With the advent of the internet it was to be certain that artists would find ways to interact, build, and create ‘’art” for such a landscape. As with any development of an idea that would form a paradigm shift into our next level of evolution, there were those that recognized the potential of the net for being a space where current constructs could be deconstructed and the future could be built.

The net offers users a unique perspective on interaction. Users are encouraged to click, play, and examine each page. They may never have the time or patience to explore every single aspect a website has to offer, yet there is an ever present engagement with the ‘surf-the-web’ experience. This idea of ‘click-holes’ has become a household term. Everyone is familiar with the time they have spent down the rabbit’s hole of clicking on links. Net art has often fully explored this concept. Hypertext novels and electronic literature riddle pages with links to other pages, with links to even more pages, by the time you look up you’re not even sure where you started or where you have gone. The journey fails temporal linearity as it capitalizes and perpetuates the attention disordered culture that we live in.

Yet in this world artists have been given an opportunity to engage with their viewers/(users(?)) in a different way than traditional art galleries may afford. As a child I remember the stiff atmosphere of an art gallery. The cold white walls would decorate the paintings that stood still and iconic. Velvet ropes defined the borders between appreciation and criticism. Guards were the warriors of silence and artistic preservation. Words were meant to be whispered and hands were meant to stay by one’s side. Maybe it was just me, but I always wanted to tear through all the borders and constrictions to feel the texture of the paint against my fingers. I was sure that the artist’s secrets were held in between the strokes of paint that defined its mastery. But in this environment the art seemed meant for only those that had the privileged knowledge that gave them the right to critically disseminate and dismantle the stagnant imagery hung on the wall by uttering pompous remarks about what they could only theorize was an artistic meaning.

Net art on the other hand is for anyone and everyone, but mostly for those who take the time to engage. Human exploration is key to understanding this art form. There is no velvet rope, there are no guards, this art can be experienced in the privacy of your own home, or when surrounded by people at a coffee shop or library. You can share, you can never tell a sole, there are many choices to how you experience net art and all of it comes down to the way in which you choose to play.

The curation of net art can be just as interactive and engaging. The art gallery of the net can be whatever you define. One of my personal favorites is Desktop It. The gallery itself is an artistic statement to your desktop. Within it are links to over fifty different pictures of desktops as well as some net art pieces. However, this site also brings to light the inherent nature of curation in digital space, site deletion or movement. Many of the links on this page are broken and thus is the case with many sites of curation. It’s as if the artist walked into the art gallery and pulled their painting off the wall leaving a gaping hole to be observed by the masses. Or maybe their piece was stolen, maybe there was a fire, maybe this art now exists nowhere and all we are left with is a blinking white page with a responding error message that makes us wonder if there was anything here to begin with at all. The impermanence of net art is inherent within the medium. While there is something so tangible to the way we interact and engage with it, there is also nothing physically viable that will define its existence for any guaranteed amount of time. This art exists outside of space and will only exist for as long as the artist chooses to water and feed it.

Personally, I am a fan of the breaking down of borders, constitutions, and definitions. The evolution of art within the net/web space has been at the forefront of challenging concepts of art and government for a while. It asks questions about community, viewer engagement, scientific understanding, and even strives to redefine our current definitions of art and curatorial space. My own interests lie heavily within examining the lines that blur art and science. The artist is now a scientific monger exploring at great depths the science and nature of their artistic expression.

EleVr is a research group that creates a series of art projects to explore and research their topics of interest. In the project “Monkey See, Monkey Do” they built a 360-degree virtual reality environment in which the viewer can manipulate the number of monkeys they see in four dimensional space. In their video 4Dmonkey.gif the evolution of art within these programmatic spaces is explored, and the lines that justify the separation of science and art become blurred.

The Johnny Cash Project is a massive web collaboration project to remix and recreate a “living portrait” of Johnny Cash. The website allows anyone to download and paint over a frame of Johnny Cash’s music video for “Ain’t No Grave”. Anyone can then vote on their favorite frames and the ones that gain the most popularity are put into a music video that you can watch. The frames that are included are changing all the time due to new frames being built and voted into existence. The website offers up the potential for collaboration from people around the world and is a piece of art within itself. It begs to question if art these days is ever a finalized piece of work or more of a platform to encourage new ways of human engagement and interactivity.

Net art has grown and evolved since it’s early days. Technology has advanced to a level where many things originally thought to be impossible are readily accessible. We are entering into a new phase where web browsers can process 3D modeling, interactive audio, virtual reality, and large scale interactive projects. This opens up a new world of creativity to be explored.