Reading Blog #2

Overall, I found this article quite boring, but the movement of using the internet as a medium for art is certainly important. The two qualities I find most appealing about net art are immediacy and immateriality. Immediacy relates to the immediate and widespread availability to the internet almost anywhere in the world. Intertwined with this quality is the necessity of having an internet connection to view the art, which often requires a paid subscription, paralleling a museum or art gallery's admission fee. However, many establishments offer free wifi (and gallery's offer free admission). Even so, one must possess a internet-capable device (or borrow a friends). For these reasons, immediacy is both a strength and a weakness of net art.

Next is immaterial. When thinking about net art and computers as a whole, there is so much more than meets the eye. Beneath the screen is a meticulous layout of buttons and wires foreign to any layperson. The ability for the hardware of the computer, which has a finite mass, to bring about a seemingly infinite amount of processes is astounding and is one of net art's greatest strengths. The overall connectivity between computers and systems also lends to this immateriality. Also underlying the net art itself is the code. Learning and writing code is an essential part of being a net artist and programmer, and net artists competed in this aspect. The function of code bringing about the art is just as mystifying as other aspects of computers.

Though I found the article's detailed history of net art boring and too jargon-y, net art has an important place in art history. Using technology as medium is perpetually growing more prevalent, especially as technology grows more advanced. I would even argue "net" art is becoming outdated. With technologies like VR, 3D printing, and robotics, the simple webpage is becoming too slow for our increasingly needy consciousnesses. Just as applications began surpassing webpages in the late 20th century, new technologies will continually replace each other in the art world and beyond until humans ultimately perish or advance as a civilization.