So we have this thing called the internet. Can we make art with it? I reference quite a few projects throughout this podcast, links are provided in the podcast details.

I have attempted to be creative with a computer for most of my life. And even though I was part of an underground art scene on the internet, I had no idea net art existed until I was in my late 20s. I’m going to talk about my discovery process in that context.

When I first started looking at graduate schools for art and design, I looked to see what current students were doing. I fell in love with the Graffiti Research Lab. It’s an art group founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly. The group came together when the two were fellows at Eyebeam. Eyebeam is an art technology center in New York City. Much of their work is informed by Roth’s time at Parsons School of Design and Powderly’s time at NYU.

As I researched more, I started following the breadcrumbs to Evan Roth and the Design and Technology program at Parsons. The dude is a bad ass motherfucker. Literally, google it. Over a decade ago, Evan exploited Google’s PageRank algorithm to have his name pop up as the first result if you were to search for “BAD ASS MOTHERFUCKER.” That Google search held as #1 for at least a decade. The last time I searched it was still on the first page. Obviously, I had to go to Parsons.

In one of our first creative code classes, we were introduced to White Glove Tracking. Evan Roth co-created it with Ben Engrebeth while at Eyebeam. The project that asked users to isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his landmark performance of Billie Jean. The software loads an individual still frame of the performance video and asks the user to click on Jackson’s white glove. When they click, the coordinates of the glove are saved.

This user generated dataset was created in 72 hours with 125,000 gloves being located. The data was then released to the public, where various artists created visualizations with it.

So fast forward a year or so and I’m in a class at Parsons co-taught by James Powderly and Andy Bichelbaum. It was a trainwreck.

That was pretty much on Andy as he rarely showed up. As a student, I was pretty furious to have wasted the credits, but another part of me had to ask: Why would my school let that happen? Now though, I’m pretty sure they were in the middle of production on “The Yes Men Fix the World” which you can watch on Netflix. Andy is one part of the duo The Yes Men along with Mike Bananno.

The Yes Men believe that corporations and government organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public. They will pose as a powerful entity and make ridiculous and shocking comments that caricature the ideological position of the organization or person. Kind of sounds like Weird Tik Tok, right?

One of their largest pranks was appearing on the BBC as a Dow Chemical spokesman. On the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, the Yes Men received a hit on one of their fake websites for Dow Chemical. The BBC invited Andy onto a news program as a spokesperson for Dow. The Yes Men, posing as Dow Chemical, announced that the company planned to liquidate Union Carbide and use the resulting $12 billion to pay for medical care, clean up, and funding research into the hazards of other Dow products.

After two hours of wide coverage, the real Dow Chemical issued a press release denying the statement, ensuring even greater coverage of the phony news of a cleanup. Dow’s share price fell 4.24 percent in 23 minutes, wiping out $2 billion from its market value.

Eva and Franco Mattes could be considered the precursor to the Yes Men. They first gained notoriety in 1998 by taking the domain name vaticano.org in order to undermine the Catholic Church’s official website. They then went on a cloning spree, copying and remixing other artists’ works, operating under the synonym 0100110111010101.org. They are pioneers of the Net Art movement and renowned for their subversion of public media. In their 2010 work “No Fun” they utilized Chatroulette to exhibit Franco Mattes staging a false suicide on one side of the screen, with people’s responses to it on the other side.

Using art and technology for activism fascinated me. Remember how I mentioned in the Hacking episode that you can find software for launching DDoS attacks? One of those tools is FloodNet, which was created by Electronic Disturbance Theater.

Electronic Disturbance Theater was founded in 1997 by Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray and Carmin Karasic. The group organized and programmed computer software to show their views against anti-propagandist and military actions. They mobilized micronetworks to act in solidarity by staging virtual sit-ins online and allowing the emergence of a collective presence in direct digital actions.

The FloodNet project allowed protestors to coordinate a DDoS attack. The first attack was executed on April 10, 1998 in a demonstration of nonviolent resistance in support of the Zapatista rebels residing in the state of Chiapas in Mexico.

So this is all Net Art. So when did the first net art appear? 1974.

Technically speaking, the internet as we know it didn’t exist at that point, but String Games String Games was the first artwork to use telecommunication technologies. It was created by Vera Frenkel, a Canadian multidisciplinary artist. String Games was composed of three live transmissions from Bell Canada Teleconferencing Studios in Montreal and Toronto with cumulative playback at Montreal's Galerie Expace 5. The piece was notable for, amongst other things, its early use of media and corporate sponsorship.

Net Art is not art that has been simply digitized and uploaded to the internet in some way. It’s art that intrinsically relies on the Internet to exist. It takes advantage of aspects like an interactive interface and the connectivity to multiple social and economic cultures.

Net Art can exist outside the technical structure of the internet. For example, the Pedobear meme started in 4chan on the internet. When a polish newspaper published a photo of the meme in an article about the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, that cultural moment became tangible.

Let’s get meta. In 1991, a community of net artists popped up on the net. It was called The Thing. The Thing was an independent art network that offered arts communities ways to establish themselves, send information to one another and conceive of new artistic practices deriving from conceptual art and performance art. The idea was that working with the Internet was a way to operate around the institutions of art distribution of the day.

Bindigirl, by Prema Murthy, is considered a pioneering example of internet art from a feminist perspective. It still lives on thing.net. Bindigirl questions our growing relationship with distance and tele-erotics, tourism and intimacy. It draws parallels between technology and religion and questions them. It utilized the then-emerging tools of streaming media as a platform for performance art. Portions of the website include animated images and text, chat logs, and an online store.

Speaking of the 1990s, towards the end of the decade, search engines began to gain prominence. One of those was Alta Vista. The Secret Lives of Numbers, by Golan Levin, visualized the popularity of numbers 1 to 1,000,000 as measured by Alta Vista search results.

This is a good place to talk about creative coding. If you are an artist who uses technology today, you could be a classically trained programmer that decides to express yourself through technology. You could also be a fine artist that has no training in programming, yet use whatever tools you can to create art.

Golan Levin is probably one of the first artists to sit comfortably in the middle. In 1994, he received a bachelor of arts from MIT in a self designed degree in Art and Design. He both mentored and collaborated with Zach Leiberman, another esteemed new media artist.

While Zach Leiberman is an amazing artist, in my opinion, his most notable contribution to creative code is openFrameworks. openFrameworks is an open source toolkit for artists that uses C++. Leiberman created the first release in 2005 with Theo Watson and Arturo Castro, who are also artists and programmers.

Today, openFrameworks is much more than Lieberman and Watson. It’s a thriving open source community with almost 300 contributors to the code base. That’s 300 people that are working on the toolkit itself. Thousands of people, if not more, use openFrameworks on a daily basis. A lot of that work is then experienced by many more people. Projects using openFrameworks can be found in museums, providing experiences at concerts, embedded in advertising campaigns and so much more.

openFrameworks was inspired in part by Processing, another toolkit for creative code designed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. Processing, or p5 as it’s known to some, was originally released in 2001. The two creators studied together at the MIT Media Lab in the Aesthetics and Computation Group, which also happens to be where Golan Levin received his Masters Degree. Yes, it’s all connected.

Creative code today is used to create live visuals, entertainment, installations, projections and projection mapping, sound art, advertising, product prototypes and a lot more. Outside of openFrameworks and Processing, other tools include Cinder, GNU Octave, Max MSP, Pure Data, Arduino, SuperCollider and Vvv.

https://www.pbs.org/video/-book-art-creative-coding/

Net art, creative code… This all falls under the definition of new media art. New is a bit of a misnomer. New media includes telephones, computers, virtual worlds, single media, website games, human-computer interface, computer animation and interactive computer installations. One of the cool things about new media art is that it doesn’t always require the creator to be concerned much with a pleasing visual aesthetic.

In 1994, Health Bunting created a web page listing the phone numbers for all the payphones in London’s King’s Cross Station along with a date and time for people to call. The result? A flash mob with various payphones ringing and people talking, way before social media.

http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ looks unappealing at first. It renders as green text on a black background. It’s nonsensical numbers, symbols and letters. Your browser must be broken. If you inspect the source code, it shows the real artwork. A series of text drawings reminiscent of technical diagrams. The hidden instructions are themselves the finished product. Jodi.org is an art duo consisting of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans.

In Deep ASCII, Vuk Cosic translates the entirety of the pornographic film Deep Throat into ASCII characters. ASCII is a coding scheme that translates English letters and characters into binary integers. As a computer art form it goes back to the 1960s although technically there was letter art long before that. I myself dabbled in ASCII, if you remember my talk from my underground days, so Deep ASCII resonates with me. If you look at a still image, you might not be able to make out the people. Once you play it in video form, your eyes should adjust and you’ll be able to see everything.

Deep ASCII is net art, but it isn’t really exploring the possibilities of networks. It’s really looking at the intersection between text and computer code, the use of spaces in information, and its fluid nature and infinite convertibility. It can be viewed as a video or a massive text file. The video could be encoded as an mp4 and streamed, but it could also play as a text file that appears to be video through code.

As with a lot of art, sometimes the artist is thinking about things that take awhile for the rest of us to catch up with. Cory Arcangel is a prolific new media artist. Many of his popular works are video game hacks, especially hacking Nintendo NES cartridges. But my favorite Arcangel piece is Punk Rock 101. In this piece, Arcangel takes Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter and inserts Google Ads throughout. The ads are tailored to the content of any given page by Google’s algorithms, so it juxtaposes Cobain’s angst with ads selling social anxiety treatment and motivational speaking.

In 2001, Mendi and Keith Obadike auctioned Keith’s blackness on ebay. After 4 days, Ebay closed the auction due to the “inappropriateness” of the item. After 12 bids, his blackness reached a peak of $152.50.

This work is even more profound today in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd. Whether or not Keith’s blackness would fetch high sums of money if Ebay hadn’t shut down the auction is a moot point. The part that resonates with me today is that a major technology company censored this as inappropriate, most likely because white people don’t want to talk about systemic racism. By shutting down the auction, Ebay was complicit by maintaining the status quo, which is white supremacy.

Artists can create art as a form of self expression, but the internet allows glimpses into our collective psyche as well. In 2008, Jon Rafman began collecting screenshots of images from Google Street View. It was relatively new at the time. Rafman conducted a close reading of Google Street View and began to isolate images from the massive database and publish them on blogs, PDFs, in books and large prints for gallery exhibition. Through these images, he reframed them within longer histories of photography and painting, raising questions about the meaning and function of these images and their implications for artists and image-makers.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotions through the internet by Jonathan Harris. Every few minutes, it searches for newly posted blog entries for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling” When it finds one of those phrases, it records the sentence that it came from. For example, if I posted a blog entry and somewhere in the post, I had written “I ate breakfast tacos today and I am feeling extremely good.” That entire sentence would be saved into a database. These sentences form feelings. These feelings can be searched and sorted in various ways.

Well, that’s art and the internet. Is your curiosity piqued? Let me tell you about a few resources.

Ars Electronica focuses on the interlinkages between art, technology and society. It runs an annual festival and manages a R&D facility known as the Futurelab. They also award the Prix Ars award. The Prix was first awarded in 1987. All entries remain on display in an online archive containing over 55,000 items.

Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet. One of the most challenging aspects of art produced with technology is archiving it and allowing an authentic experience many years later. If you’re interested in learning more about current art projects or are interested in funding for your own art, Rhizome is an excellent resource.

If you know of other resources, please share. It’s good to get out of our own bubbles.