“J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1” is a sculpture composed of two circuits connected by ethernet cables constantly exchanging a single file: the email revealing the disputed origin of the term “net.art”, sent by artist Alexei Shulgin to the mailing list Nettime on March 18, 1997. The email 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 Cosic later revealed that the story had been made up by Alexei, but by then it had circulated so widely that it earned a place in the collective imagination.
The color combinations of the two circuits – white-blue and gray-red – are inspired by the original artists’ websites. Alexei Shulgin’s http://www.easylife.org had blue links on white background. Blue has been the default color for links since the Mosaic browser in 1993.
Vuk Cosic’s http://vukcosic.org had a gray background with an animated vertical red line. The background color was gray #c0c0c0, the default color before the <bg color> tag was introduced with Netscape 2.0 in 1995. The red animation – default color of active links – consisted of a single red pixel moving left to right. Since background images were automatically tiled, it created the impression of a floating vertical line, a simple “hack” that turned the bandwidth limit of the early internet into an aesthetic feature.
