Net.art

net.art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting (irational.org, Daniel García Andújar, Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker and Minerva Cuevas). Although this group was formed as a parody of avant garde movements by writers such as Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber and Pit Schultz, their individual works have little in common.

The term "net.art" is also used as a synonym for net art or Internet art and covers a much wider range of artistic practices. In this wider definition, net.art means art that uses the Internet as its medium and that cannot be experienced in any other way. Typically net.art has the Internet and the specific socio-culture that it spawned as its subject matter but this is not required.

The German critic Tilman Baumgärtel - building on the ideas of American critic Clement Greenberg - has frequently argued for a "media specificity" of net.art in his writings. According to the introduction to his book "net.art. Materialien zur Netzkunst", the specific qualities of net.art are "connectivity, global reach, multimediality, immateriality, interactivity and egality".

The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet art. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet art history, than a specific genre. Early precursors of the net.art movement include the international fluxus (Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (Mark Amerika) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site.

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