A sculpture composed of two circuits connected by ethernet cables, continuously exchanging a single file: the email that revealed the contested origin of the term “net.art.” This email was sent by artist Alexei Shulgin to the Nettime mailing list on March 18, 1997. It reads:
I feel it’s time now to give a light on the origin of the term “net.art”.
Actually, it’s a readymade.
In December 1995 Vuk Cosic got a message, sent via anonymous mailer. Because of incompatibility of software, the opened text appeared to be practically unreadable ascii abracadabra. The only fragment of it that made any sense looked something like:
[…] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 […]
Vuk was very much amazed and excited: the net itself gave him a name for an activity he was involved in! He immediately started to use this term. After a few months he forwarded the mysterious message to Igor Markovic, who managed to correctly decode it. The text appeared to be a pretty controversial and vague manifesto in which its author blamed traditional art institutions for all possible sins and declared freedom of self-expression and independence for an artist on the Internet. The part of the text with above mentioned fragment so strangely converted by Vuk’s software was (quotation by memory):
“All this becomes possible only with the emergence of the Net. Art as a notion becomes obsolete…”, etc.
Vuk Ćosić later revealed that the story was fabricated by Shulgin. However, by that time, it had already spread widely enough to become embedded in the collective imagination.
The color schemes of the two circuits — white-blue and gray-red — are inspired by the original websites of the two artists. Shulgin’s http://www.easylife.org featured blue links on a white background, echoing the default color for hyperlinks established by the Mosaic browser in 1993.
Vuk’s http://vukcosic.org had a gray background (#c0c0c0), the default browser background color before the <bgcolor> tag was introduced in Netscape 2.0 (1995). A single red pixel, the default color of active links, was animated horizontally across the screen. Since background images were automatically tiled, this created the illusion of a floating vertical red line — a simple “hack” that turned early internet bandwidth limitations into a distinct aesthetic.
