About Net.Specific - an online exhibition space for net art
With the exhibition platform Net.Specific, the Museum of Contemporary Art seeks to expand its exhibition space to include the Internet. This is achieved both by involving net art as an art form and by using the Internet itself as an exhibition space. The museum hopes to take full advantage of the possibilities that contemporary art can yield by making a museum-based online exhibition space available for this Internet-specific art.
The name Net.Specific refers to net art that is designed to exist online and which uses the Internet as its material. It is a site-specific art form that uses the Internet as a conceptual backdrop and idea base.
Net art fits perfectly with the Museum of Contemporary Art’s focus on ephemeral, performative and time-based art. It has its artistic forebears in conceptual art and Fluxus and employs strategies that could be compared with mail art’s use of the postal system and the consequent development of artistic collaborations and networks across national borders. Common to all these art forms is their focus on the way in which we communicate and the culture and network that is thereby created.
The exhibition website Net.Specific is a permanent undertaking, through which the museum will hold successive exhibitions of Internet-based art. Net.Specific will focus on allowing users to experience net art from their own homes and at their own computers; in the environment for which the works were created. In this way a higher degree of immersion and interaction with the works will be made possible.
Net.Specific’s curatorial scope centres on works primarily executed in a browser and dependent on the Internet for their existence. Physical detours can, however, be a natural by-product of these works and a direct reinforcement of, or comment on, the works’ online site-specificity and to Internet culture generally. Net.Specific places itself squarely within a curatorial practice that seeks to make net art more accessible to the public. What distinguishes Net.Specific from other similar initiatives is that it is a Danish museum-based space facilitating the production of new works with a view to giving them a worthy and respectful distribution platform.