Inke Arns *

The Birth of Net Art Stems from an Accident

Comments about net.art in Europe from 1993 - 2000

"For example, the first page displays unformatted ASCII code. We accidentally discovered that it looks quite good. But we still receive complaints about it."
Dirk Paesmans (Jodi), Tilman Baumgärtel, [net.art], Nuremberg 1999, p. 111

"In Netscape 2.0 you could have this background that would change all the time, background 1, 2, 3 etc. You could make great movies with that. You could let it run ten times in a row. They took it out in Netscape 3.0."
Dirk Paesmans (Jodi), Interview by Josephine Bosma, zkp4 1997

The name "Dada" was created in 1916 when Ball and Huelsenbeck were searching for an artist name for Madame LeRoy, a singer in the Cabaret Voltaire, and blindly opened a German-French dictionary. Dada was French for hobbyhorse, or at least that is what Huelsenbeck claims when he was asked about the mythology behind the founding of Dada. A digital reincarnation, the creation of net.art almost 80 years after the Dadaist revelation is associated with a similarly illuminating event, or at least that is the myth or a version of the myth. During the rather heated discussions about the term "net.art" in the early 1997, the Moscow-based media artist Alexei Shulgin sent out his version of the history of the origin of the term 'net.art' over the Nettime mailing list.1 According to Shulgin, the term 'net.art' was actually a random term, a ready made that should in no way have any importance attached to it. Shulgin claims that Vuk Cosic, a net artist from Ljubljana, received an e-mail in December 1995 that had been resent using an anonymous remailer 2 . However, due to compatibility problems the text he received was an unreadable ASCII3 mess. The only fragment that appeared to make anything close to sense looked like this:

"[...] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 [...]".

After a few months Cosic sent the mysterious message to Igor Markovic, the publisher of a Zagreb-based journal, Arkzin, who was eventually able to decrypt it. It was a manifesto that heaped all kinds of reproaches on traditional art institutions and in contrast claimed that artists on the Internet had independence and freedom. The correctly converted excerpt, from which the 'net.art' fragment originated, is: "All this will become possible with the arrival of the Net. Art as a concept will become superfluous...", etc. Unfortunately, according to Shulgin, this manifesto no longer exists, because it was lost, together with other valuable data, in the summer of 1996 after Igor's hard drive crashed. A crazy story, one after Alexei Shulgin's own heart: "I like this strange story, because it perfectly illustrates the fact that the world in which we live is much more complex than all of the ideas that we have of it".4 The birth of net.art stems from an accident. So much for the myth.

Artists have been working with computer networks and new communication technologies since the 1960s. However, strictly speaking, "net.art" first came into being as more and more people started to use the Internet and especially the graphical interface of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s.5 net.art was (especially in the earlier phases until around 1997) a genuine product of translocal networking; artists from Eastern and Western Europe both played equal roles in the development of this new art form.

Net.art not only uses the Internet as a medium, but especially as a location and as material. Net.art does not include oil paintings that are digitalized and then placed on the Internet. That would be "art on the Internet." However, net.art is a genuine product of the Internet, which takes on specific characteristics of the sphere of the Internet and uses these characteristics - concretely: everything that makes it the Internet or the World Wide Web - as artistic material. This could be specific Internet services or protocols (e.g. http, ping, e-mail, IRC), the altering and typing of specific (artistic) software, the utilisation of specific scripts or the use of search engines and hypertext formats. There are many different forms of net.art: projects whose pages fully exhaust the hypertext format and invite the interaction with other documents within the context of the WWW. These works are "by nature" as ephemeral and instable as the networks themselves of which they are genuine components.6 However, some works also exist that deliberately refuse any form of interaction and disappoint the user's expectations.

One example of a net.art projects that fully exhausts the hypertext format is or was the 'intergalactic web loop' Refresh, which was a mutual undertaking of Andreas Broeckmann, Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin that began September 1996 in Rotterdam, Ljubljana and Moscow. The initiators sent out a call to several mailing lists asking people to create Web pages that would "creatively" use the "Refresh" function in a Web browser in order to link up Web pages that were located on up to 50 different servers in various countries, thereby ensuring a new Web page in the 'intergalactic roller coaster' would automatically appear every ten seconds. This project and its origins show the character of the Internet and the context of networking in which it came into being. Just a fraction of original Refresh ring is still online today.

However, as I already mentioned there are also works that deliberately refuse any interaction. One example of such a project that led hypertext format ad absurdum and disappointed the expectations of the user is the work of the British net art "pensioneer" Heath Bunting Heath Bunting, _readme7 (1998), which is a page of text, or to be more exact a text by James Flint, about Heath Bunting whose individual words represent hyperlinks to Internet addresses of companies of the same name ("dot coms") - a vision of terror that became even more explicit from the work's subtitle: Own, Be Owned Or Remain Invisible. It is conceivable that in the meantime companies have all registered copyrights for all these completely absurd domains. Bunting drives home the point here in a impressive way that the advancing fight for domain names8 is nothing more than the privatisation of public space. While many of the links came up as "404 Not found" back in 1998, at the beginning of 2001 almost all the addresses have been allocated.


Heath Bunting: "_readme"

Many net artists view themselves as Internet activists, like Heath Bunting. The types of action that are described in the following as being "net artistic" have their predecessors and parallels in real space. It is - although it sounds somewhat provocative - really what interventionist art in urban space or the political art strategies of the 1990s tried to achieve: to make visible the 'machinery' and the discourse forms, disorder or even destruction of expectations and structures, disappointments and explanations. The staging and the strategic implementation are different. One completely new aspect is the positive hype, the lofty expectations that were tied or ascribed to the Internet around 1996/97, for example with regard to the democratic, interactive or even economic possibilities. The projects described below radically do away with this hype.

People have tried to classify net.arts in the last few years. Vali Djordjevic asked whether cyber-artists are merely surface surfers or "screen designers" or whether they were "word processor" artists who deal with the structure and technical foundations of the Internet.9 Projects that use the Internet itself for raw material for their artistic work belong to the latter category. The Dutch-Belgian artistic duo Jodi, for example, deconstructs the HTML code10 , by using the ASCII characters of the source code11 instead of the sleek Web surface, thereby allowing the source code itself to become the image. I/O/D, a British artists' group, developed its own browser. Webstalker12 allows the users to map the structure and layout of a Web site. It does not display the Web surface, but rather allows the user to view the underlying structure. The question of site specificity13 also plays an important role in the ability to exhibit net.art. Does the work reside completely on the Web (in other words it is set specifically in this context - like Jodi's works) or is it a hybrid form in which one part exists on the Internet and an extension or an interface exists in the "real world"? Blank&Jeron created such a hybrid of one scanner that consists of twelve flat-bed scanners that were compiled together and developed a representation of this scanner and its activities on the Internet in Scanner++, which was realised in 1998.14 In addition to site specificity, the aesthetics of an artistic work is not just influenced by the orientation of the concept and content, but rather it is also influenced in a large part by the software and hardware that is used.15


Blank&Jeron: Scanner++, Fotos: Uwe Walter

Words such as index, rhizome, and hypertext are post modernistic metaphors that occupy the Internet, which due to its network structure (in a metaphorical sense) is a non-linear space, and search engines are non-linear practices in this space. Search engines scan the Web for images and documents based on specific keywords. The work without_addresses16 by Blank & Jeron (developed for documenta X in 1997) searches the WWW for a user name entered into the search engine. The best hits (or pages) that contained the specified names are copied, and the data rearranged. The change consists of "using a programmable template which rips the electronic fragments into its individual components, immerses them in a different background colour and pieces them back together in a typography that looks handwritten."17

Blank&Jeron: without_addresses
Blank&Jeron: "without_addresses"

The main goal of most early works of net.art was not to use new media and technologies. Instead, the goal was to purloin them. These projects have a critical and disassociated attitude to the media machines; they use strategies of infiltration, irritation and changing the function. They devote themselves to the aesthetic of the error, the media interference and the technical malfunction as well as the dysfunction and the aesthetics of the machinic, in other words the visualization of processes that are usually executed behind the sleek surface in the inner bowels of the machine. Or, as Andreas Broeckmann formulated in 1998: it is not about the "inconspicuous and seamless coherence of the material and virtual worlds, but rather about the mishaps, friction and breaks that are inherent in every technological reality."18


Proto-Net.Art-Piece TV-Poetry (1993/94) by Gebhard Sengmüller, Foto by the artists

A genuine prototype of a net.art installation is in this sense TV Poetry (1993/94) by the Austrian artist, Gebhard Sengm¸ller. On the occasion of the Medienbiennale Leipzig in 1994, he set up satellite TV receivers in three cities (Rotterdam, L¸neburg and Vienna) that switched channels every 10 seconds. At the same time he connected three computers that were equipped with text recognition programs to the receivers. The programs filtered out text elements from the television images such as subtitles or news headlines. The program was able to successfully recognize the text depending on the size and clarity of the "original" text in the television images. Every ten minutes the three computer programs sent the results via modem to the control centre in the Buntgarnwerke in Leipzig, where the results were outputted as an endless stream of text on a monitor. Easily readable text alternated with texts that had been turned into machine-produced gibberish and vice versa. TV Poetry was a silent meditation on the aesthetics of the machinic and the inconceivability of communication between machines.en.

jodi: index.html
Jodi, 404 Not found: unread, reply and unsent

The HTML deconstructions by Jodi negate the possibility that the Internet can be displayed in the browser through their visualization of the code. The objective of the works is to make the users think THEY have got a virus. After all, it is THEIR browser that crashes when they view Jodi's pages (and in the best case scenario only the browser!). Jodi works - and this is typical for early forms of net.art around 1996/97 ‚ with the material framework of the Internet medium and devotes itself to a subject that is usually dismissed as a technical dysfunction: a malfunction in the media communication between machines. Interaction is radically deconstructed.19

jodi: ip

jodi: bcd

jodi: ae
Abb. oben: Jodi, 404 Not found: unread, reply and unsent

The goal of the ASCII Art Ensembles20 (a group with members in Amsterdam, Ljubljana and Berlin), which was founded in 1998, is to transfer moving images on film into "net-based moving ASCII". The idea behind this is not to turn the source code into the image, as in Jodi's projects, but instead to represent (moving) images using ASCII characters. The process reminds the visitor of the early, graphic-free and 24-needle phases of printer technology, when images could only be displayed using existing ASCII characters and were therefore indecipherable. The ASCII Art Ensemble has already developed a java script and a java player for moving ASCII images. It is now working on a fast converter that would enable them to create moving ASCII on the Internet in real time. The final long-term goal is to develop a RealPlayer G2 Plug-In21 that supports the aforementioned new file format and can ensure that it is widely disseminated. Up to now ASCII to Speach history of art for the blind22 , is one of the only projects that has been developed to transform historical images into ASCII characters, character by character. A very nice process due to its pointlessness. A History of Moving Image, which gives the visitor an overview of the evolution in style and the distribution media of moving images in a series of seven clips, also exists, as does Deep ASCII23 , an ASCII version of the film ìDeep Throat,î that runs on a Pong Arcade. The visitor does not see the pornographic images, but rather their indecipherable ASCII versions..

The visitor is faced with another form of disappointment when he or she views an Internet project that, very simply, promises 'Answers.' For example, www.antworten.de (1997) by Holger Friese and Max Kossatz welcomes the user with the message "We are now serving 94. Sie haben Nummer: 99, bitte warten!!!" (You have number: 99, please wait!!!). The visitor is then confronted with an endless loop of muzak (elevator music) that is similar to the music you hear when you are put on hold on the telephone. After 100 seconds a question appears asking the visitor "Would you like to write something or read something while you are waiting?" If you click on 'lesen' (read), detailed access statistics for www.antworten.de since 31 May 1997 appear. These futile, painfully explicit statistics appear as coloured bar and pie charts. The tables display the "hits," "files," "sites," "kilobytes sent" for each month. You can also view the "full statistics" for 1999, 1998 and 1997 by clicking "links." The 'schreiben' (write) option opens a window that invites the user to write an e-mail to fragen@antworten.de. The next highest number is called after three minutes. Even if you have the patience to wait until you are next, you are then confronted with the message "Sie sind leider zu sp”t, Ihre alte Nummer war 99, Ihre neue Nummer ist 106" (Unfortunately you are too late. Your old number was 99. Your new number is 106). When you access antworten.de a Perl/CGI script24 reads the current number and displays the relevant graphic for the numbers. The numbers are assigned (current number + 7) using a cookie25 that is stored on the user's computer. The promising offer turns out to be an automated machine script; the hope of finding answers is all in vain.


The first page of "antworten.de"

Cornelia Sollfrank carried the game of virtual identities - and the deconstruction of those identities - to extremes in 1997. The Kunsthalle (Art Gallery) in Hamburg advertised an net.art competition that year. The artist neatly countered the Internet 'Extension' endeavour with a Female Extension. She created 288 international female cyber-artists, who she assigned individual snail mail and e-mail addresses. Sollfrank generated individual net.art projects for 127 of these artists using a computer program that gathered HTML material on the WWW and automatically rebuilt it. Even though the Kunsthalle was proud of the high number of entries from female artists (two-thirds of the applicants were women), the three monetary prizes were awarded to male artists. Sollfrank then exposed the intervention, which had remained undetected, in a press release.

Sollfrank: net.art generator
Cornelia Sollfrank's Netart Generator

In Sollfrank's new experiment, Netart Generator26, which she continued to further develop in 1999, three net.art generators were designed by four programmers offer their services under the motto "A smart artist makes the machine do the work!" One of the generators searches and generates predominantly text, while another is geared more towards images. All three generators correspond with different search engines and work at various speeds.27

Beispiel 2: Netart Generator

Beispiel 3: Netart Generator
Two other artworks by Sollfrank's net.art generator

In 1997 Moscow-based media artist, Alexei Shulgin, who was an early advocate of net.art, created abstract, artistic Web pages from HTML form elements that are usually used to build Web forms (buttons, checkboxes, text fields and pull-down menus). Under the name Form Art28 , he declared the creation to be a new art form. In July 1997 Shulgin announced a public competition ‚ the Form Art Competition - in which net artists could win $1000 for their work in this new art genre. The invitation announced with biting irony: "This new art form is based on the Internet technology and gives to an artist new possibilities for self-expression." Which was naturally counteracted by the very limited selection of forms. The contest winners were announced in September 1997 during the Ars Electronica in Linz.

Alexej Shulgin: Form Art
Alexej Shulgin's "Form Art"

Just as Jodi deconstructed the term "interactivity", Alexei Shulgin maintains an extremely critical view of this term in his 1996 manifesto, "Art, Power and Communication." In fact, many artists from Eastern Europe have repeatedly alluded to the meaning of a continually broken relationship to 'the media.' Lev Manovich underscores - motivated by Alexei Shulgin's polemic manifesto in 1996 - the meaning of differing experience:

"The experiences of East and West structure how new media is seen in both places."29 - "For a Western artist, [...] interactivity is a perfect vehicle both to represent and promulgate ideals of democracy and equality; for a post-communist, it is yet another form of manipulation, in which artists use advanced technology to impose their totalitarian wills on the people. Further, Western media artists usually take technology absolutely seriously, despairing when it does not work; post-communist artists, on the other hand, recognize that the nature of technology is that it does not work, that it will necessarily break down. Having grown up in a society where truth and lie, reality and propaganda always go hand in hand, the post-communist artist is ready to accept the basic truisms of life in an information society (spelled out in Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication): that every signal always contains some noise; that signal and noise are qualitatively the same; and that what is noise in one situation can be signal in another."30

In this sense, the Moscow-based concept artist and poet Dmitri Prigov gave a performance entitled "Orpheus and Eurydike" during the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 1994 in Helsinki, in which he used translation programs for businessmen and businesswomen to translate a 19th century poem by Alexander Pushkin from Russian into English, then into German and then back into Russian. Prigov felt the end result did not represent a terrible translation or a bad poem, but rather a new work of art, a text of the "lowest level of artistic existence," (Sasse) that had the translation program, which operated at the lowest level of artificial intelligence, to thank for its originality. Prigov's poetic attempts on the computer, according to Sylvia Sasse, can be viewed in a post-Soviet context, in which there are fewer apologists than sceptics of the new media culture. She writes: "In Russian cultural industryÖ doubts are expressed about the perfection and totality, the technological malfunction, the automatisation of the consciousness that can no longer be shut down even after the general program has endedÖ is discussed...".31 In Russia, as Alexei Shulgin has it, one rather expects "the computer network to break down" (ibid.), in other words that communication would be interrupted.

In their Internet projects, artists developed strategies of irritation against the Internet hype from the very beginning. The "raw" source code and media malfunction are set against the sleek surfaces, and against the techno-utopian hopes that are resonant in the sleek surfaces the user is faced with a strategy of disappointment, which is at best disappointment in the user's own hopes of the utopian potentials of technology. Artists from Eastern Europe played a substantial role in the orientation of early net.art. In addition to Alexei Shulgin and Vuk Cosic, Luka Frelih, Olia Lialina, Marko Peljhan, and Igor Stromajer are just some of the other influential artists who should be mentioned. I would even like to suggest that the experiences that these artists as (post)-socialist subjects contributed have strongly influenced net.art as a whole (especially as far as the malfunction as one of the facts that are inherent to technology as well as the expectation of the necessary failure of technology are concerned). As a genuine product of translocal networking, net.art is, especially in its early phase up to 1997, one of the first all-European phenomena after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Inke Arns, a theorist in cultural studies, lives in Berlin.


1 http://www.nettime.org . Alexej Shulgin, 'Net.art - the origin', in: Nettime, 18 March 1997, also published in: P. Schultz / D. McCarty / V. Cosic / G. Lovink (Hg.), ZK Proceedings 4: Beauty and the East, Ljubljana: Digital Media Lab, 1997, S. 28 http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4 [back]

2 Anonymous (re-)mailers allow people to send anonymous e-mails. Johan Helsinguis created one of the more well-known anonymous (re-)mailers in Finland in 1992. However, anon.penet.fi had to close in 1996 when the Church of Scientology demanded the identity of the author of certain anonymous postings. Cf. Michael H. Spencer, "Anonymous Internet Communication and the First Amendment: A Crack in the Dam of National Sovereignty", Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, Spring 1998, 3 Va. J..L. & Tech. 1. Available at http://www.student.Virginia.EDU/~vjolt/text_only/vol3/vol3_art1.html [back]

3 ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange [back]

4 You can find a discussion about the term "net.art" in the Nettime Mail Archive at http://www.nettime.org. A compilation and summary of the different arguments is published in the ZK Proceedings 4: Beauty and the East, Ljubljana: Digital Media Lab, 1997, see number 1 above. [back]

5Handshake, a group that was founded in 1993 by Barbara Aselmeier, Joachim Blank, Armin Haase and Karl Heinz Jeron, was the first communication project in Germany to include the electronic network of the Internet (even before the WWW came into being). Realized as an interactive room installation, it was intended to be a communication interface between the electronic network and the living world. Prepared communications and perceptual experiments (such as analysing Rorschach tests) based on text, visual and auditory stimulation referred to the cultural peculiarities and common ground of the participants. Handshake saw itself as a continuous process that intended to observe the behaviour of humans and machines in electronic networks. Handshake (1993-1994) is available from http://sero.org/handshake/ [back]

6 Andreas Broeckmann, 'Net.Art, Machines, and Parasites', in: Nettime, 8. März 1997 http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199703/msg00038.html [back]

7 Heath Bunting, _readme, 1998 http://www.irational.org/heath/_readme.html. Another project that makes the privatisation of speech on the Internet a subject of discussion is Daniel Garçia Andujar's s Language (property) (1997) http://www.irational.org/tttp/TM/trademark.html. The sentences that are listed here are registered trademarks ("Solutions for a Small Planet" (TM), "Where do you want to go today?" (TM), etc.). [back]

8 One example of a domain is "mikro," which is available from http://www.mikro.org. The last part of an URL is always a top-level domain. These consist of generic top level domains (GTLDs) and country code top level domains (CCTLDs). The current GTLDs are .org, .edu, .com, .gov, .mil, .int, and .net. There are also approximately three hundred two-letter CCTLDs such as .de, .ru, and .uk. [back]

9 Valentina Djordjevic, 'Textverarbeiter und Screendesigner: Internet f¸r Netzk¸nstler leichtgemacht' (Text processors and screen designers: the Internet made easy for net artists), netz.kunst, Jahrbuch '98-'99 ('98-'99 Yearbook), edited by the Institut f¸r moderne Kunst (Institute of Modern Art) in Nuremberg 1999, pp. 18-21.[back]

10 HTML = Hypertext Markup Language; the programming language used to create Web pages. [back]

11 Source code: A version that is written in a higher programming language and therefore a human-readable version of a program; it must be compiled in object code or interpreted before it can be execute by a computer. [back]

12 I/O/D, Webstalker, 1997, available at http://www.backspace.org/iod [back]

13 Inke Arns, 'A Particular Site-specificity, or: Do I Have a Good Reason to Be Here?', Lecture given at the "Netz, Kunst und Publikum - Vermittlungsstrategien der Netzkunst" conference, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, October 1998, in: BE Magazin, Berlin, Spring/Summer 2000; also available at http://www.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/Media/net-e.html [back]

14 Blank&Jeron, Scanner++, 1998 . Scanner++ was developed for the "body of the message" exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in 1998. Available at http://www.nbk.org/Ausst/Body/body.html [back]

15 See Hans Dieter Huber, 'Materialität und Immaterialität der Netzkunst', in: kritische berichte. Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, 1/1998, p. 39-53 [back]

16 Blank&Jeron, without_addresses (1997) http://sero.org/without_addresses/ [back]

17 Gerrit Gohlke, 'Greifen Sie zu!', in: Ortsbegehung 4 - body of the message, [Sandra Becker, Joachim Blank & Karl Heinz Jeron, Daniel Pflumm], Kat. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, edited by Inke Arns, Berlin, 4. Juli - 16. August 1998, [o.S.] as well as from "http://www.nbk.org/Ausst/Body/gohlkeD.html [back]

18 Andreas Broeckmann, 'DEAF98 - The Unreliability of Accidents' (Konzept), Rotterdam, 17 - 29 November 1998 [back]

19 Jodi, 404 Not Found: unread, reply and unsent http://404.jodi.org/index.html. 404 Not Found is the error message that a server sends a browser when the requested page does not exist. [back]

20 ASCII Art Ensemble http://www.desk.org/a/a/e/first.html [back]

21 The G2 Real Player is a popular, downloadable software that is available for free on the Internet and is used to play audio or video files. A plug-in for the G2 Real Player is a software that allows the G2 Real Player to read and play specific file formats.[back]

22 ASCII Art Ensemble, ASCII to Speach history of art for the blind http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/blind/ [back]

23 ASCII Art Ensemble, Deep ASCII http://www1.zkm.de/~wvdc/ascii/java/ [back]

24 CGI scripts or programs act as an interface between the user's browser/mail program, the server and other server side software such as database programs. They allow the user to run programs from a remote computer and view the results on his or her own monitor. [back]

25 Cookies are character strings that are created on a user's computer by a server and used to identify the user during a repeat visit. [back]

26 Cornelia Sollfrank, Netart Generator (1999) http://www.obn.org/generator [back]

27 Vgl. Ute Vorkoeper, 'Programmierte Verführung', in: Telepolis, 2.12.1999 http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/3466/1.html [back]

28 Alexej Shulgin, Form Art (1997) http://www.c3.hu/collection/form/ [back]

29 Lev Manovich, 'On Totalitarian Interactivity', Syndicate mailing list, Sept. 1996[back]

30 Lev Manovich. Behind the Screen. Russian New Media. Convergence [New Media Cultures in Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe], ed. by Inke Arns. Summer 1998 Vol 4, No. 2.10-13. Here: 11. [back]

31 Sylvia Sasse. "Anna Karenina na Puti v Raj" - Netzkunst, Computerperformances und einige Illusionen von der Elektrifizierung des ganzen Landes (Net art, Computer Performances and Some Illusions from the Electrification of the Entire Land). Die Welt der Slaven (The World of Slaves). XLIV, 1999, 285-306. Here: 287.[back]

Mai 2001