Stallabrass, J. (2003) Internet Art - The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, London: Tate Publishing
"Anyone with access to a networked computer can put work on the Net without the say-so of an art instituion (public or commercial), and anyone with access to a networked computer can, in principle, take a look." (Page 9)
"While computers are agile in the realm of simulation, digital technology is not merely a matter of reproduction but just as importantly of production." (page 10)
"This art [digital art] is bound inextricably to the development of the Internet itself, riding the torrent of furious technological progress that brings back into illumination antique versions of modernism, torn from matter and hurled into the ether, and so made suddenly and curiously new." (page 11)
REFERENCING RACHEL GREENE (my other source) - "In an introductory article to Internet art, Rachel Greene warned that her accompanying illustrations, torn from the Web, were like animals in a zoo. In fact, they are even more confined and rigid than that. Isolated and deprived of interactivity, they are like the still and lifeless shells of taxidermy. " (pages 12-14)
"The most fundamental characteristic of this art is that it deals with data, and can be thought of as a variety of database forms." (page 26)
Antonio Muntadas'
The File Room - an extensive worldwide archive of cultural censorship, at first compiled by a team of researchers but later added to by the public. A collaborative site to which users can contribute information within the framework established by the artist. It is still displayed in a gallery, however.
"Advanced computer graphics tend to be as obsessively naturalistic and fussy as nineteenth-century history painting. In modernism, the sign of contemporary was a geometrical simplicity that mirrored mechanical forms, both being manifestations of a Platonic ideal; in the age of simulation the sign of the contemporary is the completeness of naturalistic illusion. This is seen particularly in the computer games industry which drives the technology swiftly towards the ultimate goals of flawless Virtual Reality." (page 34)
"There are various reasons why avant-gardism and an interest in autonomy were strong currents in the early years of Internet art. First, there was the need to carve out a recognisably distinct area of interest of this novel art. Second, since modernism and the avant-garde were once more lively models, the issue of autonomy had to be addressed. Third, it was a way of hitting out against disabling and over-recursive strands of postmodern theory that had been used to shelter an increasingly conservative art world, while propagating heated apocalyptic visions that had sunk their readers in helpless inactivity." (page 39)
"With internet art, time comes in fits and starts. It imposes time on the user, while the user imposes time on the work in a discontinuous rhythm. Internet art may also contain representations of the other arts, bearing within them their own temporal frames." (page 40)
"The net has the potential to be the ultimate archive, the repository of all human knowledge, opinion and culture, yet it combines that ideal with an aggressively amnesiac urge. It could be the perfect memory system with everything ever uploaded stored, digital and thus unchanging, a Library of Alexandria for the contemporary age but without the fragility (or flammability) of books." (page 44)
"Time online takes the form of a complex, congealed space, a space that is both experiental and physical." (page 48)
"In the mid 1990s Britain had a fertile mix of technological opportunity and dissident opinion." (page 52)
"At its inception, Internet art was a marginal and oppositional practice produced in reaction to various failures in the wider art world. The centres of the US art world were and are the least marginal and best connected on Earth. If it was not prominent at the birth of Internet art, the US became increasingly so as the new art was drawn into the mainstream." (page 53)
"The difficulty with making Internet art in much of the Third World is not merely technological but social and cultural... It can be hard enough for culturally informed Westerners to grasp much of this work, let alone for those of different cultures and languages, and those with expensive and uncertain access to the Net." (page 54)
"faced with such a murky mass of disorganised data, many online artworks are actually built around the need to advertise their presence, or alterntively end up commenting on the communication processes which are inherent to the network itself" [Jon Thomson] (page 56)
