on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
I have been writing about net art and related issues since about 21 years now, and the time has come for an anthology. Since the book is in Italian, it might be trivial information for my non Italian friends, but nevertheless the book offers a good chance to thank all the artists who inspired these thoughts with their work. If you can’t read 🇮🇹, you can still enjoy some older texts included in my previous anthologies, published in English by Link Editions and available as paperbacks and free download pdfs: In Your Computer (2011) and AFK (2016).
A collection of short texts written over a period of more than two decades (2002-2023), Net Art. Scritti sull’arte nell’era dell’informazione (Postmedia Books, Milan 2023, ISBN 9788874903603) offers an in-progress chronicle of a fluid and changing matter, subject to constant cycles of death, obsolescence and rebirth, following its developments with the honesty of the present time and the inevitable optical distortions familiar to those who deal with topics that are all too close – especially when conditioned by an unwieldy narrative such as that which characterizes “new technologies.” The essays collected here discuss net art and hacktivism, video games and media hacking, metaverse and media archaeology, digital labor and collecting, NFTs and internet memes, blockchain and post-internet, exhibition strategies and virtual realities, generative art and artificial intelligence, cultural software, and more: a complexity that the phrase “net art” sums up both by acknowledging the movement of the same name as a turning point in the artistic use of digital technologies and by allowing a broadening view of the ways in which the Internet has shaped and continues to shape the condition of art’s existence – any kind of art – in the information age.
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