After following the development of art and culture in the context of the Internet since 1993 I am still fascinated: there seems to be no end to the sometimes surprising transformations in art and art criticism in this ever expanding field. The boundaries between media art and contemporary art, if they ever existed, are dissolving.

                       JODI - ICTI.me (2020) (Screenshot), part of We-Link, Ten Easy Pieces 

We live in strange and uncertain times. This year started off in a positive way, with the Datami exhibition curated by Freddy Paul Grunert at Bozar in Brussels. The Datami exhibition came out of a collaboration between artists and scientists at the JRC EU science center in Ispra, Lombardy, Italy. I gave a talk at the finissage of the exhibition and was to join a brainstorm for the follow-up when the Covid19 virus appeared in Italy and a tragedy of which we can still see no end unfolded. My heart goes out to everyone caught in the middle, and my friends and colleagues there in particular. While it is hard to grasp what is happening and how to proceed from here we have to move forward and not lose hope. It is imperative that we do not give up on life, and this means also to not give up on art and philosophy as some of the most valuable things we can use to make sense of the world. Because of this I felt honored to be invited to we-link: Ten Easy Pieces exhibition organized by the visionary curator Zhang Ga, even if in a humble way, providing historical context to the show. The international, decentralized exhibition, involving many art institutions I deeply respect and value, among them iMal (Brussels), V2_ (Rotterdam), Rhizome (New York), MU (Eindhoven), HeK (Basel), Arts at CERN (Geneva), has an amazingly energetic feel. Meanwhile I am trying to finish a chapter for a media art encyclopedia for Bloomsbury and wrote a short article (I will post a link when it is online) about INFORMATION for Metropolis M.

After following the development of art and culture in the context of the Internet since 1993 I am still fascinated: there seems to be no end to the sometimes surprising transformations in art and art criticism in this ever expanding field. The boundaries between media art and contemporary art, if they ever existed, are dissolving. Let's enjoy this moment together.

 Early photo of the Open Space artist initiative in Victoria, Canada, an important hub in the history of telecommunication art.

Though I have not updated this site in a while I have still been busy. First and foremost the research project around the late Robert Adrian's The World in 24 Hours is culminating in a panel presentation and exhibition at this year's Ars Electronica Festival. On Thursday September 5th in the afternoon there will be a special focus conference on the deep history of media art, with special attention for networked projects. I will be interviewing the legendary Bill Bartlett, organizer of Interplay, the first online conference for artists in 1979, live on stage. Bill Bartlett worked from the artist initiative Open Space in Victoria, Canada. Materials from the Open Space archive relevant to The World in 24 Hours will be presented in Ars Electronica's 40 Years Lounge, an exhibition dedicated to especially networked art in light of the Ars Electronica Festival's 40 years anniversary. I am thrilled this is all coming together and thank the Stimuleringsfonds voor Creatieve Industrie for having made my research possible! Other things I have been working on have come to their conclusion. The Dutch Digital Art Canon, for which I was an advisor, for example was launched in March this year during the annual Transformation Digital Art symposium at LIMA in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I could not be there because I was in New York giving a presentation in light of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology project. My presentation resulted in The World in 24 Hours becoming part of the Net Art Anthology. The text I wrote for the impressive Net Art Anthology catalog/book also refers to Adrian's seminal work. You can order this packed book from the Rhizome website. Besides also writing I have also given a lecture in V2_'s media art for beginners course, where I discovered a new hunger to learn about all things media art and net art related. Students came from across the country! It was great to see such enthusiasm, and I thank Alex Falk and Arie Altena from V2_ for organizing this, and artist Jan Robert Leegte for his great artist presentation during the event.

 The Swedish artist Jonas Lund combines media art deconstruction strategies with contemporary art practices. This results in works that are often participatory, conceptual, or performance-based. In his work Lund easily moves between online and offline systems, and between technological and socio-cultural constructs, all the while working the analogies that bind them. He first got international recognition in 2013 with his first solo exhibition the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), at the Rotterdam art initiative MAMA. For this show Lund created an elaborate analytical software system that told him how to construct each piece in the exhibition, with title and all, based on work by the top-selling artists of the time.

                                   Jonas Lund - Selfportrait

Software and network are basic properties of Jonas Lund’s praxis, both materially and conceptually. Some examples: in 2011 Lund made Blue Crush, a typical net art work in which blue pop up windows take over and crash the browser, and In Search of Lost Time, a Twitter version of the book by Proust, in which the book is broken down in 140 character sections tweeted over the course of 6,5 years. In 2012 he made The Paintshop.biz, a combination of interactive website, paintshop and website, in which people could design, print and sell their own paintings. The same year Lund also wrote an algorithm for a performance on Facebook called 1,164,041 Or How I Failed In Getting The Guinness World Book Of Record Of Most Comments On A Facebook Post. In the pivotal year 2013 Lund went from creating works like Paint Your Own Pizza (for Eyebeam), a work that was very similar to The Paintshop.biz, to almost completely dedicating himself to handling the art world as a system after his graduation. Lund commented on the art market already in 2011 with the spam inspired work Collection Enlargement and with several other works since. With his first solo show Jonas Lund however moved from the commentator position to that of the hacker, engineer, or systems architect.

Jaromil Rojo and Debra Solomon, Entropical, Zone2source, Amsterdam, 2015. Photo courtesy Florian Weigl.

These are interesting times: the year starts off with many exhibitions focussing on the crossover field of art, science and technology. The often criticized gap between the contemporary art field and that of media art (or AST, Art, Science and Technology) seems to be closing. The question is what this will mean for the acknowledgment of earlier work in the latter field. There is a lot of catching up to do! Luckily there are many occasions to talk about classic and new works this year. February is packed with events where we could meet and discuss. First up is Transmediale from 2 till 7 February. On February 5th I will be joining the Telekommunisten in their Panic Room session. There will be many other interesting sessions to follow, like for example that on the Tactical Media Archive. A few days after Transmediale TEC ART opens in the 'institute for avantgarde recreation' WORM, Rotterdam. Part of the opening is a public presentation and debate about what art and life would be like in a Post-Singularity world. The next morning, on Thursday 11 February at 11.00, I will be in an hour long discussion with cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen in the Reflections series at Art Rotterdam. The Sunday after that, on Valentine's Day, I have been invited to speak about the value of art in a mini-symposium at Zone2source, for the exhibition of Entropical by Jaromil Rojo and Debra Solomon. Other speakers include Merijn Oudenampsen and Koert van Mensvoort. Last but not least the topic of conservation is to be addressed at Transformation Digital Art organized by LIMA on 18 and 19 February. I will present a brief introduction to art in networks on the Thursday evening in a session with also Rafaël Rozendaal and Eric Kluitenberg.

In January 2013 I was a writer in residence at Quartier21 in Vienna, in the preparation for the Faceless exhibition, curated by Bogomir Doringer, that would be shown there later in the year. Faceless focusses on the trend of hiding the face in art and fashion. This short essay was written for the catalog, which is yet to appear. The text reflects on how identity is shaped through a historical reflection of the self in a social context, as experienced through tools and media. The work of four artists (or artist groups) serves as illustrations.

Spring 2014 I was invited to talk on a panel organized in Hito Steyerl's exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Theme of the panel was 'circulationism', a term Steyerl uses for the online distribution of images. I was asked to speak about alternative networks, or rather, about the possibility for the creation of alternative networks after the revelations made by Snowden showed the Internet is heavily surveilled by the NSA. In my talk I try to show alternative networks already exist, and will be very hard to erase or control completely by authorities.

“The location of power - and the site of resistance - rest in an ambiguous zone without borders.” Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance,1994.

This essay was written for the Post-Digital research conference in the Kunsthal Aarhus, which was a collaboration between Aarhus University and the Transmediale festival in Berlin.

In 2002 I was invited to speak at the Reality Check for Cyber Utopias conference in Zagreb, organized by MAMA, the Croatian media lab. I decided to talk about the way art is approached in many media art contexts, something I elaborate on almost ten years later in my book Nettitudes. I make a plea for a different view of both net art and media art, and defend the legitimacy of all contemporary art practices that involve the Internet.

Outdoor installation at the Technorganic festival organized by Cary Peppermint and Leila Christine Nadir in 2005.

In 2002 the Dutch Belgian artist duo Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) had their first big solo exhibition at Plug-In gallery in Basel. In preparation of the text I met up with the artists, and it became clear they wanted me to write a light text. They came up with the title themselves: Caricatures of Knowbotic Research. Knowbotic Research is a German-Swiss electronic art group, known for their extensive collabortions with media art labs and technologically complex works.  

Catalogue cover of install.exe, ed. Tilman Baumgärtel 

In 2001 I was asked to give a talk at NCC48, a rather curious 48 hour nonstop congress in a cave in Graz, Austria. I decided to present my very own thoughts on net art, after I felt many words had been put in my mouth by others. The hype and noise around net art had produced an almost impossible climate to discuss this new art context seriously. Needless to say my words hardly impressed anyone. Today it turns out I was right: more 'users' creates more mainstream art behavior; artists have started to explore the broader virtual field of the network (which is translated in 'new' theories from post-Internet to New Aesthetic);  and art institutions are very, very slowly exploring their new expanded field of influence. For your information: the open letter by Jon Ippolito I am referring to here criticized the possibility for art institutions to be able to get a .museum domain (instead of a .org or .com suffix), posted on the nettime mailing list in December 2000.

Today I would have to add some words to the last paragraph though, to be clear. I am NOT saying the Internet is a conceptual space, but I am saying that to think about art and the internet it is necessary to let go of simplistic and outdated notions of the Internet as a purely technological, singular medium. Quote: "So the 'web of possibilities', which is in the expanded virtual space of the combination of technology and humans is the true basis of net art. One could say the ability to see beyond the purely technical environment produces a new kind of abstraction in art."

Picture of the entrance to Dom im Berg, the cave in which the NCC48 congress was held

This review of Alexei Shulgin's music and data CD was originally written for Rhizome in 2001. For those unfamiliar with the 'band' or the name, a 386DX is an old type computerchip, the Intel 80386 developed in 1985.

The question of how to exhibit net art came up strongly in 1997. It became clear that some works were actually interesting for a traditional, offline art audience. In the beginning it seemed that exhibiting net art in a physical space was an anomaly, something contradictive to the nature and background of the attitude from which net art sprung. The online communities a lot of net art came out of refused to think of solutions for physical exhibitions, like they also found it very difficult (with some exceptions) to find a way to deal with question how to sell a net art work.

When I was approached by one of the net communities' most notorious members Frederic Madre to write a text for a tongue in cheeck woman's magazine I decided therefore to write a piece that was half satire half serious about how to deal with net art. In some sense one could say the text is metaphorical. By ridiculing the style of the average woman's magazine I compare the desire to own any art work (and also to exhibit it) to certain bourgois tendencies to use art in a semi-decorative way. We could ask ourselves whether our desire to own and present an art piece is ultimately more then a wish to exhibit our own cultural awareness in a fashionable way, like the American artist Cary Peppermint jokes in this text. The intangibility of most new media art and the impossibility to set limits to certain works force us having to face what exactly it is we want from art. Many do want something of art that seems missing: something to surround oneself with. Let's dive into the interior design of net art.

This short interview is part of a small set of interviews I did for a semi-ironic text about net art in the home called 'The Interior of Net Art,' which is also on this site. The goal of the interview is to find out how artists working with the Internet think their work could be exhibited in physical space, and also whether they think it could be sold. These questions have been hovering around net art from the mid-nineties. The artists and art examples in 'The Interior of Net Art' show a great variety of apporaches and opinions.

The grammar and spelling errors in this interview are not accidental, but part of Peppermint's writing style at the time.

Peter Luining lives and works in Amsterdam. His net art is rather 'stylish', in the sense that compared to most net art it does not that clearly reflect on net culture and information. His work is more easthetic. A few years ago [1998] he was called 'the next generation Superbad', because of his particular use of imagery in combination with sound. Peter Luining was asked to curate an exhibition for a Dutch gallery called Planet Art, on the alternative artfair Kunstvlaai. He has gathered an interesting collection there. This interview concentrates mostly on his own work though.

Lezing gegeven in Januari 2000 in SubK te Utrecht, ter gelegenheid van een avond over 'digipersonae'. 

De kunstenaar achter antiorp, Gheorghe Dan.