This thesis examines site-specific art on the Internet from the popularisation of the World Wide Web in 1994 until 2001. The artists studied here are those primarily associated with the term 'net.art', although other artists not associated with this term have also been considered wherever relevant. The generic term I use to designate all these artists is thus 'net art'. The central aim of this thesis is to understand how Internet technology has been used by artists to extend certain avant-garde tendencies in the context of a globalised and networked society. Setting artwork in the busy multi-media 'information superhighway' also used for economic and commercial transactions, media production, private communication, cultural projects, political debate and organisation, creates new proximities and relationships between art and other forms of communication and action. Indeed it can be said of the Net in general that it produces a whole series of new proximities and relationships, including those between geographically disparate communities, the space of the public and private and between the corporate and cultural spheres.

Collaborating for fifteen years as Out-of-Sync, the Australian artists, Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark, engage in performative explorations of affect via intersecting new media interfaces, sound, CD-Rom, installation, video, internet, and graphics. Wishing to bring the touch of the human – its skin, organs, and emotions – directly into the mix of computing culture, they have systematically developed artistic projects that inject the messiness of feeling, sound, trauma, and delay into the digital frontier’s paradigms of efficiency, speed, and transparent cognition. They initially set out by combining Miranda’s digital imagery with Neumark’s experimental sounds to investigate the unpredictability and confusion of human communication, as enhanced by digital sound and image.  More recently, interdisciplinary experimentations with video installation, internet art, and mobile computing have extended the international reach of their studios in Coogee Beach and Sydney. 

^{> Machine Organs by Out-Of-Sync}

Whatever happened to tactical media? David Garcia, one of the genre’s early formulators, takes C6’s recent publication DIY Survival as an opportunity to reflect on the general state of cultural politics after its net propelled reinvention in the `90s. Concerned with the commercial cannibalisation of tactical media, he identifies a need to connect its ‘hit and run’ ephemerality with more permanent stuctures of resistance

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting

Net.artist Jess Loseby celebrates the greener pastures of the thriving net.art, net.sound and net.criticism aggregator Furtherfield

Digital artists, together with net nomads and net junkies, habitually spend time searching for art platforms for works often created in an atmosphere of solitary obsession. Traditionally, the American net.art ‘big boys’ have built and occupied such spaces. Despite the apparently unifying anonymity of the net, to use these hubs it is advisable to be vocal, adversarial, preferably from NY, and male.

Net artists are using data corruption to create work from chaos. But is it really chaos, asks Peter Carty

> NEST: Example of corrupted data

Noise – or random data, or interference – has long been an obsession of digital artists. That obsession reflects the Nietzschean idea of a creative tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian. First outlined in The Birth of Tragedy, the idea is that Dionysus represents fundamental primal energy, while Apollo stands for rationality, logic and structure. Noise is unbounded dissonance; it is Dionysian. Information which is structured and rendered directly meaningful by IT protocols is Apollonian. But NEST, the new project from C6, raises the question of whether noise can sometimes be a little bit Apollonian too.

Net art just wants to be free, or at least that's what we were led to believe. But recently the shine has been wearing off its image as the rebel art form which no 'dirty capitalist' would touch with a barge pole. Frederic Madre takes a look at net art in the post-edenic era.

Ask an artist about money and you're likely to get a long face or some convoluted meta-cover ups of the well rehearsed sort. Email the same questions to net.artists like JODI and you will receive the object of desire delivered in your inbox: art for free. Every bit as effective as any of the aforementioned smokescreens, it is the best of both worlds. Immaterial, maybe, but still in my inbox. Outside my inbox there is now a price tag on net.art. Not that anyone's sure if it's really for sale, whether the just opened art.teleportacia.org gallery is a clever fiction or - simply - a gallery.

After the heady days of the dot com boom and the online corporate critique that followed in its wake, net artists’ and activists’ preoccupations are shifting towards the state. Raimundas Malasauskas reports on one New York example

‘Dear Director, I am writing to inform you that I am deeply troubled by your closure of White Box, an absolutely un-American thing to do. Please rescind the order as soon as possible and affirm our freedom of speech and assembly.’ So wrote one angry activist in an email to Carolyn Parker Mayes, the director of the Homeland Security Cultural Bureau (HSCB), after it ordered the White Box gallery in New York’s Chelsea to be shut down on September 11 2002.

BLURTING IN A & L ONLINE

It is sometimes maintained that one art medium anticipates another, looking forward to its incarnation with a new technological or cultural base. That, for example, surrealism's cuts and juxtapositions were normalised in cinematic montage (and in the transition slipped from vanguard to mainstream), or realist painting looked forward to its consummation in photography. However, in art the child is not always father to the man. This is worth keeping in mind when considering Thomas Dreher’s website where, with a gesture that is surely haunted by such teleological thinking, the Munich-based art historian has taken an Art & Language project conceived before the days of the PC and translated it into the medium of online hypertext.

EMAIL ART

Very, very rarely does an exhibition that invites contributions from members of the public become a success, and Email Art, organised by The Centre of Attention, is no exception. But like much that the Centre does, the curious left-field ambition of this exhibition makes the thing work. Every Monday for six weeks the curator Pierre-Alexandre Coindre sends subscribers an email from any one of the following artists: Jenny Holzer, Ken Friedman, Sylvie Fleury, Simon Poulter and Simon Faithful. Subscribers are invited to submit work in response to these emails. At the end of the fifth week, Coindre selects his preferred email and sends it out as the final element of the Email Art show.

At the Tate Modern's Border Crossing seminar, the artist/activist approaches of panelists Heath Bunting and Florian Schneider threw divergent light on the politics of migration.

Life is a burning up of questions, wrote Antonin Artaud. The projects presented at the Border Crossings seminar at the Tate Modern last Tuesday provided enough material for a bonfire, even if the ensuing discussion somehow failed to catch light.

Today’s ‘self-managed’ or sociological type has been shaped overwhelmingly by the impact of ‘60s counter-culture. Jettisoning the disciplinary schemas of modernity, capitalist production models – of goods and subjects – have taken on board the anti-authoritarian demands of the flower power generation. But, argues Brian Holmes, our newfound flexibility, mobility and interactivity is both repressive and liberatory by turns. It is able to create both the extreme individualisation of cybernetic market research and the anti-individualism of the multiple name – two polarities which define and open a new space of struggle


>> Jordan Crandall, Drive, 2000. Installation view, Neue Gallerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz

What now for ‘access’ and ‘autonomy’ after the dot.bomb? Daniel Berchenko reports on current thinking in New York

Nearly everyone can agree that the internet has not lived up to its early utopian promise. What exactly that promise was remains the source of much contention. As it turns out, now may be the perfect time for sober re-evaluation. With the shadow of global recession looming large, the fate of the net as digital marketplace is less than certain. As Name.Space founder and media artist Paul Garrin described the situation during a recent panel discussion: ‘We are in the throes of the hangover of the dot.bomb euphoria.’