#net.art

[yosefinasays]

In Defense Of Electronic Civil Disobedience

There has been some criticism lodged against us. Claims have been made that our activism is merely engagement. That our movement is sort of sofa ersatz activism. However, in order for this argument to hold true, you must make a central conceit. That the concrete world is somehow more real than the digital. Members of The Kollectiv do not view the net from this narrow scope. We see the digital realm as an extension of the more abstract plain of technology. We see the space, though incorporeal on a macroscale, to be very real.

The average user in 2024, spent a 1/5th of their life online. Whether engaging with shopping, posting, or just browsing the net this is a significant portion of time. Enough time is spent on the net that a culture has emerged around various social media sites. Artifacts are made that can only be interacted with in the digital space. And people can become totally enmeshed in a digital world if they wish. Interacting with the greater world almost exclusively in the digital realm. 

An extreme example would be an individual who works as a digital nomad, does all their shopping online, and interacts with others exclusively through social media. Although this individual would be seen to be living a fringe net lifestyle, this way of life is very possible. To argue that activism should not be done through the medium of technology is only alienating. It does not serve one's greater purpose. 64% of the world is online. That is 5.52 billion souls. 

Though The Kollectiv adopts a view of the internet separate from those informed by commodity and corporate interest, the economic activity on the net can’t be ignored. Imagine the disruptive potential of a boycott. The sheer volume of activity allows the activist to make lasting change on the world. We can look back to The Gamestop Short Squeeze. A grassroots political action originating in Wallstreets Bets. To go further back in history we can make reference to the initiatives of net.artists. Groups such as the VNS created works like the “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”. Work like this advanced both feminism and digital art. To write off the digital landscape as a lesser landscape of reform, activism, and engaging art, one would have to ignore the efficacy of these movements. 

Going further into the political landscape we can look at the example set by Net Strike. A software that was deployed by activists in the 90’s for digital sit ins. It essentially was a tool for groups to orchestrate DDOS attacks. A vector of protest, that has unfortunately been taken from the general public and is now deployed heinously by state actors to suppress movements. This reversal if anything shows that net activism should be more staunchly defended. The internet is now often the first point of contact individuals have with any movement. And it is also the center of global operations. Are rights on the net should be defended, advanced, and clearly defined. The right to protest should not just extend to the physical space, when the digital space is becoming such a driving factor in our lives.

The Kollectiv’s digital graffiti campaign and its current food disparity initiative is only the beginning. We plan on continuing to mobilize people to be the change they want to see in the world. By establishing our ad hoc hyperlink structure: essentially a website built within the framework of another. We will be raising awareness for our cause. Making people think about the effects of food disparity, while considering new ways to experience the internet. Are either of these aims ignoble? I do not believe so.

We are continuing in the footsteps of activists such as The Electro Hippies. Advancing methods of protest into the 21st Century. We are also continuing the efforts of situationist thinkers. Now that globalism taken home and the internet has pushed commodity and spectacle into our home. We must attack it at its source if liberty is to continue to flourish and grow for future generations.

 To ignore the possibilities of change now is rob the children of the future of their potential fruit. That is why I continue to call for the development of net.art and methods of activism on the web. Not only to raise awareness for causes affecting us here and now, but to change the landscape of the internet for the people of the future.

[yhancik]

60X1.COM by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung

60X1.com is designed to be user-unfriendly, aiming to serve as a counter structure to the model of most successful websites- portal sites where all the links are contained in one interface in order to generate a maximum number of hits, instead 60X1 is designed to generate a minimum amount of hits with it's long domain name, one way navigation and it's big file sizes of images, existing as an experiment to test viewers' patience and expectation, as well as calling the internet into question as a forum for communication.

View it on archive.org

Via Eternal Wanderer, from whom I also stole the video.

[vispoarchive]

Heath Bunting. a terrorist map of influence (2010)

[curatingyoutube]

TheInternet.Express

by #JonasLund from 2017 is still running online and offline at the panke.gallery –– https://www.panke.gallery/exhibition/theinternetexpress/

[artbythemurphy]

Net.art generator

The net.art generator is a computer program which collects and recombines material from the Internet to create a new website or a new image.

The WWW-interface requires the user to enter a title which then functions as the search term, and to enter a name as author.

The resulting images and websites are stored online in an archive from where recent results can be downloaded. The complete archive is only available to the artist.

[sinophone-net-art]

Title: 60X1.com (Sixties One Dot Com) 《食屎第一得金》 Year: 2003 URL: https://www.111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.com/ [Active] Format: Website Themes: Questioning user-unfriendly, internet as a forum for communication. Alter and remanipulate meaning and identity.

Artist(s): Kenneth Tin-kin Hung 洪天健 City/Country: Hong Kong/San Francisco

Notes: The work altered its apolitical net.art concept to focus on political causes after the events of the 9/11 Attack and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Therefore, two artist statements can be found on the artist's page.

More about:

Hung, Kenneth Tin-kin. 60X1.com (Sixties One Dot Com). Accessed December 13, 2023. https://www.tinkin.com/arts/sixties-one-dot-com/

Adler, Phoebe. Art and the Internet. London, UK: Black Dog Publishing, 2013. 78-81.

ISEA Symposium Archive. 60X1.COM. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://archive.aec.at/prix/showmode/37344/

[yhancik]

Ah yes, the famous net.art duo JODI!

original url http://www.geocities.com/mathprofjc/

last modified 2008-09-07 02:36:56

[laraboard]

// ARCHIVE ENTRY:

// echoing... ping//ping... loading... fragments found...

// data bytes corrupted [ ] ghost noise detected: static_sequence...

// DECODE/ATTEMPT:

// BEGIN TRANSMISSION:

01001001 00100000 01101001 01101110 01101000 01100001 01100010 01101001 01110100 01100001 01101110 01110100

[inhabitant] of the //net_vessel—half _rendered images, split-open GIFs,

~~— the text bleeding ~~ in the screen, glitching, glitching ( ).

click pulse //memory_a shovel of cyber dirt digging graves in the deep net. <error>:

[404] <where do they go?>

00101100 01001100 01000101 01010100 00100000 01001101 01000101 01001101 01001111 01010010 01011001 00100000 01001110 01000101 01010110 01000101 01010010

[LET MEMORY NEVER]

— flicker, flicker, expired pixels.

<html>

<body style=��background: #000; color: #00ff00;”>

<div class=“memory”>

<h1>RENDER_ERROR://Past Version Load Failed</h1>

<p>breathe_ghost trails_ <br>

echo archives on loop. // infinite loop_ (press ESC to exit?)

</p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

The code trembles—each [artifact] is a_ rupture. Memory collapses. A dial-up tone scratches against the fiber optic fog—[it lingers], sound trailing like an old friend. SHADOW IN THE WIRES glitched out, [00x] blinking in & out...

The net — (scraps & remains) // the ghosts whisper:

nostalgia.exe runs but cannot complete >> error: (file corrupted) >>

you dig through // glitchscapes of net.art ruins, gif_graves, bits of (code). You find a half-burnt pixel, a loading icon from 2003, it pulses—half // alive, half // gone.

The archives break open—the walls of the old net—snap in half; the pixels peel. Layers // memory, each torn screen reveals another: <<futures_that_were—past_dreams>>... — the echo pulses, pulses, and pulses each click: a resurrection, each refresh: a decay cycle.

FILE_SAVE: C:\Ghosts\invisible\trace.backup

A mess of jpgs & forum shreds: each byte collapsing back into the grid. Nostalgia—web.relic— funeral. Recycling...

// AND THE OLD BECOMES (new).

[k-net]

JODI.ORG

Es un dúo de artistas de Internet formado por Joan Heemskerk de Holanda y Dirk Paesmans de Bélgica. Considerados artistas claves del Net.art.

Se consideran muy importantes en la rama del Net.art. Cada uno de sus trabajos artísticos consiste en una página web en la cual se encuentra alterada la estructura y su código interno. Este cambio no es al azar y tiene una finalidad estética. Se trata de mostrar la fragilidad de este mundo virtual y cómo un ligero error de programación puedo volcar todo un sistema como lo es una página web.

Sus finalidades es explorar el ordenador para luego reflejarlo o plasmarlo en la red como una obra de arte. Para ellos, es un gran honor que miles de personas puedan ver sus obras a través de sus pantallas. En este caso, elegí la obra “20%Wrong”, la cual es una pagina en la que aparecerán los números “404” el cual es un error común cuando un ordenador no encuentra una” URL o HTML”. Pero en este caso, esta página fue creada totalmente adrede, y cada vez que cargas la página, cambian de color. (Amarillo, turquesa, rosa, pero jamás blanco.)

En mi opinión acerca del Net.art, me parece un estilo de arte bastante curioso, pero a la vez me fascina el hecho de que las personas seamos capaces de hacer arte a partir de errores informáticos o códigos y como lo comparten en miles de redes sociales para que otras personas sean capaces de apreciarlo. Es algo triste, que seguramente hoy en día la gente ya no haga este tipo de cosas, o muy pocas.

El color es plano, el número 404 está en el extremo superior izquierdo (números blancos sobre un rectángulo negro). El Error 404 es una de las manifestaciones de la lista de códigos de protocolo HTTP ( hypertext transfer protocol, o protocolo de transferencia de hipertexto) que significa: File not found.

[yosefinasays]

The Thanksgiving Day Parade

On November 28th the digital graffiti enclave The Kollectiv will occupy the social media accounts of McDonald's, Wendy's, and Starbucks. We will be exhibiting art to both demonstrate a new form of protest and raise awareness of food disparity in the U.S and around the world. We will essentially be making an ad-hoc website using hyperlinks to art, poetry, and prose.

Our work is informed by the modern hip-hop and punk ethos. And it is directly related to the real world. The synthesis of concrete and digital that is the modern day. We hope to show a different way of looking at the web.

One that isn't solely focused on commodity, capital, and convenience. One where we acknowledge the impact technology has on our lived experience. Only through adopting different frames of mind when accessing the dimension of technology can we fully explore the depth of experiences it has to offer.

[yhancik]

Great minds think alike, I guess! I also have a "fake Geocities page" unfinished project. I haven't given up on it yet, I have several visuals for it, but it's not yet put together. Likewise, it's meant to be the personal page of a fictional character, describing fictional artifacts.

A great reference for such works is Martine Neddam, well-known for her 1996 net art project mouchette.org (which is still up, you should check it out!). It was meant to be the homepage of a 13 years old, but progressively turned strange and properly creepy. She also created other characters since.

The disappearing Valentine Village story is kinda lynchian, even more so that "Универсальный магазин" can apparently be translated into "convenience store", which has significance in the Twin Peaks lore.

i often see your posts next to the screenshots of Geocities homepages captured by @oneterabyteofkilobyteage, and that made wonder: if you were on Geocities, somewhere back in the 1990s, instead of 2020s Tumblr, what would your personal site look like? What would you talk about? Would it be loaded with gifs, personal poems, low-resolution scans of photos of you? Would you join a thematic webring? MIDI files? ASCII art?

The answer to this question is kind of funny because I had actually made a fake Geocities page for a project back in college, but I never actually hosted it anywhere!

(The project was based on something I'd read about Alexanderwohl, a community in Kansas populated by Russian immigrants. Among other things, it featured a "Russian tourist attraction" called "Valentine Village," which was a little frontage town on the main highway, done up in a cheesy attempt to recreate Russian culture. There was a huge sign which said "Универсальный магазин" and went on like that, but no one could read Cyrillic, so no one knew what it meant. The frontage town was very small and was all you could really see when you drove by, so a lot of people saw it as a joke, as silly cheesiness, or just as bizarre.)

So I had this idea for an experimental webcomic in which a guy is driving through Kansas and in the middle of nowhere he sees this frontage town out of nowhere and then he just sees it. He knows he's been there before, but doesn't know how or why, and then . . . it's all gone. And he has a panic attack and turns on the radio and hears about the whole Valentine Village thing and the mysterious Russian tourist attraction, and he starts having a nervous breakdown.

Well, it had a prose version (which was eventually published in a lit mag) but I also drew a fake Geocities page for it. My idea was to have it be a realistic "mirror image" of the prose excerpt, i.e. write the page as though I were really the guy, except I know he's fictional, and make it pretty true to life as a Geocities page from 2002 might have been. It'd be kind of "eerie" in a very conventional way, I guess.

It's a shame I never actually put it up. I think I still have the image files somewhere . . . I should track them down and post them.

[yhancik]

Nest, a net art piece by Raphaël Bastide, made for Copy Paste Waste , based on a .mp3 inherited from Bruno Gola.

[vispoarchive]

Vuk Ćosić. Deep ASCII.

[sinophone-net-art]

Title: One Million Heartbeats 《一百萬個心跳》 Year: 2006 URL: http://blog.sina.com.tw/millionheartbeat/ [Inactive] Format: Interactive artwork includes wireless sensor network by FBI Lab, TNUA, video projection, sculpture, and interactive internet website Themes: Collective social behavior. Global and social interaction.

Artist(s): Futuristic Brilliant Interaction Laboratory 未來創意互動實驗室 (FBI Lab), Center for Art and Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), 台北藝術大學藝術與科技中心

Notes: This project consists of three phases. The third phase engages with participants through their views and comments on the blog, which are part of the criteria to determine the birth of the babies and their characteristics.

More about:

One Million Heartbeats. Accessed December 9, 2023. http://techart.tnua.edu.tw/heartbeats/index.html

Digital Art Foundation, Taipei. 《2006第一屆台北數位藝術節》邀展作品【一百萬個心跳】 [The 1st Taipei Digital Art Festival in 2006, invited artwork "One Million Heartbeats"]. YouTube Video. https://youtu.be/Ss_hJwrpsSQ?feature=shared