Art as Hypermedia (Summary 1)
I really enjoyed the concept of King’s Cross Phone In, which really shows the extent of what net.art can do – reaching out beyond the World Wide Web and causing interaction in the physical realm. “King’s Cross Phone In came out of Bunting’s explicit goal to ‘bring high tech to street level’,” though it was very simplistic in nature ( Internet Art 34). The piece allowed users to view the phone numbers of public telephone booths that were at King’s Cross station in London. The website specified a date and time, and gave suggestions of what the user could do, including calling one of the numbers and hanging up on whoever picked up. The directness of this approach to art and the necessity of participation appeals to me especially because it encouraged people to get to know other people around the world. The internet has many aspects that forge bonds between people in different countries today, but this early piece of art (created in 1994) embraces the physicality instead of connecting users via modem.
Rachel Greene’s book Internet Art has information about many different kinds of websites that were created at the onset of the internet and that are now hailed as the forefathers of net.art created today. The pieces of art she discusses in the first chapter often only contain text and an interface that allows the user to participate in some way, such as the “World’s First Collaborative Sentence” which is basically never-ending and allows any user to add to the sentence.
Greene goes on to explain the problem that most net artists face, which is not being recognized as “real” artists by real-world, traditional art critics. Net.art is becoming more accepted with advancement of technology, but it is often accepted as only that: technology. Artists are seen more as programmers than artists. I can see how people would look at some websites that are net.art and classify them in this way, because the page looks like it took a long time to create technically, but is less aesthetically pleasing than traditional art. And if an artist is more conceptual and does not have many technical or physical, tangible (meaning visual in this case) aspects to his or her piece, it is sometimes hard to give credit for an idea.
Sometimes because the piece is on the internet, it does not feel tangible or accessible to the user and is overlooked. I love conceptual pieces, but I am less likely to give the artist credit because he or she did not spend as much time physically constructing the piece. I think that in this way, net.art is almost viewed as intellectual property. I am not quite sure how to explain my thoughts on this, but I will try. Because a lot of art is conceptual (and not just net.art), it gets categorized into a section of people’s brains called “cool ideas that people have had” instead of “cool [insert physical element here] that people have [insert active verb here]”. So, maybe intellectual property is not the right word. Artists have enough trouble trying to copyright their work after they have created it.