I don't think this got throughŠ.

From: Pit Schultz <
Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, 5 October 2013 06:23
To: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: CRUMB List <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Net.art.history?

the first exhibition ever done with Heath Bunting, Jodi, Alexej Shulgin and
Vuk Cosic together was "Files" in the 4th floor of Bunker Berlin, 01 -
30.11.1996
it consisted of a number of digital pictures, i have asked to simply send me
desktop hardcopies, mostly from mosaic browser showing their own work,
and was turned into a kodak karusell slide show projection, in a shuffle
mode / random order. i think each of them sent 10 screens and i made 2
copies of each.

none of the artists have seen it i think, you can ask each of them
seperately, i think most of them will agree that during the
email-conversations along the preparations of this little exhibition at some
point, net dot art appeared. Vuk later said it was me during a presenation
at Arco Madrid.
i really don't care so much. its simply usenet nomenclatura. but this
exhibition should be probably mentioned. it brought together the biggest
artist talents of the
nettime circle during that time, and i was very much looking forward to it
how it would disrupt contemporary media art a little, ultimately
showing the limits of the art system, playing with the rules, but also
understanding media not just as a tool.

Still have to get the slides from the curator who kept them until today :)
so, yes, i have invited the group and suggested this work.

but more importantly, we have talked intensively during that time, and i
have met each of them during various events, heath even visited me in
kreuzberg,
the rest in amsterdam or during other events, so the idea of a "net.art
movement" formed along these meetings with this group of artists.
about starting a artificial art movement, i tried to help to kickstart it,
see it happen.
olia lialina came to the net.art group during metaform budapest, with her
work "when my boyfriend came back from war". afterwards no new member
was accepted. and then the group declared its end a few years later, which
has been documented by others.
and which was always the plan. Vuk Cosic had an important role as a
strategist, i remember, crafting the ironic/heroic overhead of
post-communist decend, a mix of french surrealism, western product brands,
and obsolete public sculptures.
Jodi are maybe the most influential when it comes to coding and style, while
Shulgin and Heath are at both ends of the conceptual.

Alexej Shulgin followed next with the Refresh project, and a desktop
project. we had the most productive talks on "artificial" art movements,
deriving from digital folclore, which all of use believed as beeing the only
true net.art form. so he came later with "form art". It was the close
discussions we had in early 1996 during next five minutes and other informal
meetings where the agenda of net.art was discussed,
and the attitude each of the contributors brought in their specificities.

I knew Dirk from Jodi from before, as a VJ of the Zapptv video tape series.
Met Alexeij during an exhibition in Leipzig and later Berlin
where he exhibited shaking photographs. We agreed on many things regarding
the art world and media art, and finally Heath Bunting,
a friend, was a founding member of nettime, like Vuk Cosic who came to
Venice from Triest. Heath was into situationism, and
eco activism, street art, mailboxes and pirate radio. we very much agreed on
many "radical" approaches but also formal ones,
as we both worked with hypercard and fm radio.

i still think that during this phase everyone corresponded in one or the
other way to the works of the other, and due to the reflectivity to other
historic art movements, the strategies of institutional critique and context
art, and also the dialectical and direct relation to nettime, this group had
an intellectual and crititical level which has been hardly achieved
afterwards. often copied, and often questioned.
crafting a temporary art movement, playing with the expectations, even
making fun of the functionalisation, beeing ambivalent as well as political,
formalistic as well as contextual, i am sure that net.art is there to keep
its little place in art history.













 






On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Charlotte Frost
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Is this post one of the most iconic pieces of net art history?
> http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9703/msg00094.html
>
> Certainly Rhizome's Rachel Greene believed the story and made it 'art history'
> in an article written for Artforum in 2000 she put: 'The term Œnet.art¹ is
> less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred
> in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail
> only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of
> alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term ­ Œnet.art¹
> ­ which he began using to talk about online art and communications'. Greene,
> R. (2000) ŒWeb Work: a history of internet art¹, Artforum, v.38 (no.9): 162
>
> But as other writers like Josephine Bosma have argued, the term 'net.art'
> wasn't born this way at allŠ see her book Nettitudes:
> http://www.amazon.com/Nettitudes-Lets-Studies-Network-Cultures/dp/9056628003
>
> So was it a stunt? A work of net.art itself? And if it is a fusion of artwork
> and a tongue-in-cheek jibe at the discipline of art history (creating a kind
> of 'ism' to bait the art historians) what do we describe it as? A kind of new
> media new art history? Perhaps Rachel Greene didn't believe the story, but
> was also invested in crafting this red herring of a narrative? And whatever it
> was, how do we work with a post like this when studying the history of
> Internet art forms? How easy is it to misinterpret an list-based archive (or
> any social media-based archive)? To what extent do we have the license to
> interpret a list post or should we hunt down it's author and verify we've
> understood?



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