This transition is powerfully documented in Olga Lialina’s essay A Vernacular Web (2005–2010), which archives the visual and material culture of mid-1990s web pages. As Lialina observes, the early web was “bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction,” a space of “sudden connections and personal links” built largely by amateurs. It was a digital landscape brimming with hope and a sense of potential, where pages were crafted on “the edge of tomorrow” (Lialina, 2005). 1 Yet this vernacular creativity was gradually effaced by the rise of corporate platforms, professionalised design tools, and the rigid guidelines of usability experts. The amateur web did not disappear entirely, but it became marginalised—hidden beneath the weight of search engine algorithms and institutional neglect, its aesthetic vitality often reduced to a source of parody or nostalgic retrieval.

What Lialina’s work reveals is a fundamental shift in the conception of digital space: from an open, expressive medium shaped by its users to a highly regulated environment where architecture is dictated by platforms like Meta. In this newly conceived space, the agency of the individual user is circumscribed by predefined pathways and interaction loops. Hyperlinks that were once the fundamental gesture of a connective, exploratory web are now often limited or channelled to keep users within closed ecosystems. Instagram, for example, restricts the implementation of external links, effectively curbing free movement between platforms and information sources. Here, the architects are no longer individual webmasters but corporations whose primary logic is engagement and retention, not intellectual exploration or serendipitous discovery. Thus, where the conceived space of the early web was shaped by the values of openness and personal expression, it has increasingly been replaced by a space conceived for usability, commercial optimisation, and control. This transition mirrors broader patterns in urban planning and architectural modernism, where functional standardisation often supersedes local variation and organic growth. In the digital realm, as in the physical one, the conceived space is never neutral: it embodies the values, priorities, and power structures of those who design it.

Thirdly, the ‘lived space’ of the digital realm encompasses the dynamic, experiential, and social dimensions of how users inhabit, appropriate, and transform digital environments through everyday engagement. It is characterised by timeless, globalised interaction and the emergence of collective intelligence, facilitated by the very structure and metaphoricity of digital space itself. Unlike the rigidly conceived architectures imposed by platforms, the lived space is fluid, affective, and often subversive: it is where users reinterpret, resist, or repurpose digital environments beyond their intended design. This dimension of space thrives on immediacy; the collapse of temporal and geographic distance enables real-time collaboration, conversation, and cultural production, whether through open-source software development, meme circulation, or viral social movements. The mental and metaphorical frameworks of digital space, the browser as a window, the feed as a stream, the cloud as boundless storage—are not merely decorative; they shape how people perceive and behave within these environments, enabling intuitive and embodied forms of interaction. 

In this sense, contemporary digital space embodies all three elements of Lefebvre’s framework: the conceived space of algorithms and interfaces, the perceived space of visual and navigational structures, and the lived space of social practice and meaning-making. It is within this lived layer that digital space becomes truly social: a realm of continuous negotiation, adaptation, and creativity, where users continually reimagine what these spaces are and can be.

This theoretical exploration has established digital space as a socially constructed triality, simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived, wherein the interface functions as the primary site of spatial production and contestation. Having delineated this framework, the inquiry now turns from the abstract nature of digital space to the concrete practices enacted within it. The following chapter examines the specific domain of net art curation to interrogate a central tension: to what extent do these practices merely replicate established physical concepts of exhibition, and to what degree do they generate novel, native innovations for the digital realm?

This question moves beyond a simple binary. As suggested by the fluidity of Lefebvre's lived space and the critical subversions of artists like Grosser, net art curation does not operate in a vacuum of pure invention. It exists in a dialogic relationship with physical precedents, the white cube, the salon hang, and the theatrical stage, which it simultaneously references, reinterprets, and often deliberately ruptures. The critical lens shifts, therefore, from imitation versus innovation to an analysis of translation and transcendence. The pivotal concept for this analysis is the rhizome, as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari. Opposed to the hierarchical, root-tree model of linear organisation, the rhizome offers a model of a-centred, non-hierarchical, and multiplicious connections. In the context of net art curation, the rhizomatic structure provides a powerful alternative to the linear, narrative-driven "story" of the traditional thematic group show.