Page 196 - The Black Box Book

spaces makes it singularly relevant to our contemporary social, cultural,
and political experience. As such, networked art, particularly web-based
and internet art, has become increasingly attractive to major contemporary
art institutions. The exhibition The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival
Poetics (2019) at the New Museum and the accompanying online portal,
Net Art Anthology (Rhizome, 2016/2019), is such an example. The project
takes its title from MTAA’s Simple Net Art Diagram (1997) (Figure 1),
which concisely articulates networked art practice as a performative, live
encounter or exchange within relational space.
So, where and how does networked art happen? Does the art always
happen ‘in between’ as the MTAA diagram suggests, or if “The Address
is the Art” [as mail artists Marc Bloch, Mark Pawson, and others have
stamped (Ochone, n. d.)], can the location or coordinates of that inter-
action align with a URL? Taking our working definition of networked art
as artworks which draw on distribution networks as their primary means
of production, what might this mean for works such as Miao Ying’s Blind
Spot (2007), a Mandarin dictionary annotated to remove censored search
terms on google.cn?
Or a work such as Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion’s Nakamoto Figure 1: MTAA (M. River & T. Whid Art
(The Proof) (2014) (Figure 2) which documents the artists’ unsuccess- Associates), ‘The Simple Net Art Diagram’ (circa 1997)
ful attempt to use bitcoin to buy a fake passport for Satoshi Nakamoto, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5;
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legal-
the alleged creator of Bitcoin, over the darknet. code

196 197