Tendencies

Since the end of the 1980s, if not before, technology has been developing apace, with digital cutting systems and camera offering broadcasting quality at affordable prices; “networking” and “interactivity” became bywords throughout the world.

The computer has now long been an object of everyday use. Its varied applications have been changing habitual forms of perception and communication. Theoretical discourse as to how this was happening and how it was changing opportunities for political action was taken up at an early stage in the arts. With the spread of the Internet, many artists and activists hoped to call into question on (at least) the net the mass media's representation of social and cultural-political power relations and to form there new virtual communities.

In 1990/91, the Austrian artist Wolfgang Staehle set up in New York and Vienna the mailbox exchange for art and community projects The Thing, which was later enlarged on the World Wide Web to include Rome, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg. In 1993, Barbara Aselmeier, Armin Haase, Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron began Handshake, the first artistic Internet project in Germany. Conceived as an interactive telecommunication project, it still operated within the framework of print-oriented news lists. But shortly thereafter, the Mosaic Browser popularised the World Wide Web. Its graphics-based user interface ensured the rapid spread of the Web beyond the hitherto mainly academic Internet scene.

Artists were also among the first to discover the World Wide Web as a free zone for experimentation. In cooperation with Thomax Kaufmann, Frank Kunkel and Gereon Schmitz, the artists from Handshake, for example, initiated the project International City in Berlin, a virtual community in the style of De digitale Stad in Amsterdam. From 1994 to 1998, it reconstructed urban and social spaces for encounter on the Web until it had to be discontinued due to lack of funding. The professional world of media art also began to exploit the possibilities of communication technology for the exchange of information: the Mikro e.V., founded in 1998 by fifteen net activists (including Inke Arns, Diana McCarthy, Pit Schulz, Tilman Baumgärtel, Andreas Broeckmann and Thorsten Schilling) and modelled on the English-language mailing lists Nettime and Rhizome, set up Rohrpost (i.e., pneumatic post), the first mailing list in the German-speaking world. It operated both as a source of information about events throughout Germany and as a forum for discussion and exchange.

Exploring the possibilities of the web

In Sub Fiction, the catalogue of the Third Werkleitz Biennale in 1998, the net artist Joachim Blank described the situation of net art as follows:

“From the website in black-and-white to one that completely does without any design elements, everything is being tried to break out of the new, boring, thoroughly stylised WWW. Net artists have been exploring the conventions of the Web and its virtual visitors by transgressing those conventions. Even the hypertext, inherent in the WWW, is being put into context. Many artists don't use any hyperlinks, others use them so excessively that one loses all orientation. So-called 'fake projects' are also very popular. Here net artists seek to lodge themselves within areas having nothing to do with art without being discovered. To do this, they copy design elements of a certain informational context and transfer them to their own projects. Products are offered that could never exist, services promised that nobody could ever supply … Buzz words popularised by the Web, such as dislocation, identity, truth, reality, territory, are taken up and radically altered. This has less to do with clarifying these terms than with artistic interventions that will confuse virtual visitors”.

Net art and archive

Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron were founding members of International City, Berlin. After it shut down, they started the site sero.org, where they collected projects based on themes ranging from spam (rem@il) to linking the web with real environment installations (Scanner).

Franz Alken works in a similar direction, presenting his subversive robot web projects such as Superbot 2003 or Superconsumer 2005 (together with Karl Rueskaefer) in the form of spatial installations.

Another category of web projects makes (alternative) information available: Stephan (Spiv) Schröder's Verybusy.org lists over 1,400 net art projects. Online net art databases such as Database of Virtual Art and Netzspannung.org of the Fraunhofer Institute were developed somewhat later and are administrated in accordance with scholarly standards. In D>ELEKTRO, Knut Gewers describes the development of electronic music in Germany, and Sebastian Lütgert's textz.com offers a collection of critical, sub-cultural and alternative texts by international and mainly well-known authors.

Opposition to the dictatorship of the newest and most expensive

The manufacturer-driven upgrading to ever newer, better and faster technology caused the user to follow suit, requiring constantly new investments of money. To counter this, artists have developed low-tech strategies that deliberately eschew the use of the newest, most expensive technology and instead seek to make the most of inexpensive or older computer and video technology. Open source programming, that is, freely available software and source codes, has often been used to break Microsoft's software monopoly. The free operating system Linux, which was developed by a world-wide community of programmers, provides a serious alternative to commercial systems and was therefore awarded the Golden Nica in 1999 at the Ars Electronica in Linz. In addition to Linux's stability and flexibility, it is its inherent philosophy of offering “free access to information and technology to all” that makes it attractive to manyusers.

Today the new media are given equal footing next to established art forms at many exhibitions and festivals. They comprise all digital computer art, whether on digital video, CD-ROM, DVD or the Internet. The question of production and carrier medium has become less and less important. Costs and content usually determine the choice of medium. Film, video, music, animation and graphics have all gone digital!