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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 Śnet.artą 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 Śnet.artą which he began using to talk about online art and communications'. Greene, R. (2000) ŚWeb Work: a history of internet artą, 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?