The term “net.art” is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term “net.art” which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts
Josephine Berry
As Net Art has begun to shrug off its ghetto character and step into the revealing light of mainstream culture, it finds itself
increasingly subject to accusations of institutional complicity, technophilia, neo-liberal social engineering, even racism.
When Net Art first emerged in the early 90s, it was often identified as a defiant art form which targeted the nepotism, materialism
and aesthetic conformity of the gallery/museum/publishing power complex. It was hailed as an art glasnost which, for the
first time since the cold war, was forging a truly international art movement. Thanks to the efforts of the extravagantly