On net.art, postinternet, and CryptoArt

As a listening exercise for different creator communities, Right Click Save has always resisted imposing taxonomic order on digital art. Attempts to do so invariably construct histories of progress that are no longer fit for purpose and privilege certain groups at the expense of everyone else. To address this problem, we established a specific category of articles for the purpose of celebrating digital art as a mess of competing visions while acknowledging areas of common language.

Three of the most common terms used to group digital artists of the last 30 years are “net.art,” “postinternet,” and “CryptoArt” in chronological order. Broadly coinciding with the three different iterations of the internet, one can make a case for net.art and CryptoArt as having the most in common, since both constitute groups of artists that embraced anti-institutional strategies and decentralization. When she coined the term “postinternet,” Marisa Olson was referring to art made “after the internet,” both online and off it. Although postinternet has sometimes been perceived as a push to fit digitally-inspired work into traditional art world institutions, Olson rejects this interpretation, instead insisting that the concept was meant to encourage a more inclusive approach to supporting contemporary artists.

One of the problems often associated with art after NFTs is that the new market masked the work of artists, curators, and theorists who had previously sought to establish digital art on rigorous foundations. Yet CryptoArt also unlocked careers for many digital creators who hadn’t previously been considered artists. Indeed, without NFTs, it is likely that many pioneering generative artists would have remained in the wilderness. In the spirit of intergenerational conversation as well as playful competition, RCS is pleased to bring together Marisa Olson with one of the pioneers of the net.art movement, Vuk Ćosić, as well as Jason Bailey, who codified CryptoArt in 2018, and Auriea Harvey, who made her name as a net artist in the mid-1990s before returning triumphantly to the Web3 scene. Here, they discuss how the language of digital art has evolved with Alex Estorick. 

‍Alex Estorick: Vuk, what do you recall from the early days of net.art and how do you feel about terms like “postinternet” and “CryptoArt” that emerged subsequently?

‍Vuk Ćosić: Although none of us here is comfortable with this model of representing a decade or group of people, if we play nice and compare these generations or waves, I like to begin with central motivations. Why did we go into our practice? What was creating our community of practice? 

I believe that, for the first generation of the early ’90s and for my group that came about a bit later in 1994 or ’95, the motivation was absolute autonomy. We were fascinated by concepts such as artist-run centers and publicly accessible art such as street art. For our musical preferences, we were into punk or new wave, and we also saw the disaster of grunge in terms of their super-rapid emancipation and avalanche of suicides that came immediately after. These were the cultural influences and surroundings that we appreciated. 

We saw ourselves as people who had finally found themselves a workable refuge from the art system: galleries, art bureaucracy, critics, theorists, gallerists — people with keys — as well as the art market. 

Without being evil or cynical about it, maybe it is possible to say for postinternet art — and I’m really keen to hear what Marisa has to say about it — there was not such a rough, confrontational attitude toward the art system as ours. We were full of piss and vinegar. 

Then, a generation later, we have seen an equally soft relationship to the art market of crypto, which I guess is how the generations differ. Our motive was to stay away deliberately from the art system and the art market because we thought that they were damaging to sublime artistic practices and high ideals. For us, everything else was a sell-out and we were cross with our friends who went to work in art schools. We thought they had sold out. Exhibiting in a gallery was like a defeat and the dialogues we had were brutal. We were purists who held to this idea of our own continent where you run and run and, as the first one, you look back and see your traces all the way to the horizon. That was the beauty and the adrenaline rush, and it lasted for a very brief period of time until we realized: “Oh, we need a critical and theoretical apparatus.”

‍Auriea Harvey: That’s so true, I mirror what you say.

‍Marisa Olson: I often hear people describe artists of that time as being cyberpunk, but I’m not sure if that’s really how you identify. I’m also curious about the specific time period you have in mind.

‍VC: Usually with net.art, we talk of an heroic period between 1995 and ’98. That’s just a small consensus. I’m thinking of the time from the founding of the nettime mailing list in Venice in June 1995 until we had a gathering in May 1998 in Banff, Canada, which is so beautiful that you can’t possibly work and there can be no critique or anything — it’s really where artists go to die. We happened to be there for a conference called “Curating and Conserving New Media,” which is where a few of us crazy anarchists made a deal to declare the death of net.art. That was a symbolic breakpoint because, after that, we had all these exhibitions everywhere — in fact, it was already happening in ’97. 

It became unbearable because instead of doing art we were doing art careers, which are two conflicting concepts and categories that should never mix in the same human being if at all possible. 

What followed was a bit of a vacuum and then the dot-com bust meant that there was not much talk about net.art for a few years, and then there was this generation of yours, Marisa, with a beautiful, useful umbrella expression that really works.

‍AH: We never really involved ourselves with “net.art” as a term, which felt sacred in a certain sense, especially with the “dot” in the middle and so we never claimed it. We were much happier to be “computer artists” or “multimedia artists” or “web artists.” But I was there during that whole heroic period cheering y’all on while being totally in love. Part of the reason I wanted to move to Europe was because I was just like: “I gotta be in the same time zone with these people.” Olia [Lialina] was my biggest hero; she and I met online and we’ve been great friends ever since. 

That moment in ’98 was crucial because you could now become an artist by making net art, web art, or whatever you want to call it. I didn’t meet Michaël [Samyn] until ’99, so I was still in New York, where there was this whole Rhizome period that I was not involved in. I was far more in tune with the Syndicate mailing list and the grimy underground of the net rather than Rhizome, which was kind of shiny and pop, trying to organize things, whereas these other projects were always fighting. I was in-between and not entirely in the arts because I was also trying to be a fake professional. But that was part of the freedom that Vuk was talking about. 

We were all anon. One day you could be running your own design studio and the next day you were an internationally renowned artist. You really could make it till you fake it, let’s say. 

Suddenly, I was in a position where I didn’t need a job because I could always find work on the web. Half of the people who hired me didn’t even know my name and nobody cared whether I was a woman or Black or if I lived in New York or Tokyo. It was a really beautiful moment and the networking that happened was on a worldwide scale for the first time. For someone so young it was very energizing, but people try retroactively to rewrite the story as if we hadn’t actually experienced it. 

I left New York in ’99 and missed the dot-com crash so, in a sense, I was protected by the fact that I had moved to another country. But the crash was felt in other ways. There was a time around the turn of the millennium when there was a lot of institutional interest: you had Rhizome, which was trying to get people to collect and conserve the work; you had ZKM in Karlsruhe, Gallery 9 at the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum, SFMOMA. But they weren’t treating us like real artists yet, so it was kind of fake with the exception of two shows: “BitStreams” at the Whitney, and “010101” at SFMOMA that we took part in. These were huge shows with digital commissions that hadn’t really been seen before. They paid us real money but then they just walked away like it never happened and it was ice cold. 

‍VC: I had several commissions with Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in the UK that are now practically non-existent. Nowadays, the only copies of those pieces exist on my disc and I don’t even know if I can ever actually display them.

We used “net.art” with a dot as a funky expression (originally invented by Pit Schultz, the co-founder of nettime) because it sounded like a file type such as .art or .doc. At the time, there was no internet culture so it took a bit of revolutionary spirit. 

For us net.art was an expression that we slapped on our dialogue and ambition to come up with new stuff, to refuse the consumer electronics trap — the idea that internet art has to be interactive, multimedia, and involve selling other people’s hardware and software — that was the worst. 

Auriea, earlier you said that nobody was taking us seriously. I know that this was my hyper-arrogant way of seeing things at the time, but I knew I was already there, that I belonged to the most important avant-garde, edgy movement of the time. I knew that it was only a question of time before the museums and art theorists came to the realization of how important it was. I wasn’t waiting for confirmation.

‍AH: I turned down the Whitney Biennial because I was just like: “what are you guys even talking about? Why are you showing a film program? This is net art, dammit.” 

‍MO: Wasn’t there a prevailing mythology about “net.art” being the result of a glitch or typo? I’ve sat in rooms where professors have taught that story. 

‍VK: That story was written by Alexei Shulgin, my beautiful brother from Moscow, sometime in ’97. He felt this urge to write a creation myth, which is completely bonkers — it was just a post on nettime and we all laughed our heads off and then moved onto the next thing. But then all the critics picked up on it and published it everywhere. We were pranksters.

‍AH: But there was also this whole other thread that involved thinking about interface design and about popularizing a website as well as the future of the media. It had nothing to do with net.art. That’s where you get Joshua Davis and projects like praystation — hybrid works that you could take offline. That was more “internet art” or maybe “multimedia”. We didn’t have these precise terms. [Laughs] But new media wasn’t a thing yet. 

When I saw Web 2.0 happening, I left the internet and went off and made video games. I missed postinternet entirely. 

‍MO: I remember writing a WIRED article, in 2000, about a panel that Auriea was on in San Francisco, where people were practically in tears about whether net art had to be connected to the internet. I’ve never been a purist myself and always had an interest in editing and remixing, working fluidly between online and offline formats. 

Back then, there were all these conversations about the right words to use when discussing internet art, as well as who gets to define it: curators, artists, critics, the audience. Does it have to be on a computer or can it be on some other kind of device? 

I was playing with “translating” my net art pieces to cassette tapes, ipods, prints, and other offline media including, early on, live performance. My Monitor Tracings (drawings) were the first work I explicitly called “postinternet.” With emergent forms, there’s a frequent cycle in art made with new tools. In the more nascent periods of photography or cinema, one often encounters more self-reflexive, recursive approaches. For instance, you often see hands in early photograms, where the form and content is about photography itself and its relationship to the body of the photographer. It’s not till later that artists are finally allowed to go beyond photography for photography’s sake and make work about other subjects, whether they’re more creative or perhaps more political — which is not to throw shade on the earlier work!

I was Rhizome’s first commissioned writer in 1999, back when they were still a Listserv  and so, around the time when you’re talking about the “death” of internet art, that was when they first got money to start commissioning writers to review exhibitions and opened up a new chapter of support for artists. A few years later, I was their first Editor and Curator, and I helped fold their Listserv into proper publications, while organizing some of their first major exhibits (including the first-ever animated gif show). We were looking to amplify the dialogue and build a community, a vocabulary, and an art historiography. I’ve always been interested in language, partly because my father was a cryptographer, so I was always conscious that those of us curating and writing about this work were actively involved in coining or perpetuating new terms.

‍AE: Are you conscious of any alignment between the work you were seeing at the time and the wider move toward user-generated content that came to characterize Web2 from the mid-2000s?

‍MO: Instead of “Web2” or “Web 2.0” I refer to “social media” and an internet that revolved more around social relationships, as well as the availability of more WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) tools with fewer barriers to entry to the web. To me, “Web2” or “Web3” are really commercial terms that are more about propelling capital than anything. 

Usually, we artists are already using tools before other people come around to using terms. I remember being on a panel about Web 2.0 and I was like, “Oh, there’s a term for this now? We’ve already been doing this for 10 years.” 

It was actually on another panel at Electronic Arts Intermix, organized by Rhizome in 2006, when I started bringing about the phrase “art after the internet.” Rhizome had this mission to support internet artists, but I really wanted to expand the mission to look at internet-engaged artists. I wanted to be more inclusive and think about the variety of ways artists were engaging with the internet, and then what they were making as a result. For instance, I saw feminist artists working in craft who were making work that I might think of as internet art. Even though it was offline, it embodied the internet. It described the internet and it critiqued the internet. For me, those would be markers of “postinternet.” 

The phrase “after the internet” is something that people continue to cite and yet constantly misunderstand and criticize. Some people panicked, like, “What do you mean, the internet is dead!?” And my response was, “No, the internet is not dead!” Although the world wide web is definitely dying and that’s by design. What it really meant was a kind of afterness in the sense of postmodernity and in the sense of influence, like when art historians describe an artist as working “after Rembrandt” or “after Degas.” It’s about being under the influence of the internet.

‍AH: It also bled into platforms like Tumblr and Screenfull that were about using the internet and the tools that were there, fitting your work into the platform rather than what we were doing which was kind of the opposite. It was like working inside out rather than outside in.

‍MO: Screenfull actually predated the term, “postinternet,” but Abe Linkoln (Rick Silva) and Jimpunk, who ran it, were a huge influence on me and the way that I thought about internet art. They worked in a performative way both online and offline, following the motto, “We crash your browser with content.” They were definitely influenced by Jodi but they also influenced surf clubs such as Nasty Nets, which I co-founded right as I was starting to think about what “postinternet” meant. 

The term, “postinternet,” clearly took on a life of its own and many people also have their own definitions of it. Some insist that it was never defined or just love to hate it. But I believe that was because it was very quickly embraced by commercial gallerists who saw it as a great way to sell paintings by PYTs [pretty young things] influenced by Tumblr or whatever. Not a good look.

Back in 2013, the curator Karen Archey suggested that “postinternet” was the number one theme of submissions to Frieze, but that didn’t correlate with how I was thinking about the term. I really wanted it to be something that was not only a self-reflexive critique of the aesthetics but also the networked conditions of the means of production, distribution, and reception of art, ideas, social relations, and power dynamics. 

‍AE: Is it frustrating to you that a term that was intended to describe an expanded field of hybrid practices became a means of assimilating work into a canon?

‍MO: Who would mind being canonized? [Laughs] Let’s be real, that’s fine. The fact that postinternet has been canonized means that there’s a bookmark there and indices that we can go back to and use as points of reference for more meaningful conversations. Right now, when I think about the meaning of “postinternet,” I’m interested in the deeper social, political, and cultural resonance, including what we overlooked in the beginning. Artists including Auriea as well as American Artist, Caitlin Cherry, Sondra Perry, and Martine Syms are some of my favorites now, but I wouldn’t necessarily identify them with the early postinternet artists. 

There’s important work to be done revisiting the presently-canonical (very white, cishet male-dominated) history of media art to acknowledge the profound contributions of artists like Charles Gaines, Ana Mendieta, and others whose pioneering conceptual work laid the groundwork for so many discussions about systems, code, and media specificity. One can think about the temporality of postinternet like that of postmodernism. Arguably modernism never really ended, per se, but after those flashbang facts of political, economic, and technological change you can never go back. The same is true of the affects of network culture. 

Postinternet art may have passed its first commercial heyday, but I don’t think the conversation will be over any time soon.

‍AH: Don’t you think that the same is happening with Web3? 

‍VC: NFTs are reality net art, like reality TV. Maybe there’s no need to elaborate; it fits nicely into a tweet, so it works. Right now, I’m in the middle of a sale of an ancient 30-year-old file of mine to an NFT collective. Suddenly this Java ASCII piece, DEEP ASCII (1998), has to be reconfigured to work on-chain and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. These people are using the rhetoric of artistic emancipation and liberation but, as a matter of fact, they’re altering the nature of the piece. They’re not going to ruin it because they still have it. But that’s my take.

‍AE: I feel like I should stake out my own positionality as Editor-in-Chief of Right Click Save, which is an offshoot of the CryptoArt movement and where Jason, despite being CEO of the magazine, has given me free rein. A prime example of that is in the decision I took to exchange “CryptoArt” in its original form for “crypto art” as a way of normalizing the relationship between digital art and the token (and art and money). Given that the NFT precipitated a new market for code-based generative art, “crypto art” also made for a workable container for all forms of digital art tokenized as NFTs — one less apparently offensive than “NFT Art.” 

Whichever way you spell it, one of the points that Jason and I made in our essay for the Taschen book, On NFTs (2024), is that you can either treat crypto art as a group of artists at a moment in time or as a set of principles for an expanded art world that is more inclusive, horizontal, and decentralized than that of mainstream contemporary art. 

In my view, crypto art is directly related to the technologies associated with Web3: principally blockchain, NFTs, and smart contracts. The popularity of terms like “on-chain” also makes it self-reflexive in the way that Marisa described early photography. I often overhear members of the digital art community asking: “are you in Web3?” which I don’t recall from Web2. To me, this suggests that the art and tech industries as well as art and finance are increasingly interwoven. Jason, how do you view the relationship between CryptoArt and other digital art movements that preceded the NFT? 

‍Jason Bailey: In some ways, I feel underqualified to be participating in this conversation but then I’ve also lived through a lot of what has been described here. I feel bad when people talk about how the internet was sort of a failed experiment, and that people didn’t really benefit from it, because I know that I’m a product of the internet. I built substantial audiences over the last decade and a half without having to ask permission because I was able to create a website myself, whether it’s Artnome.com or the sports analytics work I was doing before. If I had been born in a prior generation, I wouldn’t have any of that. 

I was really happy in the early days with Flash, when everyone was designing their own interfaces and things were unusable. It was a wild, chaotic spot where artists thrive. Then what we call Web2 emerged with apps and standardization. I remember user experience (UX) got really big and I thought: “well, this is good because it makes it so everyone can use things,” but it was simultaneously killing off a lot of what had made the web so interesting in those early years. 

CryptoArt represents the antithesis of old, centralized authorities like 200-year-old auction houses and the traditional art world, as well as big Web2 companies that monetized a lot of art without artists ever seeing any of that money coming back. 

It was at the Rare Art Festival in 2018 that I encountered the Rare Pepe crowd. They had set up a marketplace called Rare Pepe Wallet and were saying: “we have zero interest in curating because we want to decentralize art and make it less exclusive. We’re not going to judge whether your art is good or not — anyone can make a token and we’re not going to take any commission.” Their use of smart contracts was indicative of the fact that they weren’t coming from the art world but rather from the crypto world, which is why I called it “CryptoArt” and collapsed the space between the words because people were using the term for other things at the time. 

I hate to generalize but, on the one hand there was this libertarian Rare Pepe crowd that wasn’t necessarily party to the problems associated with Pepe the Frog at the time. Simultaneously, you had the DADA group led by Judy Mam and Beatriz Helena Ramos (a self-described anarchist), who were bringing in artists of all skill levels from around the world and trying to figure out how to build a new economy where, regardless of your skill level or who likes your work, you don’t have perverse incentives to create and survive to meet an audience’s requirements. They sold work and redistributed the revenue equally across the entire community, somewhat like a universal basic income and politically very different from the Pepe crowd. 

Then we had Larva Labs with CryptoPunks (2017). Nowadays, the idea of PFPs (profile pictures) seems almost cliché, but their idea was to give away 10,000 digital things that were actually ownable. For me, there was something that overlapped all of those projects that wasn’t about art-world artists using technology, which we’ve had for a long time. Yes, there is an aesthetic maybe where you could say that they were leaning into memes. But it was really the social experiment of radical inclusivity, removal of curation to an extreme, and an emphasis on participation rather than skill or ability. CryptoArt was about building an altruistic, utopian, decentralized alternative to the traditional art market. 

Much like Vuk and Auriea have spoken of how net artists weren’t looking for permission from the art world, we weren’t trying to come through the front door or the back door. We were building a new building next door as an alternative. Our view was: “we don’t want your permission and we don’t even want your recognition.”

It’s when things flipped and CryptoArtists inevitably started gaining attention from the traditional art world that everything started to erode and CryptoArt became an ideal. We can judge things that have happened since 2018 as being more or less CryptoArt-like, but once it went full bore and super monetary-driven, adopting and magnifying a lot of the capitalist tendencies of the traditional art world, I would argue it died. Certainly, after Beeple’s work sold at Christie’s for $69 million it became a different, commercial animal.

‍AH: I find that amazing. I had some familiarity with writing things to the chain because I was part of Casey Reas’s a2p experiment. But I really came into this space the day after Beeple’s sale. Hic Et Nunc was going on at the time and everyone was talking to each other, so I said: “can we do 3D?” and then started minting. 

The Hic Et Nunc experience felt very familiar in spirit to me. It warmed my heart to see this janky interface, which had less to do with the death by fire of CryptoArt and more to do with a new community that was coming next. 

I’m happy that I was there for it because it felt like there was the possibility of independence. At that time, I hadn’t been making objects at all for twenty years. Then, suddenly in 2017, I woke up, chose violence and said: “I’m going to make sculpture.” I ended up having a solo show of physical objects that I couldn’t actually attend due to COVID, so to have this medium come along that said: “no, your digital art is real” felt like what I had been waiting for. 

Now, the money is mostly gone. They fucked up; they got rid of royalties. But it has created a situation where there is an overlap between the NFT people and contemporary art, and I’m speaking as someone who’s now deeply ingrained in the contemporary art world for better or worse. I don’t look at the future because I’ve given that up. But I’m working at bringing these worlds together through my work and through my advocacy because we’re all sitting here in this [online] thing all the time so why shouldn’t our art be here?

‍JB: I regard Hic Et Nunc as very close to that ideal of CryptoArt because it cared a lot about community and decentralization. There are aspects that live on, but, in the same way that we talk about “postinternet,” we recognize when the pure form of something, including its naivety, is over. I felt that it was necessary to use language as a tool to differentiate what came before the hyper-commercialized NFT world of 2021 and what followed after. 

‍VC: Jason, please take this super broadly, but when you say “finally, we could publish our work outside of the system.” Wait a minute, where did the concept of a website go? Normally, you could do exactly the stuff you said. But, of course, your community of practice had a deal without expressing it, and you guys felt good about belonging. 

Each generation of new media artists starts again with the same discourse of spaces of freedom, of us as the people responsible for creating new meaning. These are almost clichés but I also totally subscribe to them, of course, and I have no problem with people switching generations. It’s beautiful. 

We are debugging capitalism, are we not? But there is also glory in the fact that, thanks to the NFT, digital artists can finally put some money next to their names.