Monthly Archives: June 2008

There has been some interesting discussion over at Rhizome.org in the wake of the Net Aesthetics panel discussion held recently at the New Museum in New York. For the most part it is the online after party for several of the panel members as they expand on some of the trains of thought originally conceived and derailed during the sit down discussion. However, one of the more entertaining and contentious points being fought over is an attempt to determine exactly when, or rather where, the separation between the first and second generation of net artists begins and ends. And then, pending resolution of that, what the work produced by the second generation should be referred to as. Net art 2.0?

Anyhow, in response to all of this Tom Moody has come up with a quiz to determine which side of the fence each might fall. Not that ultimately any of this is really all that important. Net art hasn’t reinvented itself so radically in the relatively few years that it has been a concern. It has simply responded and progressed at the same rate as the technology available to it. As the web expands in both its physicality and its capability, so do its uses as a medium and a platform. The redundancy of the art produced 5, 6, 7 years ago is superseded by the redundancy of the software used to create it rather any redundancy of spirit. The net art produced today, especially by surf blogs like Loshadka, Spirit Surfers and Double Happiness do not fetishize the technology they are based on. They may critique it, be playful and laden in irony, but they do so in the context that the platform, the blog, the wiki or whatever, now satellite the mainstream media in increasingly tight orbits. So while there remains to some extent the self reflexive naval gazing always inherent in the guarded clique; what they may be laughing at is increasingly comprehensible as the detritus of the web sinks into our unconscious.