/ From Link to Landscape
The axiom that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 7) 1 resonates profoundly in the context of net art, where the interface does not merely display the work but constitutes its very ontology.
McLuhan’s assertion that “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (1964, p. 18) 2 finds sharp relevance here: net art’s form, its digital interfaces, networked architectures, and algorithmic behaviours are not a neutral vessel but an active agent shaping perception and meaning. To exhibit net art through traditional curatorial frameworks (physical galleries, static catalogues) is to commit a category error, akin to projecting a film onto a cave wall.
As Slavoj Žižek observes, “form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion” (2012, p. 190). 1 In net art, the interface is the concretion, a dynamic medium that dictates how the work exists, evolves, and communicates.
This chapter interrogates how net art’s interfaces, its browsers, hyperlinks, and code platforms operate as both medium and message, demanding curatorial strategies that reject replication of physical paradigms. Consider Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (1996), a net art piece structured through nested browser frames and hypertext. Its fractured narrative cannot be “adapted” to a gallery wall without dissolving its essence; the work’s meaning emerges from its collision with the browser’s constraints and possibilities. Similarly, Jodi.org’s %20Unpredictable (2004) exploits glitches and code errors, turning the browser itself into a collaborator. As McLuhan notes, “the effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’” (1964, p. 18). 3 Here, the browser becomes both content and container, remediating older media (text, image) while generating new aesthetic and participatory logics.
Net art curation, then, is less about exhibiting works than orchestrating their conditions of encounter. The 2002 Documenta11 exhibition, which integrated net art via custom-built interfaces, exemplifies this shift. Curator Okwui Enwezor framed the digital gallery not as a “white cube pixel” but as a rhizomatic space where users navigated artworks through decentralised pathways. This mirrors Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation—the process by which new media “absorb, refashion, and repurpose” older forms (1999, p. 45). 1 Yet net art pushes further: its interfaces often subvert immediacy, foregrounding their own materiality. Take Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Index (2010), which transforms biometric data into interactive light installations. The work’s “content” is inseparable from its sensor-driven interface; to extract it for print or video documentation would reduce it to a “nonexistent product of artistic creation” (1986, p.14), 1 as Brian O’Doherty warns of decontextualised art.
McLuhan’s later refinement, “Each technology creates a new environment” (qtd. in Gordon, 1997, p. 175), 2 captures net art’s radical proposition. Unlike film adapting theatre or radio absorbing print, net art does not merely remediate prior media; it generates environments where the spectator becomes an interfacer, navigating mutable, networked spaces. The 2014 The Wrong Biennale, hosted across decentralised websites and social platforms, epitomises this. Curator David Quiles Guillo rejected monolithic platforms, instead distributing artworks across fragmented nodes—a deliberate embrace of the internet’s “rhizomatic” structure (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Here, curation mirrors the medium: unstable, participatory, and resistant to hierarchical display.
Henry Jenkins’ notion of convergence culture, where producers and consumers blur, further illuminates net art’s defiance of static form. Meme-based works like An Xiao Mina’s The Haunting of the Chinese Internet (2019) thrive on collective remixing, their “content” evolving through platforms like Weibo and Twitter. To frame such works through traditional exhibition models (fixed timelines, authorial primacy) is to misunderstand their ontology. As McGann argues, we must move beyond “what our texts are saying” to grasp “what they are doing in saying what they say” (2001, p. viii). 1 Net art does through its interface: it hacks, glitches, redirects, and auto-updates.
This tension between form and content collapses entirely in blockchain-based net art, where NFTs (non-fungible tokens) paradoxically fix digital ephemera into marketable assets. While platforms like SuperRare remediate gallery aesthetics (virtual “walls,” auction mechanics), the artworks themselves, such as Pak’s The Fungible (2021), interrogate ownership through smart contracts. The interface here is not just a medium but a provocation, challenging the “juicy piece of meat” of art’s commodification.
In this light, McLuhan’s claim that “the content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech” (1964, p. 18) 4 acquires new urgency. Net art’s interfaces—whether browsers, apps, or blockchain ledgers—are its unconscious: invisible yet constitutive.
To curate net art is to curate its infrastructural conditions, acknowledging, as Žižek insists, that form is “the very principle of concretion”(2012, p. 190). 2 The challenge lies not in translating net art into physical or textual analogues but in allowing its interfaces to dictate their own exhibition logics—a practice as disruptive as the shift from cave walls to white cubes.