Your assignment is to curate your first online exhibition of net art. You may include the artists you have already reported on and/or new artists you want to include in your exhibition. You must include at least four artworks in your online exhibition.

Each exhibition needs to have the following:

• an original name for the exhibition
• an original theme for the exhibition
• a 1000-1500 word curatorial essay
• at least three relevant quotes from external sources (i.e. critical reviews, new media theories, quotes from artists from interviews or artist's statements, etc.). These quotes should be creatively inserted into your writing so that they strengthen the rhetorical quality of your curatorial statement, and if the source you are quoting is available online, be sure to create a direct link to it
• a stand-alone Web site for the exhibition i.e. a home page with links to the various components of the exhibition such as curatorial essays, links to the art work, etc.

Questions that you may want to investigate as part of your curatorial essay include:

• What is Internet art and how is it exhibited? Is there a difference between net art and art on the net?
• At this (still) early stage of digital art history, what are the evolving models of art being employed by its practitioners? How does it relate to 20th century art movements in art history like Fluxus, Happenings, Dadaism, Futurism, Situationism, and Conceptual Art?
• How do the writings of the cultural theorists, scientists, and artists we have read so far this semester as well as other writers who you may be familiar with, prophesize the development of new media art forms like those associated with the Internet?
• How does Internet art compare to other works of art created using other media? Use concrete examples comparing work from one discipline/artist/era to those works of Internet art included in your example. For example, you could delineate how experimental writing or conceptual art inform digital narrative / hypertext production ... or, you could investigate how street art relates to more socially-networked and interactive forms of net art ... or how do certain net art interfaces relate to the history of remixing ... or how do certain design aesthetics relate to early experiments in poster art or innovative typography.
• What are the implications of creating art work specfically for the Internet and how does an online exhibition create a new set of challenges for more institutional art settings like museums and galleries? Is this work being collected? If yes, by who? And how?
• What are the larger political and economic implications of art on the net?
• How does the digitization of content allow for more "open source" or "open content" forms of art, such as remix and mash-up, and how does this challenge our ongoing relationship with intellectual property?

• Describe the work in concise detail. Articulate a context for the work, i.e. why is it important that this work appear on the Internet?

• Discuss the unique characteristics of the net art works you have chosen by each artist and, when appropriate, make reference to any conceptual, methodological, technical, design, or thematic links to other works of art in media forms such as painting, film, photography, literature, performance, conceptual art, music, remix culture, political art, video art, etc.

• As we have been doing throughout the semester thus far, try to imagine what the artist is attempting to do and put yourself in their creative position. Why are they making these particular works of net art? What is it about each work that you are curating that makes it a valuable addition to the theme you have chosen for your exhibition?

Sample themes that have been explored in the past include digital narratives, conceptual art-memes, the GUI interface, not.art vs. net.art (i.e. sites that do not identify themselves as net art but can be received that way nonetheless), hactivism (art+hacking+activism), interactive sound art, Web 2.0 art, browser art, remix art, interactivity, Flash, virus art, generative art, game art, comix, cyberfeminism, Tumblr art and the #NewAesthetic, animated GIFs, etc. (see below for links to projects created by students who have taken this class in the past).

Cyber+Feminist?

Digital Memes

Sex, Gender, Identity and Internet Art

Links to past student projects for this course can be found here:

Digital (Art)atomy: A new form of art?

Generative Jockey

Art Offensive

When Designers Go Art

Retooling Wargames

Midterm projects are due on October 24th at 5:30PM. This is when your online exhibition must be accessible over the Internet.