net.art

Some of the early adopters and main members of this movement include Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Heath Bunting, Daniel García Andújar,[1] and Rachel Baker.

[2] Although this group was formed as a parody of avant garde movements by writers such as Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber and Pit Schultz, their individual works have little in common.

"Codeworks" is a term coined by poet Alan Sondheim to define the textual experiments of artists playing with faux-code and non-executable script or mark-up languages.

[citation needed] net.art developed in a context of cultural crisis in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990s after the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

By questioning structures such as the navigation window and challenging their functionality, net.artists have shown that what is considered to be natural by most Internet users is actually highly constructed, even controlled, by corporations.

Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back From The War[11] or the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work.

Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting have played with the structure of advertisement portals by establishing lists of keywords unlikely to be searched for but nonetheless existing on the web as URLs or metadata components: they use this relational data to enmesh paths of navigation in order to create new readable texts [citation needed].

The user is not exploring one art website that has its own meaning and aesthetic significance within itself, but rather they are exposed to the entire network as a collection of socioeconomic forces and political stances that are not always visible.

Greene writes: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media'.

On the other hand, the collective irational.org expands the idea of "art hacktivism" by performing interventions and perturbations in the real world, acting on it as on a possible ground for social reengineering.

In response, European net.artists impersonated Amerika in faux emails to deconstruct his demystification of the marketing schemes most net.artists employed to achieve art world legitimacy.

The WWWArt Award competition initiated by Alexei Shulgin in 1995 suggests rewarding found Internet works with what he calls an "art feeling.

"[citation needed] Some projects, such as Joachim Schmid's Archiv, Hybrids, or Copies by Eva & Franco Mattes (under the pseudonym of 0100101110101101.org), are examples of how to store art-related or documentary data on a website.

[citation needed] This attempt at giving net.art an economic identity and a legitimation within the art world was questioned even within the net.art sphere, though the project was often understood as a satire.