I find the Net.Art concept extremely fascinating, with this article in and of itself being a time capsule to the ye old day's of y2k. Considering this retrospective article was published 2 years before I was born, the subject matter is distant. My understanding of the early internet mostly comes from media, whether it be through osmosis from other media created at the time or from deliberate parody, like the game HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW. So, reading this article was like reading a historical account; while history is good, getting a full context of the past often requires archeological evidence. So, I decided to do some digging.
Most links were either dead or, worse, redirected to a nicer, unrelated webpage by the original creator. I guess one has to make a living, but it's sad to see webart substituted for airline software architecture. My searching did bear some fruit, however. Rhizome.org , mentioned as an archive for another piece of net.art in the article, is not just up, but still archiving loads of pieces dating all the way up to last year. The amount of pages up are dizzying, and I'll have to go through them when I'm bored. Potatoland.org is up, and, also remarkably, their html shredder is still functional. Sure, the kind of computer generated mashup art it represents is perhaps less novel, but it's still neat to see.
I kind of love the spirit of net.art. It seems transgressive and cool in a way that still resonates today. I really respect the work that's been done, and I feel motivated to start making crude HTML webpages about queer issues and capitalism and angst. Some of the websites might be dead, but hopefully the spirit can live on.
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