Taiwanese researcher Hsiang-Yun Huang and Argentinian-Uruguayan researcher Daniela Ruiz Moreno collaborate to investigate internet art from the perspective of postcolonialism and the Global South. This editorial features interviews with artists Vuk Ćosić (Slovenia/Serbia) and Brian Mackern (Uruguay), as well as a retrospective survey of net art from Taiwan and Latin America in the decade before the turn of the millennium. A Perspective on the Myth of the Origins of the Net.art, the interview with Vuk Ćosić, discusses the history of Net.art and reflects on whether the geographical location of artists had a direct influence on their creative processes. A Perspective on Net.art from South America is an interview with Brian Mackern about his own art practice and his insights on Latin American net art. What Happened to Art at the Dawn of the Internet? : A Revision of Net Art from the 90s to 2000s has its focus on the inception of both Taiwanese and Latin American net art, in an attempt to escape Eurocentrism in the contextualization of the discourse. In the future, we look forward to the further fermentation of this project towards exploring the differences in technical mechanisms and the digital gap between distinct regions, and examining the global political landscape through the frame of internet art. This editorial was first published on https://dac.taipei/.
Introduction
Since the pandemic breakout, it has been a necessity for institutions and individual practitioners to migrate to the online. However, the development of online platforms and internet-based artworks was already happening in the 1990s when the internet was starting to become available. Therefore, this article focuses on the situation of the born-digital artworks from the 1990s and 2000s which have been categorized as net art practices by “Western” scholars in order to find out the historical context of the present situation. The research period matches with the general access to the internet and it will focus mainly on the “regions” of Taiwan and Latinamerica. Although referring to geographical locations can seem contradictory when talking about the “borderless” online sphere, the research acknowledges that access to the internet, hardware, and software are indeed affected by the development of the technology, political/social structure, regional infrastructures and institutions.
A Brief Introduction of Net Art
Since the 1990s net art has been defined in many different ways. Initially, from the euro-centered traditional art history perspective, net art refers to a specific artistic movement that took place during the mid-90s with artists living mainly in Europe (to expand about the myth of origin see Vuk Cosic’s interview). [1] At its early stage, the artistic movement had an utopian vision of the internet, considering it as an autonomous zone and made an effort to differentiate from artworks for the internet (also called “web art”, “art in the net”) that perpetuated traditional institutional logics. [2] The general consideration of the network as a medium for a democratized access to art works and its documentation was another characteristic of this so-called movement. The network allowed them to propose ubiquitous artworks that could be accessed in cheaper ways. This provided a DIY philosophy and the idea that anyone could generate an artwork. [3] Some artists related to it nowadays consider that net art as a movement has died, it’s finished because of its institutional absorption which appeared as a limitation to its autonomy.
However, some net artists belonging to the above-mentioned movement do not identify with the concept of movement. [4] Moreover, researchers such as Josephine Bosma (Netherland,) Claudia Kozak (Argentina,) and Lila Pagola (Argentina) have expanded the considerations of net art, not as a specific movement but as an artistic practice and way of reception. Considering the non-binary relation among culture and technology is crucial to understand this expanded notion of net art. As theorists Claudia Kozak and Lila Pagola explain, net art should be understood as a technopoetic. This concept that they propose refers to any artwork, (including artistic projects, public art programs and even poetic devices) that “in various ways assumes at every moment their technical environment and acts accordingly.” [5] They consider both art and technology as regimes that have the potentiality to experiment and create with the sensible world.
The flexible definition that Bosma developed during 1996 to 2001 can be summarized as follows: “A net art work can exist completely outside of the Net […] The ‘net’ in net art is both a social and a technological reference (the network,) which is why the term net art is highly flexible […] Net art is art that is created from an awareness of, or deep involvement, in a world transformed and affected by elaborate technical ensembles, which are, in turn, established or enhanced through the Net […] Net art can be described as an expansion of the entire field of the arts. Net art is, therefore, not a discipline, because it contains and even connects numerous disciplines.” [6,7]
Several artists argue that there was a general utopian and even “naive” mood of the net artworks from this period. Much more than being a practice which was obsessed with its materiality or with the available technical devices, it made use of such an infrastructure to achieve a social necessity of collaboration which differed from the possibilities that cultural institutions were able to offer at the moment. Artist Thiago Hersan (Brazil) expressed that at the beginning the Internet “felt like a wide open space of exploration, of learning, of building, of meeting people. It was a time when using the internet and programming the internet was pretty much the same. But a few years later, a lot of the internet looked predetermined, with predetermined forms, predetermined questions and with reasons behind all this. And besides being boring, it was kind of a disappointment.” [8]
Early Net Art in Taiwan
In the 1990s, Taiwan had lifted martial law and entered into the era of globalization and capitalism. At that time, the internet had become more widespread, and personal computers have started to become widely involved in everyday life and for working, although it was not yet fully engaged in building up social relations in everyday life like it is nowadays. [9] Most of the net artworks from Taiwan are no longer available or difficult to find sufficient information. Here are the net artworks in that era: Jun-Jieh Wang’s Neo Urlab (1997), Huang Wen-Hao’s Internet Installation Art Exhibition – Secret Garden (1999) and Yu-Chuan Tseng’s Let’s Make ART (2003.) [10] The more well-preserved or documented net artworks were generated by artists based in New York at that time such as Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon (1998-1999,) [11] Lee Mingwe’s the RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center (2002,) Fang-Yu Lin’s installation From the Great Beyond (2005,) [12] and Doctor of Creative Arts in New Media Arts at University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, Yueh-Hsiu Giffen Cheng’s Cyber Fortune (2008.) [13] The above-mentioned artworks are preserved by institutions from the U.S.A. and the UK. In Taiwan, an archive of net art hasn’t been created yet and artworks from European artists, more than from locals, are easily accessed. Further in the article, a similar situation will be described for Latinamerica.
Take Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon as an example to have an idea about this period. The work was the first web art commissioned and collected by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It shows a story of a young transgender who was raped and murdered because of his gender identity. It not only used the latest technology at that time but also included performances and created an open-collaboration platform during the project. Brandon is not merely a “website” that happens on the internet, it also included holding public forums, chatting online, staging a virtual court that invited people to join both physically and virtually to become the jury of the court and discuss Brandon’s case at the Theatrum Anatonicum in WAAG SOCIETY in the Netherlands. Cheang emphasized in an interview held by Rhizome, “It’s an open narrative. I was inviting different participants to join to fill in the narrative, the content. I have always planned the project as a multi-artist collaboration.” [14] — [to be continued]
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Bio
Daniela Ruiz Moreno (Argentina / Uruguay) is an independent curator and art historian focused on interdisciplinary practices that combine video, performance, sound and participatory art. She has coordinated the Artist-in-Residence International Program of the Fundación ‘ace para el Arte Contemporáneo (Argentina) and has been a curator in residence at various institutions such as Delfina Foundation (London), demolición/construcción (Argentina), Guanlan Printmaking Base (Shenzhen) and Shanghai Curators Lab (Shanghai). In 2019 she received the Brooks International Fellowship and was part of the Tate Exchange team at Tate Modern. Currently she is based in Madrid and is working with projects supported by institutions as Fundación “la Caixa” and Espacio de todos.
Hsiang-Yun Huang (Taiwan) is a visual artist and researcher of contemporary art theory based in Taiwan and the Netherlands. Her art critiques about philosophy of time, internet arts and curating the digital were given grants by the National Art and Culture Foundation (TW) in 2018-2019 and 2021-2022. In 2020, she initiated a webinar/performance program Embodied Interface （Latin America, Japan, the Netherlands, Slovenia). In the same year, she and Chen Jhen co-created the exhibition Uchronia (interactive website about post-colonialism) both as an online exhibition and offline exhibition in Taiwan.
As a curatorial collective: They focus on internet art from the perspective of post-colonialism and the global south. With a process driven co-creation approach, their curatorial methodology articulates academic research and art practice. They have launched the project EMBODIED INTERFACE in 2020 and they are currently researching the issue of post-truth in the context of digital globalization.
[1] Hsiang-Yun Huang, Daniela Ruiz Moreno VUK ĆOSIĆ, VUK ĆOSIĆ: A perspective on the myth of the origins of the net.art, Taipei Digital Art Center, 2021
Link：https://dac.taipei/%e7%b7%9a%e4%b8%8a%e5%b0%88%e6%96%87/vuk-cosic-%e7%b6%b2%e7%b5%a1%e8%97%9d%e8%a1%93%e7%9a%84%e8%b5%b7%e6%ba%90%e8%bf%b7%e6%80%9d/. Access Date: 2021.10.01.
[2] PAGOLA, Lila and GRADIN Charly, Tecnopoéticas Argentinas: archivo blando de arte y tecnología, Net.art. Editado por Claudia Kozak, Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2015, p.184-185.
[3] This perspective also related net art to the previous international expansion of the Fluxus group, visual poetry and mail art.
[4] See footnote 1.
[5] KOZAK, Claudia Tecnopoéticas Argentinas: archivo blando de arte y tecnología, Net.art. Editado por Claudia Kozak, Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2015, p.1.
[6] BOSMA, Josephine, Nettitudes, Let’s Talk Net Art (Studies in Network Culture), 2011 p.23.
[7] ibid, p.24-25.
[8] HERSAN, Thiago, Other networks, other intimacies, lecture performance for Embodied Interface, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5L7jfIHOUo&t=2s
[9] Po-Wei Wang，Performing Arts Redefined (Platform). 334 edition / issue of 2020.10. Post-digital Condition:The Narrative Constructed Beyond the Screen. (「後數位」狀態下 建構逸出螢幕外的敘事 2020「亞當計畫」觀察) (in Chinese)。Access Date: 2021.10.1.，Link：https://par.npac-ntch.org/tw/article/doc-%E3%80%8C%E5%BE%8C%E6%95%B8%E4%BD%8D%E3%80%8D%E7%8B%80%E6%85%8B%E4%B8%8B-%E5%BB%BA%E6%A7%8B%E9%80%B8%E5%87%BA%E8%9E%A2%E5%B9%95%E5%A4%96%E7%9A%84%E6%95%98%E4%BA%8B-2020%E3%80%8C%E4%BA%9E%E7%95%B6%E8%A8%88%E7%95%AB%E3%80%8D%E8%A7%80%E5%AF%9F-fro0zh5tvk (in Chinese)
[10] The link of Let’s Make ART (2003)：http://tyuchuan.com/1988-2014/mart02/page/c_main.htm 。 See also ：曾鈺涓，數位藝述第5號，2016，DIGIART臺灣數位藝術知識與創作流通平台，〈 網路藝術已死？〉 （in Chinese）
[11] Link of the artwork Brandon (1998-1999) : http://brandon.guggenheim.org/
[12] Link of the documentation of the artwork From the Great Beyond (2005)： http://compustition.com/projects/beyond/index.html
[13] Link of the documentation of Cyber Fortune (2008) from Rhizome Artbase: https://artbase.rhizome.org/wiki/Q2032
[14] KARIN, de Wild, The Brandon Project: An Open Narrative, Rhizome, May 16, 2017, This interview accompanies the presentation of Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon as a part of the online exhibition Net Art Anthology. Link:https://rhizome.org/editorial/2017/may/16/the-brandon-project-an-open-narrative/. Access Date: 2021.10.20.
