This article was super hard to read. I think it’s because the concept of net.art is sort of mundane to me. Maybe it was a bigger deal because the internet was more of a novelty when most of the sites that are mentioned in the article were created, but since most of our lives are centered around the Internet, interacting with art is nothing new. The closest thing I can relate the phenomenon of net.art to is NFT’s. Although they are very different, they both exclusively live online. I’m interested to see what some of these artists could achieve in this day and age with the power of AI on their side.
One part of this article that I thought was really funny was the concept of a web shredder, or a web landfill.
“His Digital Landfill (www.potatoland.org/landfill) and Shredder (www.potatoland.org/shredder) tear the components of any Web page away from their code and either reconfigure them into a new design (Shredder) or add them to a dump pile of components from other pages (Landfill). These works are dynamic and fun, a bit like voodoo dolls for websites: Enter a URL and watch the chosen site get trashed.”
The idea of being able to just destroy someone’s website is such a good metaphor for internet interactions. Honestly, it’s so on par with the devious nature of the internet. I’m curious about what type of code was needed to prevent this from happening to major corporate websites. The early days of the internet seemed almost uncontrollable because there were very few restrictions. Now that the internet is a bit more well-rounded, I’m curious to see how AI and quantum computing will stir that up. Maybe we will see another wild west era of the internet…
