Wiki Group 2C-wctaflatclassroom3

The Internet engenders a new era of instantaneous connectivity and interactivity in which the totality of representations exists in virtual proximity. Ascot believes the Net is the infrastructure of a dynamic new human consciousness powered by associative thought.[24] This mode of thinking is the aspect of cognition that is related to artistic activity, and artists have been drawn to the Internet from its very inception.

In the early days, networked art required some technical understanding of electronic media and was the domain of the committed computer or digital artist. Five years before the advent of the World Wide Web, pioneering network artist Paul Sermon was setting up telematic workstations in public exhibition spaces and at festival sites. The workstations, consisting of clusters of Macintosh computer terminals, were connected via modems to what was then the European Academic Research Network. These telematic events involved a large number of contributors from around the world and questioned the authority of the artist over representations made in networked environments. The last of these projects--Texts, Bombs & Videotape (1991)--simulated the TV newsroom scenario in an interactive satire of the role of the media in the Gulf War.[25] Today, just as icon-and-mouse software transformed the notion of computer literacy, the World Wide Web has simplified and democratized Internet access. Artists from the real world have been going online at a tremendous rate. This artistic engagement is underscored by the fact that the Web makes commonplace some of the esoteric sensibilities of the age.

Art on the Internet (and I don't mean Hollywood!)

The web, as everyone now knows, has found uses far beyond the original one of linking electronic documents about particle physics in laboratories around the world

it has also transformed, as its inventor hoped it would, the business of doing science itself.