The challenge of terminology extended beyond the choice between internet art and net art to encompass the orthography of the latter term itself. Among its various iterations, the formulation net.art remains the most historically stable and connotatively rich, deliberately evoking the movement’s nascent years in the 1990s. Its provenance is well-documented: first coined by Pit Schultz of the nettime collective for a 1995 exhibition in Berlin featuring Vuk Ćosić and Alexei Shulgin, the term was later cemented at the 1996 “net.art per se” meeting in Trieste, which also produced a seminal prank website parodying CNN. The term’s mythic origin—reportedly born from an email corrupted into a “morass of alphanumeric junk” from which only ‘net.art’ emerged legible—further underscores its deeply embedded, almost glitch-essentialist connection to early networked culture. However, this clarity dissipates when one considers the subsequent proliferation of stylistic variants, each attempting to recalibrate the term’s conceptual boundaries. Constant Dullaart employs the hyphenated net-art to designate works that “emphasise the medium-specific materiality of the global computer networked landscape” (Dullaart in Dekker, 2021, p. 267), 12 a spelling that visually performs the connection and tension between the ‘net’ and the ‘art’. In a more contemporary framing, Omar Kholeif adopts the underscored Net_art in his recent publication Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (2021), a typographical choice that mirrors the syntax of a digital file name or URL, thus anchoring the term within a specific platform logic while attempting to chart a continuous history of the form from 1989 to the present. This orthographic plasticity is not merely stylistic pedantry; each mark—the dot, the hyphen, the underscore—functions as a critical diacritic, signalling a distinct historical moment, theoretical priority, and curatorial stance towards its unstable object of study.

My methodological navigation of these terms thus became an act of critical cartography: mapping how language shapes perception, while acknowledging that digital art’s essence thrives in its resistance to containment. What emerges as a common thread throughout Annet Dekker’s collection of interviews is that net art is consistently framed through its engagement with communication, connectivity, and the critical use of technology, a practice that observes, scrutinises, and seeks to make sense of our present environment.

While I am sympathetic to the liberating impulse to resist categorisation, recognising, as many interviewees do, that fixed terms can limit interpretation and obscure meaningful connections between artists and curators, I also maintain that well-defined parameters are essential for the academic discourse. It is precisely the plurality of definitions, however, and the varied applications of the term across curatorial practices, that empowered me to articulate my own methodological stance. Rather than adhering strictly to one source or definition, this landscape has allowed me to synthesise a position that is both creative and critically grounded, tailoring terminology that reflects the specific contours of my curatorial inquiry.

From this perspective, I have identified the central term that anchors this research: Curatorial Interface. This concept, elaborated further in this chapter, functions as a conceptual beacon, enabling a fluid movement between online and physical spaces, between independent curatorial practice and artist-led experimentation, and between technological innovation and creative expression. It provides a coherent yet flexible framework through which the tensions and possibilities of net art curation can be systematically explored.

To define the Curatorial Interface, the central conceptual framework and primary contribution of this thesis, it is essential first to establish the nature of the artistic field it engages with and the environment in which it operates. This requires a clear, nuanced understanding of both ‘net art’ and ‘interface’ as distinct but profoundly interrelated constructs. Net art is not merely art that uses the network as a tool, but art for which the network—its protocols, aesthetics, and social dynamics—is the fundamental condition of its existence. As a discipline born from and residing within the network, it undergoes continuous transformation, its ideologies, aesthetics, and media evolving in lockstep with the digital environment it inhabits. This inherent mutability defies rigid taxonomies, a characteristic noted by Jon Ippolito, who observed that “Art on this electronic frontier - known variously as Internet art, online art, or Net art - matured at the same breakneck pace with digital technology itself has expanded” (2002, p. 486). 1 The fluid nature of net art defies rigid classification, continually extending its boundaries and complicating efforts to define its essential characteristics. 

For this dissertation, the term ‘net art’ is adopted as the primary designation. This choice aligns with the nuanced terminology tracked by the platform Rhizome.org, which distinguishes ‘net art’ as the term favoured by artists themselves, reserving ‘Internet art’ for more institutional contexts and ‘net.art’ for the specific mid-1990s movement (Rhizome, 2017). The informality of ‘net art’ is particularly fitting, reflecting not only the critical use of the web as a medium but also encompassing more vernacular digital practices. Early critical engagements with net art predominantly focused on its technological novelty, seeking to delineate it from other digital art forms such as screen-based installations. Scholars like Rachael Green positioned it as an art of cyberspace, noting it “...resides in a largely open zone... manifesting itself on computer desktops anywhere in the world but rarely in museum halls and white cube galleries...” (2004, p. 8). 1 

Concurrently, Alexander R. Galloway framed its definition as inherently “tactical,” an aesthetic defined by its “oppositional position vis-à-vis previous, often inadequate, forms of cultural production” (2004, p. 212). 1 These foundational perspectives underscore net art’s innate situatedness within the digital realm and its initial focus on reflecting the new technological condition.

Net art practice has evolved since these early definitions, particularly with the normalisation of physicality in both artworks and exhibition practices from the mid-2000s onwards. To encapsulate this expanded contemporary dimension, this thesis employs a definition articulated by Michael Conner, Artistic Director of Rhizome, who describes net art as “the art of a new social paradigm: the information one, where emergent forms of power and social organisation escape traditional models of representation... an effort to come to terms with the nascent conditions of the network while participating in it” (2019, p. 9). 1 This perspective aligns profoundly with the core argument of this research. The “new social paradigm” Connor identifies can be deciphered through Manuel Castells' theory of the "network society," where internet technology facilitates new social structures characterised by decentralisation and algorithmic logic. Net art, as a practice embedded within this very technology, both reflects and critically examines these profound social and cultural influences. 

Furthermore, by “escaping traditional models of representation,” net art inherently challenges the hierarchical and selective methodologies of traditional museum and gallery spaces. This aligns with Josia Krysa’s assertion in Curating Immateriality (2006) that network-based curation offers vast new possibilities, simultaneously limiting the control of authoritative institutions and empowering smaller artistic communities to experiment and build audiences. Krysa, drawing on Galloway’s (2004) analysis of networked protocols, identifies a central question for curatorial practice in this context: "If the assumption is made that traditional curating follows a centralised network model, then what is the position of the curator within the distributed network?” (2006, p.16). 4 Her response posits the curator as a ‘filter feeder,’ an agent operating within a continuous process of selection and filtration. The decentralised architecture of the internet fosters participatory environments that enable novel forms of collaboration between artists, curators, and audiences. This is exemplified by initiatives like The Wrong Biennale, which, in its 2023 edition, employed strategies such as presenting projects as unsequenced blocks of text and empowering participants to create their own pavilions, thereby subverting singular, centralised curatorial frameworks.