Ten Myths of Internet Art

Abstract

This article identifies ten myths about Internet Art, and explains the difficulties museums and others have understanding what it means to make art for the Internet. In identifying these common misconceptions, the author offers insight on successful online works, provides inspiration to Internet artists, and explains that geographical location does not measure success when making art for the Internet. The article also mentions that the World Wide Web is only one of the many parts that make up the Internet. Other online protocols include e-mail, peer-to-peer instant messaging, videoconferencing software, MP3 audio files, and text-only environments like MUDs and MOOs. The author concludes his list of myths with the idea that surfing the Internet is not a solitary experience. Online communities and listservers, along with interactive Internet artworks that trace viewers and integrate their actions into respective interfaces, prove that the Internet is a social mechanism.

By the time the mainstream art world awakened to the telecommunications revolution of the 1990s, a new landscape of exploration and experimentation had already dawned outside its window. Art on this electronic frontier-known variously as Internet art, online art, or Net art-matured at the same breakneck pace with which digital technology itself has expanded. Less than a decade after the introduction of the first image-capable browser for the World Wide Web, online art has become a major movement with a global audience. It took twenty years after the introduction of television for video artists such as Nam June Paik to access the technology required to produce art for broadcast television. Online artists, by comparison, were already exchanging text-based projects and criticism before the Internet became a visual medium with the introduction of the Mosaic browser in 1993. By 1995, eight percent of all Web sites were produced by artists, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to shape a new medium at its very inception. Since that time, art on the Internet has spawned countless critical discussions on email-based communities such as the Thing, Nettime, 7-11, and Rhizome.org. Encouraged by a growing excitement over the Internet as a social and economic phenomenon, proliferating news articles and museum exhibitions have brought online art to the forefront of the discussion on art's future in the 21st century.

One of the reasons for the difficulty of adapting a museum to networked culture is that numerous misconceptions persist about that culture-even those who are savvy about art or the Internet do not often understand what it means to make art for the Internet. The following are ten myths about Internet art worth dispelling.

Myth Number 1: The Internet is a medium for delivering miniature forms of other art mediums.

Though you might never know it from browsing many of the forty million Web sites listed in an online search for the word "art," the Internet is more than a newfangled outlet for selling paintings. Granted, searching Yahoo for "Visual Art" is just as likely to turn up alt.airbrush.art as äda'web, but that's because Internet art tends to make its cultural waves outside of art-world enclaves, surfacing on media venues like CNN and the Wall Street Journal as well as on museum Web sites. More importantly, this art exploits the inherent capabilities of the Internet, making both more participatory, connective, or dynamic. Online renditions of paintings or films are limited not only by the fact that most people cannot afford the bandwidth required to view these works at their original resolution, but also because painting and cinema do not benefit from the Internet's inherent strengths: You would expect more art made for television than a still image. So when surfing the Web, why settle for a scanned-in Picasso or a 150-by 200 pixel Gone with the Wind? Successful online works can offer diverse paths to navigate, recombine images from different servers on the same Web page, or create unique forms of community consisting of people scattered across the globe.

Myth Number 2: Internet art is appreciated only by an arcane subculture.

Museum curators...