Lessons from Internet Art About Life with the Internet

Abstract

Internet has been incorporated into our lives for almost two decades now. Within this time, it has proven itself to be so much more than a new technology for a new machine or “a medium of mediums.” Its relation to every aspect of life from a social, political, economic, and cultural perspective makes the Internet the most formative technology we have ever developed. Today, the length and depth of Internet’s role in our lives means that the Internet becomes part of our reality. We no longer see our lives with or without the Internet, it simply becomes “life” as “life with the Internet.” During these last twenty-five years, Internet art – from net art, to post-Internet art today – has been co-evolving in relation and in response to the Internet. As a cultural product of Internet technology, Internet art has been reflecting the multifarious changes we have been experiencing by living with the Internet. Copyright, open-source software, convergence, remix and appropriation culture, mixed-reality, and network sociality are all issues that are being raised and explored by Internet art. This chapter reviews Internet art’s evolution along with Internet technology and it highlights Internet art’s importance and potential for Internet research. It begins by tracing Internet’s technology evolution as reflected through Internet art’s brief history. Important Internet artworks are being reviewed in relation to these changes. It then extensively analyses post-Internet art as a unique cultural product of contemporary life with the Internet. Through this analysis, it presents an overview of the major areas of change in relation to art and the Internet through specific examples. This chapter’s important contribution is to offer a better understanding of Internet art as an art form in direct relation with a world shaped by Internet technology.