The internet as brush: When the network became canvas
Imagine a morning in 1997. You switch on your computer, a Pentium humming under a desk cluttered with cables. The screen flickers to life in an electric blue, and there, instead of an ordinary webpage, you stumble upon a tangle of characters that seem to dance. HTML tags appear in plain text, links
By Artedusa
••12 min read
The internet as brush: when the network became canvas
Imagine a morning in 1997. You switch on your computer, a Pentium humming under a desk cluttered with cables. The screen flickers to life in an electric blue, and there, instead of an ordinary webpage, you stumble upon a tangle of characters that seem to dance. HTML tags appear in plain text, links blink like faulty neon signs, and suddenly your browser starts coughing, spitting out fragments of code like an old television with bad reception. You’ve just encountered wwwwwwww.jodi.org, and without realising it, you’ve witnessed the birth of an artistic revolution.
What you’re seeing isn’t a bug. It’s a work of art. A canvas woven not with paint, but with lines of code, deliberate glitches, an aesthetic that celebrates the imperfections of the digital. Behind this apparent chaos lie two artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, better known by their pseudonym Jodi. Their work marks a turning point: for the first time, the internet is no longer just a tool, a medium, a display case. It becomes the medium itself—a living, interactive, ephemeral canvas.
But Jodi are not alone. In the shadowy corners of the nascent web, other pioneers are exploring this new frontier. In Moscow, Alexei Shulgin plays with HTML forms as a painter might wield a brush. In London, Heath Bunting turns geopolitical borders into digital artworks. Together, they will invent what will be called net.art—a movement as radical as it is overlooked, where art doesn’t just use the internet, but reveals its hidden poetry, its flaws, its potential.
Code as pigment: when HTML became poetry
If you had visited Alexei Shulgin’s website in 1997, you would have found a page of deceptive simplicity. No garish colours, no Flash animations, no blinking banners already invading the web. Just a series of checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields—those basic elements every developer used to create forms. But in Shulgin’s hands, these forms serve no purpose. Or rather, they serve something else entirely.
Form Art, as he called it, is a provocation. An elegant mockery of the conventions of early web design. At a time when companies were spending fortunes to create "user-friendly" sites, Shulgin exposed the other side of the coin: those forms asking us to identify ourselves, to sign up, to submit, are nothing more than tools of control disguised as friendliness. By subverting them, turning them into artworks, he reveals their fundamental absurdity.
But what strikes most is the beauty that emerges from this constraint. Checkboxes aligned like pixels on a monochrome screen, radio buttons resembling miniature constellations, text fields waiting for input that will never come—all of this creates a minimalist, almost zen aesthetic. Shulgin doesn’t paint with colours, but with functionality. His brush is the HTML language itself, with its austere tags and rigid structures.
And then there’s interactivity. Unlike a painting hanging on a wall, Form Art invites you to participate. You click a checkbox, select a radio button, type text into a field—and nothing happens. Or rather, something does happen: you become aware of the act of clicking, selecting, submitting. You become both the viewer and the performer of the work. It’s this participatory, almost performative dimension that makes net.art far more than a simple transposition of traditional media into the digital.
The border as canvas: when the web became territory
While Shulgin explored the aesthetic possibilities of code, Heath Bunting used the internet as a weapon. A peaceful one, of course, but a weapon nonetheless. His playground? Borders. Not the abstract ones of cyberspace, but the real ones—those that separate countries, trace lines on maps, determine who can pass and who must stay.
In 2001, Bunting launched BorderXing Guide, a project as simple as it was audacious. It was a website documenting, step by step, how to illegally cross European borders. No theory, no political manifestos—just precise instructions, photos, maps. How to cross the Alps on foot. How to avoid patrols near the Mediterranean. How to blend into the crowd at border checkpoints.
What makes BorderXing Guide so fascinating is its fundamental ambiguity. Is it a work of art? An activist manual? A social commentary? Bunting himself refuses to decide. For him, art and activism are one and the same. The web isn’t just a medium—it’s a territory to conquer, a border to push.
And then there’s the performative dimension. Bunting doesn’t just document illegal crossings—he carries them out himself. He becomes both the artist and the subject of his work. In 1994, he organised King’s Cross Phone-In, a performance where he invited strangers to gather at a London train station following instructions broadcast by phone. The result? Organised chaos, a crowd transformed into an ephemeral artwork.
With Bunting, net.art becomes political. It doesn’t just play with the codes of the web—it uses them to challenge the codes of the real world. His works are acts of resistance, calculated provocations, invitations to rethink the boundaries between art and life, between the virtual and the real.
The work that erases itself: when net.art became ephemeral
In 1996, Heath Bunting created a work that would mark the history of net.art. It was called _readme.html, and it consisted of a single sentence: "This file must be deleted."
Imagine the scene. You come across this file, lost in the middle of a website. You open it and read the instruction. What do you do? Most people, out of reflex, curiosity, or simple obedience, click "Delete." And that’s when the work takes on its full meaning.
_readme.html is a meditation on the ephemeral. On the fragility of digital works. On the illusion of permanence in a world where everything can disappear with a single click. By asking you to delete the file, Bunting turns you into an accomplice in its destruction. You become both the viewer and the executioner of the work.
But there’s more. _readme.html is also a critique of our relationship with technology. At a time when we’re sold the internet as an infinite space, where everything can be archived, saved, shared, Bunting reminds us of a fundamental truth: the digital is as fragile as paper. A server crash, a broken link, a corrupted file—and the work disappears forever.
This ephemeral dimension is at the heart of net.art. Unlike a painting or sculpture, which can last for centuries, digital works are doomed to disappear. They depend on obsolete technologies, on servers that shut down, on browsers that evolve. Shulgin’s Form Art, for example, no longer works properly on modern browsers. The HTML forms he used are now considered outdated, even dangerous.
And that’s where the paradoxical beauty of net.art lies. By embracing the ephemeral, by celebrating fragility, these artists created works that resist time precisely because they accept their own disappearance. Their legacy isn’t measured in centuries, but in moments—those fleeting instants when code becomes poetry, when the internet becomes art.
The museum faces the digital: when the institution stumbled
If net.art made its mark on art history, it’s also because it forced institutions to question themselves. How do you exhibit a work that only exists in a browser? How do you collect a file that can be copied endlessly? How do you preserve a performance that depends on obsolete technologies?
In 1997, net.art made a striking debut at Documenta in Kassel, one of the most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions. For the first time, digital works were presented alongside paintings and sculptures. But this institutional recognition was also a source of tension. How do you show wwwwwwww.jodi.org in a museum? Should it be displayed on a screen, like a video? Or should visitors be allowed to interact with the work on their own computers?
Museums have long struggled with these questions. The Whitney Museum in New York eventually acquired wwwwwwww.jodi.org in 2002, but in what form? A computer file? A screenshot? A written description? The Tate, meanwhile, collected Bunting’s BorderXing Guide, but how to exhibit it without betraying its subversive essence?
These challenges gave rise to new forms of preservation. Organisations like Rhizome, founded in 1996, specialise in archiving digital works. Their Net Art Anthology, launched in 2016, attempts to reconstruct and document lost works using emulators, screenshots, and detailed descriptions.
But despite these efforts, one question remains: can net.art really be preserved? Can a work like Bunting’s _readme.html, which depends on its own erasure, be archived without losing its soul? Can a performance like King’s Cross Phone-In, which relies on improvisation and chaos, be reproduced?
Perhaps the answer lies in accepting the ephemeral. Maybe net.art, like theatre or dance, is an art form that can only exist in the moment. A work that lives, breathes, disappears—and is reborn, in another form, in the minds of those who experienced it.
The invisible legacy: when net.art became post-internet
Today, net.art belongs to the past. The web of the 1990s, with its static pages, slow connections, and DIY aesthetic, has given way to an internet dominated by social media, algorithms, and tech giants. The artists who shaped this movement have mostly moved on, or reinvented themselves in other forms of expression.
Yet their legacy is everywhere. In the memes circulating on social networks, those repurposed images that become ephemeral artworks. In NFTs, those digital tokens attempting to recreate scarcity in a world where everything can be copied. In post-internet art, which explores the cultural and social consequences of our immersion in the digital.
Artists like Artie Vierkant, with his Image Objects, or Petra Cortright, with her computer-generated videos, owe much to net.art. They’ve inherited its fascination with the digital as a medium, its desire to play with the codes of the web, its aesthetic of glitch and imperfection.
But there’s a fundamental difference. Where net.art was radical, subversive, anti-institutional, post-internet art is often more consensual, more commercial. It has absorbed the rules of the art market, galleries, museums. It has lost the rebellious spirit that gave net.art its power.
Perhaps that’s inevitable. Maybe every form of art, no matter how radical, is eventually absorbed by the system it seeks to challenge. But that doesn’t mean net.art failed. On the contrary, it opened a breach, showed a path, asked questions that still resonate today.
The network as studio: when art became collective
One of the most fascinating aspects of net.art is its collective dimension. Unlike traditional artists, who often work alone in their studios, the pioneers of net.art created works collaboratively, in networks, sometimes even anonymously.
Take irational.org, the collective founded by Heath Bunting in 1996. It’s not a gallery, nor a museum, nor even a group of artists in the traditional sense. It’s a network, a platform, a shared creative space. Artists like Rachel Baker and Minerva Cuevas contributed to it, each bringing their own vision, their own style.
This collaborative approach is at the heart of net.art’s ethos. It reflects the very nature of the internet—a decentralised network where ideas circulate freely, where the boundaries between creator and audience blur. In net.art, the work doesn’t belong to a single artist, but to all those who contribute to it, interpret it, transform it.
This collective dimension makes net.art so modern, so relevant today. In an era where algorithms shape our lives, where social media dictates our behaviour, where artificial intelligence redefines the boundaries of creation, net.art reminds us of a fundamental truth: art isn’t the preserve of a solitary genius, but the result of collaboration, exchange, community.
The internet as mirror: when the network became consciousness
At its core, net.art was never just about technique, code, or technology. It was about perspective. A way of seeing the internet not as a tool, but as a mirror of our society, our desires, our fears.
When Alexei Shulgin subverted HTML forms, he wasn’t just playing with code—he was revealing something deeper about our relationship with technology. Those checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields aren’t just technical elements. They’re symbols of our willing submission to a system that asks us to identify ourselves, to sign up, to conform.
When Heath Bunting documented illegal border crossings, he wasn’t just engaging in activism—he was asking a fundamental question about freedom, about limits, about what divides us and what unites us.
And when Jodi created works that seemed to break browsers, they weren’t just making art—they were reminding us that behind the web’s smooth, user-friendly interface lies a world of code, protocols, servers—a world that can break, corrupt, disappear.
Net.art is the art of seeing the internet not as a display case, but as a canvas. Not as a tool, but as a territory. Not as an infinite space, but as a mirror of our own contradictions.
And perhaps that’s why it still speaks to us today. Because in an era where the internet has become omnipresent, shaping our lives, our relationships, our identities, net.art reminds us of a simple truth: the network isn’t just a tool. It’s a work in itself. A collective, ephemeral, fragile work—and profoundly human.
The internet as brush: When the network became canvas | Art History
