CIAC’s Electronic Magazine No 27

“A more “expressivist” form of communication is apparent today in a range of media - in the flourishing growth of the means for self-production and the production of the self in the form of personal web sites, blogs and their attendant technology (syndication, tags, podcasting, videoblogging, etc.) and the networks for communication among Internet users and their associated practices (fansubbing, fan films, etc.). Since the late 1990s, net art has been guiding and prefiguring these “mass” technologies and practices by multiplying the ambivalence of our relationship with the Internet, which is both intimate and dreadfully solitary. As new dialogue interfaces grow and expand, we withdraw from the real world, which is both more collective and community-minded. Today, the term net art refers to interactive works of art designed by, for and with the Internet, as distinct from more traditional forms of art which have simply been transferred onto the web sites of art galleries and other virtual museums. In the art world, the originality of the Internet lies in the fact that it is simultaneously a medium, a tool and a creative environment.
By medium I mean a vector of transmission, in the sense that the Internet is its own broadcaster; by tool, the way it is used as a means of production, giving rise to different usages and generating new artistic products; and by environment the fact that it is a space both inhabitable and inhabited. In this context, artists seek at least as much to design interactive devices1 as they do to create settings for communication. Using all the means at its disposal-the Web (HTML FTP, peer to peer) but also e-mail and chat-net art encourages the production of works whose relational and collaborative aspects have turned the relations between art and society upside down. Internet sites, home pages, blogs, mailing lists and discussion forums have become the new forms of sociability. Net art, by associating itself with this dynamic, can take the shape of specific forms of interactivity but also of the production of on-line lifestyles and communication strategies. The Internet has become both an on-line artist’s studio and a gallery space: a space for artistic creation and for communicating and receiving artistic practices.” Continue reading NET ART V1+2.0. GENESIS, FIGURES, SITUATIONS by Jean-Paul Fourmentraux (Translated from French by Timothy Barnard), CIAC’s Electronic Magazine No 27, Printemps 2007 / Spring 2007, 10th Anniversary Special.