright. His texts are not really reviews. They are autobiographical pieces of ction. Killian uses Amazon.com as a platform for his writing practice- a place with an immediate broad readership.

Killian's review of a 14K ruby necklace

"As an American boy growing up in France, I became mesmerized by an enchanting painting of an ancestor that hung never very far from the hearth. The painting, smudged by smoke and damaged by Vichy occupation of the chateau, showed a very thin and angular woman, her face like something reected in the bowl of a spoon, festooned in bright stones that gleamed out still bright after the passage of many decades. "Who is this woman," I used to wonder out loud, until one evening, as my grandmother passed through the room looking for our vanished cat, "Gateau," I noticed that she wore the same diamond and ruby necklace as the ancestor in the old damaged painting. I persuaded my grandmother to sit down and forget about her eternal hunt for a cat who had died long before I was born, when she was still a young woman not even married to my grandpapa yet, and to tell me about the necklace she wore. She took my little hands in hers and, in a low, breathy whisper, told me how she had stumbled across these precious stones in a valise once. Amazon's 14K Ruby and Diamond "Dynasty" necklace looks like a lot like my family jewels; the resemblance is shocking enough to have made me drop my cocoa while leang through the jewel pages this morning in an attempt to bring back, madeleine-style, the vanished days of yesteryear."

http://chrisbarr.net/art/available-on-thursday

http://www.chrisbarr.net/art/interruptions

http://yeslab.org/project/coal-cares-scholastic

http://www.ikatun.com/institute/innitelysmallthings/

2004 - present. Performances of corporate commands (ads in the imperative) where they occur in the urban landscape. We try to perform each command as literally as possible. There have been more than 15 performances of corporate commands in the U.S. and Canada in public and private urban spaces.

Delocator.net is an online database project that creates a comparison between the amounts of local independently owned cafes and Starbucks retail stores within a specic zip code. By comparison of numeric quantity and site-specic detail, the user will see evidence of unchecked aggression and power that corporate businesses have in our communities. The site is also a free online space for independent cafe goers and owners to promote their cafes by uploading local cafe information to the Delocator.net database. The creation of other delocated database-driven web sites is encouraged. On the Delocator web site, users are able to download the code necessary to establish a new database, prompting more sites and databases that may focus on other specic retail stores. Delocator.net was launched with the intention of becoming a web-meme, sprouting many future de-located corporate stores. This project is a collaboration between the collective Finishing School and programmer Vasna Sdoeung.
http://www.rhizome.org/object.php?o=33376&m=1017283

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notions of truth on Wikipedia

h"p://www.wikipediaart.org

http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Art Deletion Review http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Deletion_review

http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Art_(resurrected)

http://www.popularitydialer.com/

Terms & Conditions are often written for legal regulations but they are never read by consumers, as a result consumers are often exploited by agreeing on these unreadable terms. You know the I agree phenomenon. In this piece, terms & conditions of Wive social web services are re-written using a custom typeface. The resulting images are generated by three processes: me typing the words, the program deciding on the size of each letter each time I hit the key, and the instructions for the font... Burak Arikan
http://meta-markets.com/

Burak Airkan's Meta Markets http://meta-markets.com/

Online stock market for trading socially networked creative products. Trade shares of social web assets from online bookmarking, social networking, photo and video sharing services. IPO your own social web work.

Distributed Creativity, Purposeless Creative Activity, Networked Folk Art?

http://www.deviantart.com/

http://wiki.cs.princeton.edu/index.php/So%2C_you_want_to_start_a_laptop_orchestra%3F

Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is an Internet meme that originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online and ofWline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known. (Wikipedia)

Trebor Scholz
scholzt@newschool.edu
Twitter: @trebors