Net Art
I suggest that net art practices of the 1990s and 2000s contribute to an articulation of a non-technological distributed form in contemporary art. Although, in the main, net artists focused on the materiality of the Internet and world wide web, particularly the different kinds of protocol that underpin the technology, an evaluation of the ways in which artists worked with protocol contributes to the development of a language and to the conceptualisation of a distributed form that extends beyond the technical and technological. New media theorists such as Lev Manovich support the possibility of transcoding forms, structures and logics from the computerised network to non-technological contexts. Whilst it is undoubtedly useful to be able to carry out such manoeuvres, and I make much use of this approach in my work, it is important to point to Manuel Castells’ proposal that the Internet is a technological manifestation of the distributed network and not synonymous with it. Net artists devised work with direct reference to technologies, but the distributed network and its political, social and cultural conditions of life already exist outside of the technology.
According to art historian Julian Stallabrass, net artists delivered ‘a broad critique of administered lives and bureaucratised minds’ [1] engaging in ‘a similar assault on murderously rational society [to] Dada during and after the First World War’. [2] He suggests that net art ‘is the most conceptually sophisticated and socially conscious area of contemporary [art] practice’. Throughout the 1990s net artists gave particular attention to the materiality of the Internet, both in terms of attention to different protocols in the actual artwork produced, and in terms of the dissemination of work online as a means of circumventing existing art world structures. Artists used various strategies to draw attention to the phenomenal significance of the distributed network to contemporary culture and society. They gave attention to the relationship between data structure and algorithm that underpins the ontology of the computer; to the distributed qualities of the network; to DIY hacker culture; political activism; and conceptual art. Net art manifested itself on different levels of generality from computer code, data sets and repositories, technical and bureaucratic protocol, dematerialised art object, organisational form, virtual community and network. Some artists, such as Heath Bunting, explored the social, collaborative and participative aspects of the distributed form, both inside and outside the computer. Bunting’s early net.art piece King’s Cross Phone (1994) used ‘real world’ public space to foreground the connectivity and interactivity implicit in network culture, exposing the transcoding of network logic to the cultural sphere. He devised and posted online a fluid instructional framework that invited strangers to participate in a phone-in performance using the public telephone booths at Kings Cross Railway Station. Facilitating participation and exchange – even between strangers – is indicative of artists’ explorations of the Internet as an open, many-to-many ‘platform’. Other artists focused on the materiality of the Internet, particularly protocol. Dutch duo, Jodi, for example, developed a practice based on the deliberate manipulation of the everyday experience of Internet users through the definition of a code specific and database aesthetic.
Frustrated with the centralised and hierarchical organisational structures of established art institutions, net artists quickly realised that the Internet was conducive to the development of distributed models of cultural production, distribution and consumption. Using the Internet to make and distribute work, to communicate, collaborate and organise politically, ‘a loose group of artists, […] based in various European countries, team[ed] up in real and virtual institutions like CERN, Netlab, the WWW Art Centre, […] working locally as well as translocally, sometimes remotely and together on the same project, at other times individually or with local collaborators’. [3] The distributed architecture of the Internet enables every user to act as an autonomous agent: to ‘post up’ material that is then accessible by other users of the network [4] without the centralised and hierarchical mediation of the established gallery-system. Artworks such as Alexei Shulgin’s early 1990s Hot Pictures is probably the first example of what is now almost ubiquitous within network art and social networking sites - ‘a gallery space free from commercial white cube constraints, accessible from home and office.’ [5]
Net Art and the Circumvention of the Established Art World
Artists attempted to by-pass the rules and regulations of the mainstream art institutions and their hierarchies, challenging the notion that some arts practices are more worthy of reification, of sanctified presentation in galleries than others, and numerous online exhibitions were organised in which all submissions were accepted [6]. Many network art practices are rooted within a collaborative, participative, open source philosophy, and believing the openness of the Internet’s architecture and culture to be its main strength, artists understood their networked-based work as being ethically and radically progressive. Informed by free software and open source models of production and consumption, most network artists did not sell their work, but rather contributed time, ideas, work and discussion to their online communities in return for enhanced reputations within and increasingly outside the network.
The dematerialised environment of the Internet seemed to offer a space within which artists could connect directly with audiences in a public sphere. It ‘appeared not only as a way out of the art industry and as a newly discovered free space for their own work, but also as almost a type of new Jerusalem where that which is impossible in the ‘real world’ should happen [7]’. In this new environment there would be ‘global herrschaft-free [8] communication for all, consumers who become producers, social networking over and through geographical and social borders, direct information exchange beyond economic constraints and without filtration through the mass media.’ [8] The Internet’s ability to facilitate international communication and exchange between artists became as significant to creative practice as the content being produced and disseminated, and small, tight-knit communities of artists developed. A desire to circumvent the competitiveness of the institutions and to engage in truly participative communities was deeply felt by many. Online communities such as, nettime [9], the THING [10], Furtherfield [11] and Rhizome [12] developed out of a desire to provide non-institutionalized spaces for artists to show and discuss work, and to some extent to explore the parameters of the open organizational forms reflective of the networking paradigm. All of these activities are commonplace in 2013: we are saturated with social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. But in the 1990s none of these existed. Net artists were the pioneers and early critics of social media. The motivation for net artists to participate was, and for some remains, grounded in a belief that it is preferable to undertake creative activities within a distributed, less hierarchical organizational framework free from the market, consumers and organizational control, than to be incorporated into the established art world.
Net Art and the Material Properties of the Distributed Network
Rather than aiming at ‘beautiful or effective artistic expression, or at a convincing representation of an abstract principle’ [13] a number of net artists used ‘the fact of machinic and interpersonal communication across the network’ to ‘amplify, mock or playfully subvert’ the ‘technological structure and functions of the network.’ [14] A key feature of net.art was that each piece could be ‘constantly updated and changed, so that there [was] never a ready and fixed creation or ‘work’’. [15] The unstable and temporary nature of the individual art works was materially related to transitory and nascent state of the Internet itself.
Net artists gave attention to significance and limitations of materiality of the Internet, with particular emphasis on the technical protocols underpinning thetechnology. Referring to those works that use ‘only the radio buttons, pull-down menus, and textboxes found in HTML forms, Alexander Galloway described net.art as having ‘unique protocological characteristics’. [16] For example, Austrian net.art group ‘x-space’ devised Ping – Die Metrik der Zeit (1994) a ‘telematic spatial sound installation’ [17] that explicitly explored the material qualities of the Internet’s new ‘ping’ protocol. Ping is the name of a standard software utility tool used to test network connections. It is often used to ascertain whether a remote device (such as Web or game server) can be accessed across the network.
Sounds made in front of a microphone were delayed by digital signal processors before they were played over a set of loudspeakers in the same room. The time-lag between input and output was determined by the time that it took for a certain data packet to be sent from the installation site in Austria via the Internet to New Zealand and returned from there. This protocol is called Ping and is used regularly in electronic networks to check whether there actually is a connection between two computers, and how fast this connection is. [18]
An explicit engagement with the materiality of the Internet is evident in works such as the ‘Refresh Art Project’ (1996) which linked together more than twenty World Wide Web (WWW) pages each located on different servers across Europe and the USA. Using the ‘refresh’ protocol devised for HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) – the language used to organise and design WWW pages - visitors were ‘zapped’ automatically from one page to another at ten-second intervals.
Net Art, Conceptual Art and Participation
There are aspects Refresh that resonate with Robert Barry’s Invitation Piece (1972-3), a work made up of eight private view cards sent out by eight galleries announcing Robert Barry solo exhibitions from November 1972 until June 1973. Paul Maenz Gallery in Cologne invited the recipient to a Robert Barry solo exhibition at Art & Project in Amsterdam; Art & Project in Amsterdam announced an exhibition at Jack Wendler Gallery in London. From there, the exhibition continued on to galleries in New York, Paris, Brussels, Milan, Turin, until it finally returned to Cologne. Nothing was shown, or happened in any of the galleries except for the display of the eight invitation cards. The ‘work’ was a concept: the exposition of protocols associated with consecutive art shows. Whereas Invitation Piece existed precisely within the institutions it critiqued, and gave attention to the conventions of the established art world, the Refresh project existed outside the established art institutions and exposed newly designed technical protocols of the newly designed HTML. In this it is typical of many net art works which referenced conceptual and instructional art practices of the 1960s whilst purposefully rejecting the seemingly hierarchical structures of art institutions for the Internet. Perhaps most of all, net art utilised the distributed qualities of the network to expand art historical experiments in participation. Like the ‘viewers’ of Invitation Piece, the ‘viewers’ of Refresh were not really viewing anything at all: rather they were invited to become participants by creating their own web page and ‘linking’ them via HTML code to the existing pages.
For Andreas Broekmann, a curator working within net art circles at the time the work was produced, ‘[t]he project was exciting for those immediately involved as they could experience how the loop grew page by page, while they were simultaneously communicating and negotiating via an IRC [Internet Relay Chat] chat channel how to solve certain problems’. [19] Refresh takes the concept of the consecutive or serial enactment of an artwork explored in artworks like Invitation Piece and utilises the distributed qualities of the new technology to speed up the process. Net art marks an extension and an intensification of art historical approaches to disseminating work and engaging audiences. It transforms fairly localised events into global events through the transgression of the physical distance between participants. [20] The participative and social aspects of an artwork and its distribution are as important as its content. [21] In challenging the orthodox notion that an artwork exists in just one place at one time, the structure of Refresh facilitates the work ‘happening’ in more than twenty places simultaneously. It exposes the structure of the distributed network, and foregrounds some of the salient qualities in distributed art: ‘multiple sites of locality, many-to-many communications channels, and a self-organizing capacity (local actions, global results)’. [22]
Net Art and the distributed form
Cornelia Sollfrank’s Female Extension (1997) explores the technical protocols of the Internet, but perhaps more interestingly for me, through engagement with protocols of curating she draws attention to the development and inclusion of a distribution platform as part of the artwork itself. In February 1997 the Galerie der Gegenwart (Gallery of Contemporary Art) of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg Art Museum) announced a net.art competition, the first museum in the world to do so. Called EXTENSION the competition was intended as an exploration of ways in which the physical art museum could extend into the distributed network and into virtual space, and it ‘posed the question of how traditional tasks of the museum, collecting, preserving, mediating, and researching, could be applied to art on the internet’. [23] The recognition that significant changes to cultural production, dissemination and consumption were emerging through and alongside the Internet is explicit. Making a distinction between ‘traditional works of art represented in digital format’ and ‘artistic works that applied familiar art concepts such as "material" and "object" to the internet’, [24] the call for contributions to EXTENSION asked explicitly not for ‘art on the net’, but for ‘net art’. Net.artist Cornelia Sollfrank responded to the call with a piece of work that she subsequently named FEMALE EXTENSION (1997) in which she ‘created’ more than 200 female net artists. Rather than referring to actual female net artists, Sollfrank’s simulations had no counterpart in the real world. She gave each simulated artist an identity: name, nationality, postal address, phone number and working email account.[25]
Sollfrank submitted to the EXTENSION competition work attributed to each of the 200 simulated artists. Rather than being created ‘directly’ by Sollfrank however all 200 works were generated ‘automatically’ by a machine; a computer-programme she designed and built in collaboration with others. Each of the artworks was uploaded under the name of one of the ‘artists’ onto the museum’s server. The computer programme used search engines (software used to find content on the WWW) to collect web pages and recombine the data automatically. In this way ‘the net art projects were generated’ [26] by a machine, even though the ‘artwork’ was produced by a human. To clarify, the ‘artwork’ here is made up of a number of elements: the concept, the computer- programme, the 200 simulated artists, the artworks automatically generated by the computer programme, and the submission of the generated works to the competition. Following Katherine Hayles’ exploration of ‘writing machines’ [27] as reflexive loops between the material apparatus of literary work and the imaginative world emerging from its semiotic components, FEMALE EXTENSION is an interrogation of the technology that produces it. Sollfrank foregrounds processes of making art in a network context; emphasising the ways in which such processes are structured by the materiality of the Internet. The form of the work, then, affects its meaning, and here Sollfrank takes the theme of the competition ‘Internet as material and object’ particularly seriously. Strengthening connections between the structure of the work, the artist, and the production of art, she foregrounds processes of automation inherent in distributed networks. By designing and building not only the programme that automates the 200 works of art, but the conceptual platform within which her simulated artists are able to interface with the competition, she becomes a prototypical ‘meta artist’: devising the platform within which others participate (even if ‘others’ in this case are simulated ‘others’).
The ‘platform’ in this context is itself a network, and the ‘meta artist’ is the one who writes the protocols that enable elements within the network to communicate with each other. Interestingly, if not surprisingly, the curators of EXTENSION did not understand Sollfrank’s contribution, registering the simulated artists’ contribution as an ‘apparently meaningless flood of data’.76 No one on the jury saw a pattern in Sollfrank’s entries, although materially they are very similar. None of her 200 artists received a prize.
In automating some of the processes of ‘art making’ to include machinic execution of artists’ instructions Sollfrank’s work extends the protocological tendencies evident in the work of conceptual and fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young and Alison Knowles. Indeed, a genealogy is evident from conceptual to software art through the automation of instructions into computer code, and through a focus on replication and modularity. Attention given to rational and mathematical procedures as the basis of ‘principles’ or ‘protocols’ from which artworks are executed is evident in both network art and conceptual art. Net artist John F. Simon suggests ‘you could actually extend some of the ideas of the conceptual artists to write them down as sourcecode, and then have them executed by a computer. The works themselves would work out what they describe, or rather: the art works could simply do what they say’. [28] This desire for artworks ‘simply to do what they say’ echoes LeWitt’s statement that ‘the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better’.
The ability to codify aspects of the artistic process in this way is precisely what Sollfrank relies on in FEMALE EXTENSION as she extends the artist’s declaration of rules that govern the execution of a drawing into software and programming. Not only did Sollfrank design and develop a machine to automate the ‘creative’ activities of her simulated artists and devise conceptual and technical protocols that organise and execute the work, she also devises a curatorial strategy for her work, which involves the integration of particular elements (the identities of the simulated artists and the generated artworks) inside another curatorial platform.
So, in reviewing and analysing net art practices for their contribution to the articulation of a non-technological distributed form in contemporary art it is possible to identify a number of key points. The parameters between production and curating become blurred, as artists become responsible for determining how their work is disseminated and displayed. The relationship to audience also changes with much early work disavowing the audience in preference to the inclusion of participants, but this changes slightly as work is represented as documentation for an external audience. The second point is regarding the emphasis on the materiality of the network in both the production of artwork and in its theoretical contextualisation. This provides a radically new way of understanding art in terms of the redefinition of that which is considered to be part of the artwork: the labour of others, curatorial practices, dialogue and provisional communities are all included within the parameters of the artwork itself. In some ways, net art is an intensification and expansion of conceptual and minimalist art practices.
The third point is the tendency within net art and media art to privilege technology as the sole determinant of change. New media theorists such as Lev Manovich support the possibility of transcoding forms, structures and logics from the computerised network to non-technological contexts. Whilst it is undoubtedly useful to be able to carry out such manoeuvres, and I make much use of this technique in the research, it is important to restate the proposal that the Internet is a technological manifestation of the distributed network and not synonymous with it. Net artists devised distributed artworks with direct reference to technologies, but the political, social and cultural conditions of life that they are foregrounding, already exist beyond the Internet. The fourth point to note is the way in which the elements that make up a net artwork can exist in different places and be engaged with at the same time or asynchronously. Related to this is the emerging relation between global elements and local elements within an artwork.
The fifth point is related to protocol and its inherent contradiction: It engenders cooperation, openness and participation yet is a rigidly controlling force. If it is impossible to escape protocol within a distributed network and a strategy of resistance to protocol itself is impossible, it follows that some way of hacking protocol – the counter-protocol described by Galloway, or re-imagining its relation to the other elements it encounters – are possible vehicles of resistance within the network. Questions of how to think resistance through protocol begin to emerge.
1. Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, 33.
2. Ibid.
3. Broekmann, “Net.Art, Machines and Parasistes,”
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9703/msg00038.html (last retrieved 5th July 2020)
4. Ibid
5. Greene, Internet Art, 36.
6. For example, Arthur X Doyle’s Net Art Open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2002, and Networking, at Watershed, Bristol, 2001.
7 Baumgartel, “On the History of Artistic Work with Telecommunications,” 152.
8 Herrschaft translates as ‘domination’ “Herrschaft (domination).
9. http:// www.nettime.org/
11 http://www.furtherfield.org
13. Broekmann, “Net.Art, Machines, and Parasites,” 2.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Galloway, Protocol: How control exists after decentralization, 225.
17. Broekmann “Net Art, Machines and Parasites,” 2.
18. Ibid.
19. Broekmann, “Net.Art, Machines, and Parasites,” 3.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Galloway and Thacker, “The Limits of Networking” posted on <nettime> 25 March 2004.
23. Sollfrank, “Project Description of Female Extension.”
http://artwarez.org/femext/content/femextEN.html (last retrieved 5th July 2020)
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Hayles, Writing Machines, 25-28. 76 Ibid.
28 John F Simon interviewed by Tilman Baumgaertel posted on nettime on Tue, 20 Jul 1999, accessed August 8, 2013, http://www.nettime.org/Lists- Archives/nettime-l-9907/msg00067.html.