Net art history
The early web as a medium, and the work of keeping it alive.
Read the guide
Independent guide / Screens / Networks / Time
New media art, explained
A plain guide to video art, net art, experimental film and data art: where they came from, how to see them and how to keep them alive. Move the cursor to sharpen the picture, then scroll to raise the resolution.
Start here
What counts as new media art?
New media art is a broad label for art that is made with, or about, technologies of its own time: television and video, computers, networks, sensors and software. Its definition keeps moving, because last decade's new medium is this decade's archive. A useful working version is art whose material is a signal, a screen, a network or a piece of code.
What is considered new media art includes video art, net art, software and generative work, interactive installation and data art, and it overlaps with experimental film. This site gives each strand a short guide, with only well established facts, and the ladder below tells the story as a rising resolution.
Five eras
From coarse cells to sharp pixels
1963
Television as material
Artists begin to treat the television set as an object and a signal. Altered sets shown in an exhibition in Wuppertal in 1963 are often named as an early landmark.
Read the history of video artLate 1960s
Portable video
Recorders that fit in a studio put the camera in the artist's hands. Performance, feedback and real time become subjects, and galleries start to show tape.
Follow the video storyMid 1990s
The early web
Browsers make the network a place to publish. Artists use pages, links and email as their medium and form the loose movement called net art.
Read net art history2000s
Museums start collecting
Institutions build media departments, online portals and conservation practice for works that run on machines and change over time.
See the museumsToday
Preservation and emulation
With plug-ins gone and formats retired, archives, emulators and documentation decide which works we can still see as intended.
Learn to preserve
The guides
Seven guides to read in any order
Each guide stands alone and links to the others. Start with the one closest to what you have seen.
History of video art
Television as material, portable cameras and the move into museums.
Read the guideExperimental film history
From 1920s abstraction to structural film, found footage and expanded cinema.
Read the guideData art and information design
From early charts to artworks made of data, and how to read them.
Read the guideHow to collect new media art
What you buy, what to ask for and how to keep a work alive.
Read the guideNew media art museums
Specialised centres and museum departments that show media art.
Read the guideMedia art festivals
Long-running festivals for media art, digital art and experimental film.
Read the guideGlossary
Seven terms in plain words
- net art art made for the internet, where the browser, links and pages are the material.
- video art art that uses video and television as its medium, from single screens to installations.
- time-based media works with duration, such as video, film, sound and software.
- born-digital made in digital form from the start, with no physical original.
- emulation running old software on current hardware so a work behaves as it did.
- information design arranging facts so people can understand them, sometimes pushed into art.
- experimental film film that takes the medium itself as its subject.
Seeing and keeping
Look slowly, then look after it
Media art rewards patience: a video loop may need ten minutes, a web work may need an old browser. Before you go, read how museums that show media art work, and when you are ready to buy, learn how to collect new media art with proper documentation.
Festivals are the other door. See which media art festivals have run for decades and how to follow their programmes.
Quick answers
Questions people ask
- Is new media art the same as digital art?
- Not exactly. Digital art is a wide label for art made or shown with computers. New media art also includes video, television and network work, and it is defined by the technologies of its time. See the guide to data art for one digital strand.
- Who started net art?
- No single person. Artists, writers and programmers began working on the web in the mid 1990s, as the net art history guide explains.
- What is the difference between video art and experimental film?
- They overlap. Video art uses television and video technology and often a gallery setting, while experimental film works on film and is often shown in screenings. See video art and experimental film.
- Can I collect works that exist only online?
- Yes, but you need to know what you are buying and how it will be kept running. Read the collecting guide first.