Nettime

Looping

"The world runs on Internet time." - Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel.

The early net artists were, in many ways, ahead of their time (or as Cocteau might have said, "would appear to be ahead of their time, for it is really the time that is behind the work."). But now that has all changed. Net Art 2.0 like Web 2.0 is embedded in the practices and rituals of everyday life. You can't be a net artist today without taking into account where the impetus for turning the net into an artistic instrument came from. That means that early net art history anticipated the socially interconnected "second lives" of the new generation of net artists for whom the digital is but an extension of their body's functionality as it navigates the network culture. I discuss this more thoroughly in the "Spontaneous Theories" section of META/DATA.

As Baudrillard reminds us, "[t]he image no longer even has time to become an image."

Perhaps we could say net art never had enough time to become net art but that Net Art 2.0 is more in sync with its time. This may be the reason why so much of the art work being created by next generation net artists is less avant (ahead of its time) and more pop (in its time).

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Metadata: net art, web 2.0, metadata, art, photography