Glossary

Net art (sometimes styled net.art) is art made specifically for and through the internet, work that uses the internet's own structure (browsers, hyperlinks, network protocols, glitches) as its actual medium. For example: a JPEG of a painting shared online isn't net art but a piece that only exists as an interactive, evolving webpage is.

The name has an origin story worth knowing. In 1995, Slovenian artist Vuk Ćosić received a corrupted email that, when opened, rendered as the garbled fragment "net.art". The phrase stuck, and a loose international group of artists, including Ćosić, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin, and the duo JODI.org, adopted it for their browser-based works. Net art predates most of what we now call New Media Art by several years, and institutions took note early. The Whitney Museum launched its artport platform in 2001 specifically to commission and archive net-based work.

For collectors, net art raises the preservation question in its most extreme form: how do you collect a work that only exists as long as a specific browser or protocol keeps functioning?