Internet Art

Internet Art is exclusively developed for the Internet, and does not include any piece of art seen on the Internet, but those which are planned to work only on the web since the beginning. This includes multimedia art, web design, and art for art’s sake.

Hypertext
In 1992 George Landow, in Hypertext : The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, quotes Roland Barthes to define the hypertext as a text formed by segments of words (or images) electronically united in multiple ways or chains in an open textuality, eternally unfinished and described as ‘nexus’, ‘net’, ‘web’ ... It is defined as an ideal text where there is no beginning, but there are different ways of access, without defined borders, like in a large network of references.

Christian Vandendorpe, on the other hand, explains that since the expansion of codices, the text is read as visual material with capital and bold letters, marks, etc. And these marks will be transported to all media, changing the relation of the reader with the text: a journal is not read as a book. In the hypertext things can exist which do not exist in traditional books: animated sequences, music, sounds, lights, changing colours. Thus, the reading becomes more visual, more flexible, more dynamic, imitating the way we think (which is not linear but ramified, rhizomatic), and this does away with the ways of traditional knowledge learning.

Digital art
Digital art is a discipline of the Plastic Arts which includes works in which digital elements are used, during production and display. It needs a digital medium such as a computer, which makes calculus to create an image or a sound. The diversity of artistic works which can be achieved is almost infinite, including films, 2 and 3D animation, sounds, illustrations, painting, virtual reality, photoshop, infographics, collages, etc.

José Luis Martínez Meseguer, in the chapter “New Media/New technologies: art and museums”, asserts that the new technologies change the way art is made: “oil as a painting material, for example, assumed a new technology in comparison with the previous non-greasy pigments, and allowed spectacular technical development”. However, the electronic media have introduced a new register which appears to have completely transformed the artistic picture.

Net art
Nilo-Manuel Casares Rivas, in “Public Net Art”, comments that this genre was born in 1995, named like this by the Slovenian artist Vuk Cosik, (although there were previous experiences, there was no name to describe them). Casares Rivas assumes that Net Art is the part of the electronic art work made by the html, javascript or flash resources.