Internet Art I: University of Chicago

The First Artists to use HTML

Net.art stood for communications and grpahics, email, texts and images, referring to and merging into one another; it was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another's interest through ongoing dialogue. Net.art meant online detournments, discourse instead of singular texts or images, defined more by links, e-mails, and exchanges than by any "optical" aesthetic. Whatever images of net.art projects grace these pages, beware that, seen out of their native HTML, out of their networked, social habitats, they are the net.art equivalents of animals in zoos
Rachel Green

Watch Christiane Paul's (Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney) talk at the Tate on the Lives of Net Art.
Read Web Work: A History of Internet Art (Artforum, 2000) by Rachel Greene (author of the book Internet Art). Look up the works and artists mentioned (many of the pieces discussed are still online) to experience them in their "native HTML" as Greene puts it.
Consider what discovering the Internet via the Web must have felt like to these artists in the early 90s, why do you think they would have gotten excited about it? What sort of potential did they see in the Web? Do you think this potential is still with us today?

Intro to HTML (through the lens of net.art)

In the video and article above, Christiane Paul and Rachel Greene share the works of various different Internet artists, predominantly from the net.art movement (the first wave of Internet artists). I've chosen a couple of the early net.art works mentioned to dive a little deeper into their history, concepts and code. @ kings x (phone in) by Heath Bunting (from the irational.org collective) and wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (aka "the misconfigured ASCII drawing") by net.art duo jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans).

We'll begin our journey into HTML by inspecting the @ kings x (phone in) code with netnet. Double click on one of the HTML element names (for example title, or img or h1 etc) in that netnet example, that will prompt netnet to explain that particular piece of code to you. Then click on "tell me more" to open the HTML Reference Widget. This will open the reference page for that particular element. Then click on the HTML Reference widget's "BACK" button to see the full list of HTML elements, then click on "BACK" one more time to see the HTML Reference introduction page >> READ THROUGH THE INTRODUCTION PAGE. Then take as much time as you'd like to inspect, edit and experiment with Heath's code.
In the previous example, I've updated Heath Bunting's code from it's original HTML1.0 to a more modern HTML5 version for our educational purposes. This is considered a somewhat sacrilegious act from the point of view of a museum curator, I explain why in this video. Watch that video to get a bit more historical/conceptual background on this (and other related) net.art pieces. I also walk through each line of code in the piece and explain important the technical bits along the way. As with the What Is Code tutorial above, you can also go through an interactive version if you'd prefer (NOTE: this interactive tutorial uses netnet-beta-v1.0 rather than the newer netnet-beta-v2.0, which requires a password: adalovelace and will have some differences from the newer version, most noticeably the absence of my video commentary)
In this last net.art video we'll take a deeper dive into the work of jodi.org as well as touch on other net.art topics including email art, ASCII art, form art and cyberfeminism. As with the previous video, you can also go through an interactive version if you'd prefer (netnet-beta-v1.0 see NOTE above) and you can also experiment with the (netnet-beta-v2.0) form art example from the end of the video.