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I’ve chosen two pieces to compare in the categories you’ve laid out, they are: “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” by Olia Lialina (1996) (Links to an external site.) and “My boyfriend live-tweeted the war” by Anna Russett (2014) (Links to an external site.). Russett’s piece is illustrating the changes that have taken place online, how cyberspace has morphed from hypertext to social media. She uses tweets in place of hypertext written by Lialina.

Olia Lialina’s piece had reminded me, and intrigued me similarly to Evar Hussayni’s (Links to an external site.) art residency on The White Pube’s website (Links to an external site.) this past April. Lialina allows the visuals to give way to text. Anonymous actors oscillate between being camouflaged in the black void behind their words and images and in the sole participant clicking and scanning feverishly, aimlessly. At times it feels like leakage from diaristic .txt documents, Russett replicates these entries exactly with tweets she’s taken from Twitter.

In my experience with net.art, net.art pieces typically always end abruptly and I never feel that they are really finished. It’s similar to an epic fantasy novel, I still wish the narrative or the chaos continues after I can interact with it. net.art lives in ways that other forms cannot.

Lialina’s piece reminded me of La Jetée by Chris Marker, I believe that she was interested in creating a cinematic narrative while only using basic HTML. I think she’s interested in illustrating the commonalities of each medium and their differences. The story can easily get out of the clean and tidy format that movies enforce, because hypertext can be distributed throughout the page, leading to a number of different trajectories and levels of comprehension for the audience.

Beyond that, I was wondering how we should be defining web art… Some of the pieces that were listed in the bank I wouldn’t consider to be Internet art and definitely not net.art.

There’s an error on one of the listings: “@mothgenerator Twitter bot by Loren Schmidt and Everest Pipkin (2015 - ongoing)”.

(I'll put some web art that's not listed in the bank in a reply to this post)