Some Final Thoughts.

Some Final Thoughts

In the past nine weeks, I have tried to explore different contemporary manifestations of the original Net Art movement. At times, it was surprisingly difficult to find specific examples of artistic creations that matched my definition of Net Art: “instances of artistic expression that rely on the Internet for existence”. Often times, I would find something interesting, but it would not match my definition. I believe that this difficulty was due in part to the fact that, as I said in my second post, “net art…is still in its fledgling stages”. Indeed, in my time spent researching for this blog, I never once came across the phrase “net art” or even a vague reference to the original movement.

In light of this lack of popularity, it may be tempting to label the short-lived Net Art movement as unimportant or irrelevant. However, I would disagree wholeheartedly. The movement took a very cutting-edge artistic approach to creating art with the Internet that is still relevant to today. The ideas that these early pioneers explored are being re-discovered by contemporary Net-Artists. For example, in my last blog post, I wrote about an interactive music video called “The Wilderness Downtown”. This application uses Google-maps information to construct a personalized viewing experience for every user. This idea of interactive narratives was present very early on in Net Art’s history. In a net art piece from 1996 by Olia Lialina called “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War”, viewers explore a sort of virtual pop-up book by clicking links and images in their browser. Each click reveals a little fragment about the artist’s relationship with her recently returned veteran boyfriend. To be honest, it is a very cryptic narrative that doesn’t compare to the raw graphical complexity of “The Wilderness Downtown”. Still, however, with such limited tools, this artist was able to create a very distinct atmosphere within the piece. The fractured dialogue and stark visual landscape conveys the apparent sense of emotional disconnect between the artist and her veteran boyfriend. Likewise, “The Wilderness Downtown” uses Google maps and animation to communicate the themes of nostalgia and perdition in the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait”. Despite being created at very different times during the Internet’s evolution, both pieces utilize the Internet’s ability to involve the viewer in the artwork. At heart, they are both interactive narratives. They only differ in the technological capacity for visual and sensory impact.

In short, Net Art is still alive and relevant. But, what impact will it have on the world?

I believe Net Art’s greatest potential contribution to the world is to demystify part of the creative process. The average person tends to view individual artworks in isolation. In this paradigm, artworks are seen as representations of ideas that were created in a vacuum or some esoteric, unapproachable place. Essentially, they lack context. For example, many people view Picasso as a totally unique artistic phenomenon. Although he was definitely a masterful artist, his ideas and even his artistic style did not just magically come into existence. His artwork was heavily influenced by the work of African mask makers and contemporaries, like Braque and Cezanne.

 

For example, which of these pieces is by Braque and which is by Picasso?

Nothing, even the most spectacular, is created from nothing. Yet, for the average person looking at a single Picasso painting in a gallery filled with hundreds if not thousands of other artistic works, it can be very difficult to see these connections; to see history of creative thoughts that finally were synthesized and displayed on a single linen canvas. The evolution of ideas is not immediately evident, nor is it readily available to viewers standing in front of the canvas. To learn more, one has to have suitable motivation to take the time to search through different sources: books on art history or various websites.

I feel that Net Art has the ability to present this evolution of ideas in the same space as the actual artwork. Chromeexperiments.com is a prime example of this. Viewers can explore individual creative projects that present innovative uses of WebGL, CSS3 and HTML5 and sometimes examine the actual code. However, these individual artworks are presented along side a whole collection of other works that use the same tools and riff off each other’s ideas. Or, to go a step further, Net Art can actually make the process a tangible part of the artwork. This type of thinking is perfectly encapsulated by the Koblin piece “The Exquisite Forest”. The whole point of this work is to examine the way people creatively expand on each other’s ideas. Similarly, his other works “The Johnny Cash Project” and “The Sheep Market” allow viewers to look at the creation of individual components of the overall piece. In both these examples, the creative process – the evolution of ideas – makes up a large portion of the actual artwork.

All of this contributes to the idea that the Internet is the manifestation of human kind’s collective mind. The conscious results of unconscious creative processes can now all be found in one place – the Internet. The context and consequences of a single idea are now easily accessible and contained within a single system. Instead of seeing a painting in one place and learning about its history in another, all of this will be done through a single system or medium - the Web.

As all the people and computers on our planet get more and more closely connected, it's becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain.

               -    THOMAS W. MALONE, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.