Digital Art

Christiane Paul - Digital Art

Exploring the section "Internet and Nomadic Networks"

The book is dedicated to various emerged and emerging art types related and originating to the digital world. This particular section focuses on the World Wide Web and how art orientating around it, has developed into a new movement. It explores how, for the first time, art has become a dynamic multi user experience, the WWW as a platform for users of varying experience in the field to collaborate together and create art.
The web has been around a long time, it's concept since the later years of World War 2, but not until the early 60's did it start to emerge as a new and accepted form of communication. It was not until the mid 90's however that the internet has been made more widely available to a general audience.
Art on the web with commercial backing has been around since 1984 when the National Science Foundation involved itself with ARPANET, an artist network. Possibly the first of it's kind. Pioneering the arts organizations however was New York based "The Thing". A simple bulletin board system for contemporary and cultural theory. In the 1990's the advent of HTML was conceptualized and made to be a collaborative multimedia information system. As HTML came to the fore front of web design so did the .com domain craze. This was really the spark that started the flash fire of commercial web enterprises.
Many new art related groups emerged during the late 90s. Of particular importance the NET.ART movement dedicated to net art (oddly enough). This is a good example of how art groups started to perceive how web art should be approached as this NET.ART movement was criticized when a conference of it's members was organized. The meeting was very exclusive and in an art movement that orientates around a global network this was thought of as a double standard. More open and incorporative communities were created as a result of this.
As web art took off, a more community based experience, the platform for users to interact became an issue itself and art started to approach the very foundations of the communities. Multimedia sharing became as much an experimental and involved experience as the work that was exhibited.
The most important and interesting point this section of the book brings to light is how the cyber is finally in decline from a digital experience back into a physical one. We are now experimenting with new forms of artificial intelligence which, although still basic, are actually not formulated on how much further we can take communication in terms of innovation but how we can revert our current innovations back to ancient communication forms. A good example of this is "Text to Speech". We want to prove to ourselves that our technology can be used to improve upon some of our most primitive information delivery techniques. This is a point that really comes accross while reading the section, and for that matter most of the book.