Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
free radio, it really took off in the mid
s when new browsers
made the Web easier to use. One of the most influential movements
working with such technology is the 'net.art', which emerged out of
the nettime discussion list. Those involved make art that can only
work on the Web. Among them are artists such as Vuk Cosic,
Olia Lialina, Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker and
the Irational [
sic
] Organization and many others. Though much of
this work is innovative, especially in exploring the possibilities
of a new medium, it is also oddly familiar. Practically every trope
or strategy of the post-war avant-garde has found new expression
through net.art, including Lettriste-style hypergraphology, involv-
ing the representation of codes and signs, Oulipian combinatorial
and algorithmic games, Situationist pranks, Fluxian or Johnsonian
postal strategies, stages technological breakdowns such as previously
rehearsed in video art, virtual cybernetic and robotic systems,
parodies and political interventions.
There are a number of reasons for this fast-forward reprise of
the post-war avant-garde. The nature of the Web as a medium makes
it easy to run through different possibilities. Furthermore the parti-
cular concerns of the post-war avant-garde, in particular in relation
to language, codes, signification and gesture, and the deliberate
economy of means by which many practitioners achieved their aims,
made such work an appropriate model for work on the computer.
It also constituted an acknowledgment of the degree to which such
work not only anticipated but also helped determine the form that
interactive digital media would take. But the work that was most
prescient about the future shape of digital media is Cage's
1990
"
.
Cage intended this silent piece, with its allusion to the blank screens
of Rauschenberg's white canvasses, to be a space in which anything
and everything could happen. This is perhaps the perfect model for
modern electronic media, from television to multimedia through
to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
4
'
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