Developing a critical technical audiovisual performance practice engaging with 'the web' as both medium and subject matter.

Context: Net Art

There is one online subculture in particular, that emerged in the mid 90s, that I would situate my practice as being related and responsive to. That subculture is net art, or ‘net.art’: a kind of artistic practice that uses websites as an experimental artistic medium. Prominent net artists like Olia Lialina, JODI.org, and Eva and Franco Mattes, have acted as major influences on my practice.

During my research I also found a text by Olia Lialina, written back in 2005, but nevertheless reflecting on the same kinds of differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’ as I have here. From A Vernacular Web: The Indigenous and The Barbarians (Lialina, 2005):

(Describing the web of the mid 90s) 'To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer.' (p.1)

‘Bright, rich, personal, slow, and under construction’, is a descriptor I have aimed to achieve with this portfolio of projects. The last list item in particular, ‘under construction’ is important. I try to deliberately avoid considering any of my tools finished and done with, the nature of web development means I can copy, and iterate, and branch off each codebase indefinitely, tweaking and exploring ideas. This is a beautiful thing about using websites as your medium, they are ephemeral and changeable while still having the potential of leaving a traceable history of what they were before.

Though my work differs from these net art examples in its format and purpose, it is still fundamentally websites as medium, and websites as artwork. It is ‘net art’.