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About Website

As the World Wide Web opened to the public in the early 1990s, artists began to treat the browser as a medium. The loose label net.art circulated from the mid-1990s among artists such as Olia Lialina, whose My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) tells a fractured story through clickable frames, and JODI, whose pages looked like broken code. Alexei Shulgin and Vuk Ćosić played with email, HTML and the look of error, and Mark Napier's Shredder 1.0 (1998) tore other sites into collage.

Later projects ranged from the minimal to the participatory. Rafaël Rozendaal makes single-screen animated websites, each on its own domain name, and Aaron Koblin's The Sheep Market (2006) paid thousands of workers to draw a sheep. Because browsers and plug-ins keep changing, many early works have stopped functioning and survive through emulation. Look for how a piece uses clicks, windows, loading time and code.