Internet Art of the 1990s

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose, and I did not go to art school, but I love to pick up weird books about art in used bookstores. 

Betty: Hi, and I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school, but I used to be a gallery guide at an art gallery back when that job was feasible before there was a global pandemic. So I also like to read books, but currently, because I work at a hospital, I haven't been doing that. So I like listening to Quinn talk about art books that she has read as well. 

Quinn: Basically what happened is a couple months ago, I went to a used bookstore and I found a book about internet art from 2004. And I said to myself ooh, that’s exciting. And I really wanted to see what this book from now 17 years ago had to say about the internet. And so I have read the book and what I discovered is that it's way more than one topic. So we're going to have a little bit of a series popping in and out of episodes that are kind of centered around like, internet art from like the mid-1900s to the mid-2000s. But I thought we would start today by talking about a basic overview of what's known as “net.art” and sorta like very early, like mid to late 90s art creation online.

Betty: You know, that’s interesting. So I obviously haven't had a chance to read this book. I did briefly look up trying to procure this book when you first mentioned it. And I think I would have had to buy a used copy, it’s not quite available. But I am interested to learn about, or hear you talk about if there's any—like, it’s interesting that not only is this a book about kind of early internet art, a historic text about the history of internet art, it also is from 17 years ago. Because I'm also interested in, what did this person or people back in 2004 think of this? So it's like, there's kind of multiple layers of history, it seems. 

Quinn: Yeah. So it was written by Rachel Greene. I actually was not as weirded out by it as I thought I was going to be, because it's already talking about a lot of stuff that's like 10 plus years in the past from the time that it was written. So it didn't totally feel like bizarro world, but there was some stuff that did stand out to me. Like, she just used the word “the net” a lot, which is not common parlance anymore for the internet. She brought up Netscape Navigator more than once, which I've barely heard of. And even though like, by 2004, like things were starting to shift in terms of the social internet, it hadn’t fully—like Facebook hadn't been invented yet, that wasn’t—like the definition of the internet was not Google, Facebook, these kinds of things. But there were already like some shifts towards that direction. So it didn't feel totally out of time, but there were just like little things here and there sprinkled throughout that I was like, oh yeah, this book is from 2004. 

Betty: There was a brief moment—don’t be offended—when you, when you said, oh, this book is from 2004. I was like, was Quinn born yet? I mean, I know you were.

Quinn: [laughing] How old do you think I am? What's funny is this book more or less starts talking about stuff from 1994, that’s about the year when things really kick off, which is before I was born.

Betty: Okay. My next question was going to be like, what, what was some of the earliest stuff that was brought up in the book? Because I'm trying to think about if I was alive. And I was, I was alive in 1994. I was like three years old, probably.

Quinn: Basically the earliest pieces and the stuff that we're going to be looking at specifically today is from like 1994 to 1996, like right in the mid 90s period, when this has really kicking off. And this all loosely falls under the umbrella of this kind of movement called net.art. Which is a little confusing because the idea of like, “net art” can also just be a synonym for internet art, but there's also kind of a more specific subset of artists who are specifically under this umbrella. And they are… their projects differ from each other widely, but they're all defined by being on the internet and sort of pushing the boundaries of like, what art on the internet meant at that time, slash up to today. Like a lot of these people, obviously since this was really not that long ago, are like still very much working. But they also were connected by kind of a loosely shared group of values, which were about exploring the capabilities of the internet for like, crossing international borders, this idea of global reach of exploring different mediums and bringing different kinds of media together. As well as sort of the increased interactivity elements of the internet. And a lot of them were defined by this idea of like being… of wanting to oppose themselves to the commercial interest of the internet. Like basically from the very beginning of the internet, like, commercialism very much defined it. And that is how most people accessed it. So a lot of artists to define themselves by wanting to fight against that, to define themselves as non-commercial, non-consumerist, open to these international dialogues. It helps that there was like basically zero ways to make money doing this, like at all. It’s still rough out there now, but at least like Patreon exists. At the time, this was a complete deviation from like anything that could possibly make money.

Betty: I did actually read an interview from the Guardian. Someone did interview the author, Rachel Greene, and one of the questions to her was like, why do you think net art is important? And she did say that she, like at least her position was, she refuses to let commercial interests dominate the history and perception of the net. And that she doesn't want to exclude some of the most important and dynamic content that was on the internet that really shifted these ideas of aesthetics and political ideas as well as experimental ideas. And it is, it is true also that yeah, the internet is, there is a lot of aspects of its history that is about heavy commercialism and it has helped a lot in terms of, you know, the market and capitalism, for sure. It really is important to note that it's not, it wasn't really the only thing. And as a matter of fact, it did seem like there was a significant amount of people when the internet was first getting started, who really had this optimism of being like more democratic. Also more able to share freely—not just freely in terms of freedom of speech freely, but like freely, like giving things away. And while like, I guess these days there's criticisms of like, you know whether the internet is actually overall a net positive thing on humanity. And that's not a discussion we need to have in this podcast because that's way too philosophical. But yeah, it is important to know that there's like lots of people at this time who kind of saw it in that direction.

Quinn: It's funny that you should bring that idea up because another thing that these artists were really pushing back on was the idea of the internet as a utopia.

Betty: Interesting.

Quinn: A lot of users of the early internet were like very much falling into sort of like commercial spaces, and sort of spaces that were defined by companies even from the beginning. But there also was this kind of grand idea that like, the internet was going to be this apolitical utopia. And a lot of the net.art artists were coming out of like, Eastern Europe after the end of the Soviet Union. Like that's where a lot of the dominant artists of this period were located. And that's what their history was. So they had a lot of cynicism about the world, but also like had this very deeply entrenched idea of social responsibility. And so a lot of them were very cynical about the world and about what the internet was going to be, but they didn't view that as an excuse to give up on it. They kind of interpreted that as their responsibility to push back on and to create their own narratives and to explore what they could make for themselves and what spaces they could make for themselves.

Betty: Oh, I was actually going to bring this up later, but what you just said kind of reminded me of what we have talked about before and something that is kind of close to my experience as well. And that is an artist like Ai WeiWei, who you could argue also, you know, became an artist during this time. And he utilizes the internet a lot and engages in these community based works such as getting people to submit their readings of, you know, his performance and things like that. And using Twitter and using social media and using these like cross borders, international, doing these international projects. And I think he's an example, and I guess you could say I'm an example also, of somebody who kind of came out of a really significant period of time, at least in our country where there's a lot of heavy censorship and a lot of not being able to access a lot of stuff, including the internet, even to this day. But again, like for me getting a computer and getting on the internet in the mid 90s, which at the time there, I don't think the great firewall of China was established until later on when they realized too many people were looking at stuff that the government weren't happy with, but it really was eye-opening for someone like me. And to a large extent, like I am probably quite a cynical person in comparison to others because I'm like, ah, I was in this place where—that had a lot of, still has a lot of political instability and I'm not that optimistic about the future. But at the same time I'm like, well, because we came out at this, you know, type of environment, this is one of the reasons why we want to keep freedom on the internet and the world in general.

Quinn: Yeah, there’s lots of different ways to interpret kind of bad events and like bad images of the world. But yeah, you can see like, even in artists that are associated with like different movements and everything, like there's still the same kind of threads running through them that are defined by their cultural contexts. So I am going to show you a few different pieces to kind of demonstrate what people were doing at this time. One of the first well-known art pieces from this movement was called the King's Cross Phone-In. And so this was in 1994 and it was very simple. It was basically just a web page that had all these telephone numbers that rang the public telephones around London's King’s Cross station. And then it had information “during the day of Friday, 5th of August, 1994, the telephone booth area behind the destination board at King's Cross British rail station will be borrowed and used for a temporary cyber cafe. It would be good to concentrate activity around 1800 GMT, but play as you will.” And then there was a bunch of instructions of what you should and should not do when calling these numbers, including encouraging people to like, go to King's Cross station for themselves and like observe what was happening or to answer the phones by themselves. And basically just coordinated, like, I don't know, the world's first flashmob, maybe? Kind of? But just had all these people from all over the world call into King’s Cross station. And then this is a really cool example of what testing the very early capabilities of the internet for public art could be, because this was very simple, nothing fancy, just a plain web page. And it used very ordinary objects, just like normal telephones at a train station, but it completely transformed the context of those telephones. And suddenly like people got involved in it from all over the world and people who were there got involved in it, but they didn't even know. They just picked up a phone and suddenly they were part of a movement that they didn't know was happening. I just find this very interesting. And the artist, Heath Bunting, articulated this as bringing high tech to street level, which is so funny to consider a plain web page as high tech. But at the time it was, but it used like this cutting edge technology back to a sort of old news technology in everyday context.

Betty: I do find it interesting that it is using quote unquote high tech or the internet, but it is to activate telephones, which is still tech and also high tech at a certain point, but probably low tech by this point now. And one of the questions I was going to ask you is like, yeah, these works or that are a part of the net.art movement or net art movement, like, how is it that, or is it something that really could only be implemented because of the nature of the internet, or it cannot be either experienced or implemented in other formats in other forms? And I think this is an example of that, is that the internet gives the ability to organize these types of events and be able to have so many people participate. And whether it's to start a flash mob or having telephones go off in a, in a massive quantity.

Quinn: Yeah. These kinds of things aren't even necessarily about the technology. They're about using new technology to connect people in interesting ways. And that is one of the things with all of net.art art pieces, like pretty much the definition of it is that they are doing things that are pushing the capabilities of the internet and exploring that in different ways and things that they couldn't do off of the internet. To bring a very different kind of example of that kind of thing. There is a piece called My Boyfriend Came Back From The War. This was made by the artist Olia Liliana in 1996, and this is very different. It uses a lot of images, which was like, still pretty fun and fresh at the time. The internet was extremely text-based just because like, obviously images are so much harder to render. And so, you know, the technology was trying to get there, but as—

Betty: Dial up.

Quinn: Yeah. But I mean, as opposed to like, today's very image based internet, it’s funny to think of it being mostly text, but this was if he's that used a lot of images, like very grainy black and white images, but images, nonetheless. And it was a narrative work. It was basically this romantic dramatic story with the war as a backdrop. This was one of the earliest examples of work in which the user could influence the narrative. So they got to click through and experience it and could actually make decisions that influenced it, which obviously is a precursor to so many things, including I think most notably, narrative driven video games in which you can change the ending.

Betty: Yeah. As you are mentioning this interactivity aspect of it—and again, it is a good example of this, is something that is very difficult to do with traditional media. I mean, there have been pick your adventure type of books and I read those as well. So, so it's not impossible, but it's definitely, in my opinion, not the same experience. I think immediately it also reminds me of something we talked about previously. It reminds me of Papers Please. Like, because of this grainy early internet sort of pixelated looking art form, and then also being able to, you know, participate. It's like, oh, well, in that game, you could make a decisions, and the storyline is going to be different depending on what decisions you make. And text-based video games probably even predates this particular artwork, but does have pre—have precedent and continue to influence types of art today and also including video games.

Quinn: A very cool thing about this as well is that it was adapted into a Twitter-based project in 2014, it's called My Boyfriend Live Tweeted the War. And it's linked on the same page that'll be in the show notes that's about this piece. But it's basically a series of like Twitter messages that in all of the text on the Twitter messages correspond with the original text from the piece and you—it’s the same, like you can also click through and do it like that. But it just appears as these texts instead of the original format, which I think is such a cool adaptation into like almost 20 years later, adapting it to the cutting edge technology of the day.

Betty: A thought came up in my mind earlier when you started going through some of these works is, so we're talking about these types of non-traditional art movements, like, you know, making art on the internet. And again, it goes back to what we speak about a lot, which is breaking out of this box of the art gallery and that we don't, we don't have to be confined by going to a museum and looking at paintings or sculptures on the wall. These types of art can be experienced in—by pretty much everybody who can have access to a computer and the internet. And it is kind of making it more egalitarian. But now I'm just thinking, well, how do we exhibit these artworks in the future?

Quinn: This was a thing that was talked about in the book very directly, because this was a problem from the very beginning, both from people not seeing any value in the art that was being created, because they were like, well, it's just like, this is just stuff on web pages. We can't exhibit this. Like, it doesn't make any sense. And over the years there have been like basically virtual curations. And so this is a thing where—like on the flip side of all of that is like, anyone can be a curator. Like you can create a webpage that has like hyperlinks organized according to like what order that you personally think that someone should view art and have that webpage serve as an art gallery and curating these different pieces, right? So that's a thing that happened, like there were different databases that gather all of this art together, they were different sites that served as forums for this kind of thing. I'm not going to get too much into that today, but places like rhizome.org or THE THING were like, basically collectives that were places online for artists to talk to each other and collaborate, but also kind of to to catalog artworks and to keep track of them. And then museums actually started doing exhibits. And so even by like the early 2000s, museums were doing exhibits of net art and they were gathering these kinds of things. I don't know exactly what these looked like. I haven't looked into that yet, but yeah they—I assume that basically like, they had a bunch of computers and you can look at the, you could look at the work. Like I've gone to exhibits of like, video games. And they have, you know, images of video games, but they also just like have video game console so you can play the games. And so I assume it's, it's a very similar kind of thing as that. 

Betty: Well, I think now we've spoken about experiencing art during a pandemic, and now that so many art galleries and museums are doing virtual exhibits on their websites and also with Google Arts projects and stuff like that, literally there can now be virtual online curated shows or exhibits that people experience and curators can now like put something on a website or on the internet and have their curatorial comments or their interpretive text comments as well incorporated. Again, it should still be done well. Or let's hope they still do it well. And I'm sure some do so now there can actually be a website or something or an app, who knows.

Quinn: Well, I have two more pieces to show you that demonstrate two other kinds of art making from this period. One is this amazing website that is still active. Like you can just go to the website.

Betty: That's a lot of W's.

Quinn: Yeah. So it's wwwwwwwww.jodi.org. And if you don't wanna type that, it will be in the show notes, thank you very much. But this was created by an artist pair who collectively go by the title "jodi.org," which rules. And I will say, side note, if you just go to the website jodi.org, there is also—that website is also some kind of strange thing. Like if you just go to jodi.org, like basically sends you to a different art piece that jodi.org the collective has created every time, which is wild. It’s so fun to play around with it. Although I am afraid it's going to break my computer. But this specifically, if you type it on the w’s, you get this piece that they made in 1995, that is still available to internet, which rules. And if you go to it, it is dark black background with fluorescent green text and it's absolute nonsense. It's just nonsense. Here's the trick. If you go to view and then view source code on your browser, then it shows you the source code and those are drawings. You get these images, you get these little diagrams, the source code—it’s like a hidden illustration in the source code. 

Betty: Oh my God. This is so cool.

Quinn: Isn't that ama—like you, everybody just has to try this. It's so cool. 

Betty: And like, as somebody who has like—you know, not for years, but has made websites in HTML and CSS, I feel like I could just have so much fun with this. Like this might be what I'm doing later tonight is just to look through some of these pages. But this is kind of wild. This page with the green, just fluorescent green text. And when you click on it, it goes to another page with like, it looks like some type of topographic map overlaid with text and random symbols and then, and words that don't seem to make a lot of sense. And then you can click on those as well. It seems like a rabbit hole that you can really get into, but also it is a little bit, it is a little bit too much sometimes right now because of like, oh my God, I have so much work to do. And this is now just so, so much for my brain to handle. [laughs]

Quinn: Yeah, you can totally click through on tons of stuff and get so many weird things and nothing will ever make sense, because that's not what they do. But yeah, if you, if you are bored, just go to jodi.org and play around with whatever you get, and then do go to jodi.org again, and it'll give you something else and just do this forever. And I haven't run out yet. I don't know how many there are, but there are apparently a lot.

Betty: I just randomly clicked and I don't even know how I got there, of so some looping jif or GIF of, I want to say Super Mario, but it's in completely red and there's, it looks like an Andy Warhol, it's overlaid on the screen. It's crazy. I got to close this right now. It's kind of giving me a bit of a seizure. [laughs]

Quinn: Yeah, these two were pioneers in technological abstraction, which is quite clear by looking at all of this stuff. And the wwww whatever jodi.org is the specific piece that was included in this book, but then like clearly they are still actively working. Like they do tons of stuff all the time and are always playing around with like stretching the limits of what a webpage can do and what they can do to it without actually breaking it all the way, which is pretty amazing.

Betty: I honestly think I'm going to have so many posts that I can post on like Internet Is Beautiful or whatever on Reddit later tonight. There’s—I mean, which I'm sure has already been posted—or actually, I don't know if it's already been posted before.  I was going to, like, one of the things that I was wondering is, oh, I wonder if Quinn’s going to bring up anything that I've seen before and now I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but I think the answer is no just because the internet is one of these examples of, there are just so many niches and so many like corners of the internet that no—either no one knows about, or maybe even a significant amount of people know about, but because there are so many people in the world and so many things and so much that, you know, that's just not humanly possible for everyone to always discover. Like it's endless. You, you can never, you can never discover everything and never even discover every cool or interesting thing on the internet. 

Quinn: Yeah. Apparently even just jodi.org by itself is endless. So there's a lot out there.

Betty: So Quinn for the rest of our lives, we will just be looking at jodi.org and that's all we will be doing.

Quinn: I have one final piece to show you to wrap this up. And this is a piece known as net.art per se, otherwise known as CNN Interactive. And so the link that I have included is basically like this sort of capture of what this site looked like. This was a piece that was put out in 1996. In the stuff we were talking about earlier in sort of a reaction against like capitalism and a lot of the dominant ideas of the early internet, this was a very direct pushback against those things. So this was a recreation of what the CNN website looked like back in this time, but like everything on it was instead having to do with this, like little art convention they were having. But like all of these links go to different places on the internet. Like a bunch of them go to like Catholic websites, all this stuff.

Betty: Yeah, I saw that.

Quinn: And it's important to remember that at this time, like CNN interactive as a website was like extremely closely associated, it was basically just a synonym for like the constant American media coverage and frankly, the propaganda that surrounded the first Gulf War. And so this was directly a commentary on that.

Betty: Just a clarification. So was this affiliated with CNN at all? Like was CNN even aware?

Quinn: Oh, no. [laughs]

Betty: Oh, okay. Okay. I just wanted to make sure, like, because again, it's early internet, it's like, it's hard to tell and, and I won't even get into it, but like whitehouse.com was a pornographic website for a very long time and—or something like that. So anyway, it’s—but these things, honestly, to me, it's hilarious. I'm sure that the media companies and/or the White House were not impressed with these types of things, but.

Quinn: This is ubiquitous now, like making sort of fake versions of websites or like making like fake campaign websites for political candidates you don't, you don't like, this is a super common, but like, this was basically the first time anyone ever did this, like parodying a mainstream website. And so in it all, it basically blurs together these sort of very mainstream corporate websites and linking to these sort of corporate ideas, blurred with this text about the art movement that they're having, or like links to some of the art sites that they deem like artistic and things like that. And so it's almost like pop art in a way. Like it's very sort of appropriating popular media, but like using the imagery of that media to comment on it. So like I said in the beginning, we’re going to come back to these kinds of topics. I basically covered chapter one in some of the stuff I talked about today, there are so many interesting specific movements that we're going to come back to in future episodes, just cause like… it’s, it's delicious. It's so fun. So if you liked this episode, let us know and we'll make more sooner rather than later. If you didn't like it, I guess you can also let us know that.

Betty: Oh I did earlier—yeah earlier, when we were talking about the curations and like, when I asked the question of how would be exhibit these and I'm like, honestly, I know we like to self proclaim ourselves on these podcast episodes a lot. We can be art curators, you know, a Pictorial episode, and with links to these artworks is a contemporary curation of art, of internet art. So we have—we’re curators now, Quinn. 

Quinn: Yeah. In a way, every episode’s show notes is an art gallery, if you think about it. Don’t think about it too hard though. Alright, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Pictorial. You could find our show notes, that art gallery we made, at relay.fm/pictorial. And you could find us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod if you want to. You can also find me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter and Instagram @articulationsV. I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these episodes to YouTube under  Pictorial Podcast, which we now have a YouTube link, youtube.com/pictorial. You can get there and you can see sometimes these episodes are uploaded, uploaded a little bit later after we upload the initial podcast episodes, but you can watch along and look at what you speak about while it goes by on the screen.

Quinn: It's going to be a wild one for that. I can tell you that right now. Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!