NET ART

“Every web site owner is thus a curator and a cultural critic, creating chains of meaning through association, comparison and juxtaposition, parts or whole of which can in turn serve as fodder for another web site's ‘gallery’.”

—Ann-Marie Schleiner

This quote described to me my experience with net art. I was weaving through “chains of meaning” from page to page. A lot of the time, these pages didn’t necessarily seem to relate in terms of meaning, proving what Ann-Marie meant by juxtaposition. I was simply exploring one net art piece to the next almost without direction. I liked having the freedom to choose where I was going and what I wanted to spend my time with.

As interesting as net art can be, it is overwhelming more than anything. I get the most out of net art pieces with aesthetic quality. Some that I encountered were hopelessly linked to endless pages, leading me to a loss of interest on occasion because there was so much that I thought I was missing. Although the artist most likely intended for the viewer to not follow each link, I still feel like the piece isn’t complete. Each time I went to a webpage I wanted to be able to see each scenario per link at once and then have to choose a direction to follow.

The pages that kept my attention were still either hard to distinguish the purpose or so broad that it brought me back to feeling overwhelmed. “I am what I link to and what I am shifts over time as I link to different sites.” This comment by Anne-Marie Schleiner talked about how we show who we are by choosing certain pages to link. If you combine that idea with the endless links that appear on each site, that tells me that we are so complex and their are endless personalities, ideas, interests, etcetera that it is impossible to tap into everything going on in our brains.

One statement that stood out above all was Tina LaPorta’s “Shifting Statement.” In this she said, “Gravity shifts, solids become liquid, while space itself expands. The universe I enter is synthetic yet real because it is the construction of my own creation. I project out into the borderless space of the matrix where you and I connect, intertwine and dissolve but never (dis)appear. I thought Tina was dead on in this explanation of her experience with the internet. She argues that connections made online will never disappear, but they also never actually appeared because it exists virtually. This virtual world only exists because it is a part of us, but with out us it doesn’t exist.