This article, titled "Web Work," by Rachel Greene was interesting in that it took us on a journey through the evolution of the internet and digital art. I was surprised to learn that the term net.art was created by accident, and that it became an umbrella term for all forms of online art, as well as communication, including email! I had never thought of email as an art form so I found this fascinating. I suppose email was a useful way to share art with others online, which makes me think of email as a sort of ancient ancestor of today's social media.
A lot of the online art forms in this article surprised me. One of my favorites was Heath Bunting's King Cross Phone In. It was interesting to me because the web page itself was not all that artistic, as it was just a list of phone numbers. However, society's participation in this web page created a real life soundscape of telephone calls. Many of the projects mentioned actually didn't sound much like art to me at first. One example are the hacker pages from jodi.org. I am still sort of confused as to what purpose this art form serves, other than an annoying 404 pop up, but maybe that was the point. Many other projects mentioned also seemed to serve a purpose as a sort of prank or playful fun, such as 7-11 and Documenta X. Digital Landfill and Shredder, created by Mark Napier even served to dismantle entire websites from their web code. To me, this seems more like a cruel attack than art, but to each his own.
Overall, I was impressed by the diversity of the digital art world of the past, and the many areas it expanded into. I guess before, when I thought about digital art I thought about images or videos, but there is much much more than that.
