What is net art? A complete guide to internet art

Tate puts it simply: internet art is art that is made on and for the internet, also known as net art (Tate, "Internet art"). Net art tends to be about the network as much as it is on it.

This guide is a map of the field: what the terms mean, how the movement changed era by era, what makes a work net art, how anyone keeps it alive, and where to see it. If you want to start with the works themselves, read our companion story Can a website be art?, which walks through ten pieces that made the case.

Net art vs related terms

The vocabulary around net art is messy, partly because artists kept renaming what they did as the internet changed underneath them. Here is a working glossary.

A useful test: if you took the work off the network and printed it, would it lose its meaning? If yes, you are probably looking at net art. If it would survive as an image or object, it is closer to digital or post-internet art.

Interactivity is common in net art but it is not the definition. For that broader idea, see What is interactive art?.

A short history of net art, era by era

Before the web: networks as art

Artists were making art out of networks long before browsers existed. Mail art in the 1960s and 1970s turned the postal system into a medium, with artists trading work through the post instead of through galleries. In the 1970s and 1980s, so-called telematic art used fax, satellite and early computer links to connect artists in different cities into shared performances. Bulletin board systems (BBSs) gave artists and hackers places to publish text art and share files.

None of this was "net art" in today's sense, but it set the habits the movement inherited: distribution over display, collaboration over the single author, and a suspicion of the institutions that normally decide what counts as art.

net.art, 1994–1999

When the World Wide Web opened to the public in the mid-1990s, a group of mostly European artists began using it directly. The name "net.art" is usually credited to Slovenian artist Vuk Ćosić, and it stuck as a label for artists such as JODI, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting and Olia Lialina.

Their work was fast, cheap and often deliberately broken. Pages that looked like error messages, hyperlinked stories that branched as you clicked, and sites that played with the source code underneath the page all treated the browser as a raw material. We go through the defining pieces in Can a website be art?, so we will not repeat them here.

What matters for the history is the attitude. net.art artists did not need a gallery, a dealer or a museum. They needed a server and an address. Many saw the early web as a space outside the art market, and much of their work is a commentary on the network as it was being built.

Institutions arrive: Rhizome, artport and the 2000s

Communities and institutions formed around this work quickly. Rhizome began as an email listserv founded by artist Mark Tribe in 1996 and grew into one of the central organisations for born-digital art. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate of the New Museum in New York.

Museums started commissioning work for the web itself. The Whitney Museum of American Art runs artport, its portal for net art and digital art commissions, launched in 2001. Artport is still active, and it remains one of the clearest examples of a major museum treating the browser as a venue in its own right.

The 2000s also brought new tools. Flash made animated, sound-filled, interactive websites easy to build, and a generation of artists and designers used it to make playful, experimental work. Much of it later became hard to view when browsers dropped Flash support, an early lesson in how fragile net art can be. We come back to that problem below.

Surf clubs and post-internet, roughly 2006–2015

As social media and blogs took over the web, net art shifted again. Surf clubs such as Nasty Nets were group blogs where artists posted found images, GIFs and remixes, treating the act of browsing and collecting as an art practice.

Around the same time, a set of artists and critics began talking about "post-internet" art. Artie Vierkant's essay The Image Object Post-Internet (2010) is often cited as a key text. The idea was that the internet had stopped being a separate place you visited; it now shaped everything, including sculptures, paintings and installations made for physical rooms. Post-internet work frequently appeared in galleries, which made it easier to sell and harder to tell apart from contemporary art in general.

Not everyone liked the shift. For some, post-internet art was net art pulled back into the market it had once avoided. For others, it was the field growing up and admitting that the online and offline worlds had merged.

Tokens, platforms and the browser again, 2015–today

The late 2010s and early 2020s brought NFTs, which promised artists a way to sell and own digital works using blockchains. The debate was loud. Supporters saw a market for born-digital art at last; critics pointed to speculation, environmental costs and the fact that a token often just points to a file hosted somewhere else. For net art history, the useful point is narrow: NFTs are about ownership, while net art is about medium. Some token-based works are network-native; many are simply images with a receipt attached.

Meanwhile, the browser kept getting more capable. Modern browsers can run 3D graphics, process audio, use cameras and read sensors, all without plugins. Artists working with creative coding tools now build live, generative and responsive pieces that open from a single link. We cover that side of things in Interactive generative art. In a sense, the field has come full circle: once again, a URL is enough.

What makes it net art: four traits

Not every net art work has all of these, but most have at least two.

1. Network-native. The work depends on the network to exist. It might pull live data, link to other sites, be shaped by visitors or simply only make sense inside a browser. Remove the network and something essential is lost.

2. Ephemeral and variable. Net art changes. Browsers update, links break, servers go down, and the same page can look different on different screens. Many artists embrace this instead of fighting it. A net art work is often closer to a performance than a painting.

3. Participatory. The viewer usually does something: clicks, scrolls, types, moves, chooses a path. Some works go further and are made collectively, with many people adding to them over time. The audience is part of the material.

4. Critical of its platform. From the start, net art has been about the internet as much as on it. Artists have poked at browsers, search engines, social networks and markets, showing how these systems shape what we see. Net art often reveals the machinery behind the interface.

How net art is preserved

Here is the uncomfortable truth: a lot of net art is already gone, or survives only in fragments. Websites depend on servers someone has to pay for, domains someone has to renew, and software that keeps changing. A work made in 1997 may rely on a browser behaviour, a plugin or a page structure that no longer exists. This is the problem of link rot, and for net art it is not a footnote. It is the central challenge of the field.

Preservation people use a few main strategies:

• Keep it running. Maintain the original server and code for as long as possible. This works until a dependency disappears.
• Emulate the past. Run old browsers and operating systems inside modern machines so a work can be seen roughly as it was meant to be seen.
• Record the experience. Capture a site as it behaves, not just as a screenshot. Webrecorder builds open-source tools for high-fidelity web archiving, capturing interactive pages so they can be replayed later.
• Document and re-perform. Write down how a work behaved, record video, interview the artist, and in some cases rebuild the piece with new technology.

Rhizome has been central to this work. Its Net Art Anthology project set out to retell the history of net art through a selection of works, restoring and re-presenting many of them so they could be experienced again.

In 2019, the New Museum brought this effort into its galleries with The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics, on view from January 22 to May 26, 2019. Curated by Michael Connor with Aria Dean, the exhibition presented 16 works drawn from Net Art Anthology, showing how born-digital art can be restored, shown and kept alive (New Museum). The title says something about the whole field: for net art, the archive is not just storage. Deciding how to preserve a work is part of deciding what the work is.

Preservation also raises questions without neat answers. Should a restored work look the way it did on a 1998 monitor, or the way the artist would want it to look now? If a piece pulled live data from a site that no longer exists, is a recording of it still the work, or only evidence that it once happened? Conservators, artists and archivists answer these case by case, and their decisions become part of each work's story.

For anyone making browser work today, the lesson is practical. Keep your code readable, avoid dependencies you cannot replace, document how the piece should behave, and assume that one day someone will need to rebuild it from your notes. Net art that plans for its own future has a much better chance of having one.

Where to see net art today

You do not need a ticket. Most of these are a click away:

• Whitney artport: the Whitney's portal for net art commissions and digital work, still active.
• Rhizome Net Art Anthology: a curated history of net art with restored works you can open in a browser.
• Tate's "Internet art" page: a clear institutional introduction and a starting point for further reading.
• New Museum, The Art Happens Here: the exhibition page for the 2019 show, with the list of works and context.
• Webrecorder: not a gallery, but a window into how archived web works are captured and replayed.
• Can a website be art?: our walk through ten works that defined the early field.

A tip: when you open an older work, give it some patience. Some pieces are meant to look broken, some load slowly, and some only work fully in an emulated browser. That friction is part of the history.

Net art now

Is net art still being made? Yes, though it rarely calls itself that. Today the field overlaps with creative coding, generative art, interactive installations and experimental web design. Artists build works in the browser that respond to a cursor, a microphone or a camera, that change with every visit, and that exist only as long as the page is open.

What links this work back to net.art is not a style but a stance: the network and the browser are the medium, not a gallery wall. A link is a venue. A visitor's movement is material.

Synfield is one small example of that tradition. Its worlds are browser pieces you open from a URL and explore with a mouse, touch or your hands. Two of them speak directly to the history in this guide. Constellation is an uneven net of stars. Draw the nodes toward you, spark one, and light travels the links from star to star, a quiet echo of the web's own structure of nodes and links. Echo answers a gesture after you have made it.

Neither needs an install, an account or a download. If you want to see what the browser can do as a medium today, open Explore and wander.

FAQ

Is net art still made today? Yes. Artists keep making work that depends on the internet and the browser, often under names like creative coding, browser art or generative art. Institutions such as the Whitney's artport continue to commission web-based work.

What is the difference between net art and digital art? Digital art is any art made with digital tools, including prints, animations and digital paintings. Net art is a specific kind of digital art that uses the internet itself as its medium. If the work loses its meaning when taken offline, it is net art.

What is the difference between net art and post-internet art? Net art lives on the network. Post-internet art is shaped by internet culture but often takes physical form, such as sculpture or installation shown in a gallery. The internet is its context rather than its medium.

Who coined the term "net.art"? The term is usually credited to the artist Vuk Ćosić in the mid-1990s, and it became the name for a group of artists including JODI, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting and Olia Lialina.

Where can I see net art online? Start with the Whitney's artport and Tate's introduction to internet art. Rhizome's Net Art Anthology is a curated history with restored works. For the foundational works, read Can a website be art?.