Net.art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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net.art refers to a group of artists who worked in the medium of internet art from 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting. Although this group was formed as a parody of avantgarde movements by writers such as Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber and Pit Schultz, their individual works have little in common.
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 means art that uses the internet as its medium and that cannot be experienced in any other way. Often net.art has the internet as (part of) its subject matter but this is certainly not required.
History of the net.art movement
The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet Art. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet Art history, than a specific genre. Early precursors of the net.art movement include the international fluxus (Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (Mark Amerika) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site.
The term "net.art" was probably coined by Pit Schultz in 1995, but is also attributed to Vuk Cosic, and stems from "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term 'net.art')" (Rachel Greene, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, 2004). It was first used with regard to the "net.art per se" meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste in May 1996, and referred to a group of artists who worked together closely in the first half of the 1990s.
