Open a web browser and type a URL. Instead of a website, you see a woman in a black dress walking across a bridge. She walks, and the browser window scrolls with her. She turns, and the window moves. She gestures, and hyperlinks appear. This is My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, a net art piece created by Olia Lialina in 1996. It was made in HTML at a time when most people had never heard of HTML. It used the web browser as its medium the way a painter uses canvas. The work could not be printed, projected, or installed in a gallery. It existed only online, only in a browser, and only as long as the technology that displayed it continued to function. Thirty years later, it is still online, though Lialina has had to restore and re-encode it multiple times to keep it accessible as browsers evolved.
Net art is art made for and about the internet. It uses the web as its primary medium, creating works that exist as websites, browser-based experiences, networked installations, or online interventions. Unlike digital art broadly, which may produce digital files that are displayed in galleries or printed as physical objects, net art is native to the network. It is made to be experienced through a browser, a connection, and a screen. The work is inseparable from the technical infrastructure that delivers it.
This entry covers the history of net art from its origins in the 1990s to the present, the artists who defined the medium, and how the practice has evolved as the internet itself has changed from an open, decentralized network into a commercial, platform-dominated environment.
What Is Net Art?
Net art is art that uses the internet as its medium, subject, or context. The category covers a range of practices: browser-based artworks that exist as websites, net.art (with the dot, referring specifically to the late 1990s movement), social media art, networked installations that respond to real-time data, and works that intervene in online systems or platforms. What unites these practices is that the internet is not just a distribution channel for the work. It is the material the work is made from.
A net art work may use HTML, JavaScript, CSS, server-side code, APIs, databases, or any technology that operates on the network. It may be interactive, requiring the viewer to click, scroll, or type. It may be generative, producing different content each time it is loaded. It may be time-based, changing over hours, days, or years. It may be collaborative, involving multiple users who contribute to or alter the work. The defining characteristic is that the work is experienced through and within the network, not as a file downloaded from the network and viewed offline.
This creates a fundamental conservation problem. Net art depends on the technologies that display it: browsers, plugins, server software, domain registrations, and network protocols. When these technologies change or become obsolete, the work breaks. A net art piece made in Flash in 2003 became inaccessible when browsers stopped supporting Flash in 2020. A piece that depends on a specific API breaks when the API is updated or discontinued. Net art is inherently fragile in a way that painting and sculpture are not, and this fragility is part of its meaning.
History and Origins
Net art emerged in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web became accessible to a broad public. The pioneers were a loosely connected group of artists, hackers, and technologists who saw the web not as a tool for distributing information but as a medium for making art. The term "net.art" (with the dot) was coined around 1995, reportedly by the Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic, who received an email with the term in a corrupted message and adopted it as a label for the emerging practice.
The early net.art scene was international and decentralized. Key figures included Olia Lialina in Germany (originally from Russia), Jodi.org (the duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) in the Netherlands, Alexei Shulgin in Russia, and Vuk Cosic in Slovenia. These artists created browser-based works that exploited the raw aesthetics of early HTML: blinking text, frames, animated GIFs, broken links, and JavaScript pop-ups. The visual language of early net art was deliberately rough, anti-commercial, and resistant to the slick design aesthetics that would come to dominate the web.
Jodi.org's oss/**** (1997) is one of the most iconic early net art works. When loaded, it displays what appears to be corrupted code, a screen of ASCII characters and symbols that seems to be a broken web page. In fact, the work is a deliberate construction, an artwork that looks like an error. It challenged the assumption that websites should be functional, readable, and user-friendly, and it established a principle that ran through early net art: the web could be a site for confusion, play, and resistance, not just commerce and information.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw net art expand and diversify. The Rhizome organization, founded in 1996 by Mark Tribe, became a central platform for net art discourse and preservation. The Net Art Anthology project, launched by Rhizome, cataloged and preserved key net art works from the 1990s onward. The New Museum in New York held The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics in 2019, a major exhibition that presented net art history through restored and emulated works.
Key Artists and Masterworks
Olia Lialina (b. 1971)
Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) is the most recognized net art work. It tells a fragmented story through browser frames that the viewer navigates by clicking, with the woman's movement synchronized to the browser's scrolling. The work is held in the collection of the New Museum and has been restored multiple times to remain accessible. Lialina also founded Art Teleportacia, one of the earliest online galleries, and she is a professor of New Media and Post Digital Cultures at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. In 2026, Lialina had a major solo exhibition, Olia Lialina. Online since 1996, at the City Gallery Sindelfingen in Germany (June 27 to October 11, 2026), which offered a comprehensive retrospective of her 30-year practice. Read about the exhibition at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen.
Lialina's ongoing project with Dragan Espenschied, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2013-present), archives and screenshots GeoCities pages from the early web. The project, hosted on Tumblr, posts a screenshot of a reconstructed GeoCities page every 20 minutes, preserving the amateur, vernacular web design that defined the early internet. The project is both an archive and an artwork, treating the homemade aesthetics of GeoCities as a form of digital folk art worthy of preservation. Read about the project at Rhizome's Net Art Anthology.
Jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, active from 1994)
Jodi.org's body of work, including oss/**** (1997) and %Location (2005), uses the visual language of code, error messages, and broken interfaces as aesthetic material. Their works look like system failures but are carefully constructed artworks. Jodi.org's practice established the principle that the raw material of the web, its code, its error messages, its interface elements, could be art.
Alexei Shulgin (b. 1963)
Shulgin's Form Art (1997) used HTML form elements, buttons, text fields, radio buttons, and checkboxes, as the sole visual material for a series of web pages. The work turned the functional components of web interfaces into abstract compositions, questioning the boundary between utility and aesthetics in digital design.
Rafaël Rozendaal (b. 1980)
Rozendaal creates browser-based artworks that exist as standalone websites, each with its own domain name. Works like ifnoyes.com (2010) and openclosets.info (2011) are interactive, abstract, and designed to be experienced directly in the browser. Rozendaal's practice has explored the question of how to sell net art, developing a model where the buyer purchases the domain name and the work remains publicly accessible, making the collector the owner of the URL while the art stays online for everyone.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)
Arcangel's Various Self-playing Internet Games (2004) and his Super Mario Clouds (2002) modified Nintendo game cartridges to produce minimalist net-adjacent artworks. While not strictly browser-based, Arcangel's work shares net art's engagement with digital culture, hacking, and the repurposing of commercial technology. His work is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Net Art and the Changing Internet
The internet that early net artists worked in was fundamentally different from the internet of 2026. In 1996, the web was a decentralized, largely non-commercial space. Anyone could learn basic HTML and publish a website. There were no platforms, no algorithms, no social media feeds. The web was a collection of individual pages linked by hyperlinks, and net art thrived in this environment because the medium itself was open, hackable, and resistant to commercial control.
The internet changed. Social media platforms centralized online activity. Search engines and recommendation algorithms replaced hyperlinks as the primary means of navigation. Commercial design standards replaced the vernacular aesthetics of the early web. The web became slick, controlled, and monetized. This transformation is the subject of much contemporary net art and post-internet art.
Lialina's practice has consistently carried a media-critical dimension that addresses this transformation. Her works function as an appeal to users to understand the technical mechanisms behind digital interfaces and to reclaim the free, decentralized character of the early World Wide Web. In 2026, Lialina led the Reclaiming the Interface Lab at the Transmediale festival in Berlin, and she curated the Without Us lecture series at Merz Akademie, both of which addressed the erosion of user agency in the platform-dominated internet. Read about her activities at Art Teleportacia.
The concept of "post-internet art" emerged in the late 2000s to describe art that acknowledges the internet as a condition of contemporary life rather than a medium to work in. Post-internet artists make objects, installations, and performances that are informed by online culture but do not necessarily exist online. The distinction between net art and post-internet art is debated, but it reflects a real shift: the internet is no longer a separate space that artists can work in. It is the environment that all contemporary art is made in, whether the artist acknowledges it or not.
Net Art Today
Net art in 2026 faces both new opportunities and new challenges. The platformization of the internet has made it harder to create the kind of independent, browser-based work that defined early net art. Most online activity now happens within walled gardens controlled by a handful of companies, and the open web that early net artists worked in has been largely replaced by social media feeds and app ecosystems.
At the same time, new technologies have created new possibilities. Browser-based art can now use WebGL, Web Audio, and WebAssembly to create works with capabilities that were impossible in the HTML era. The NFT art market briefly created a new economic model for digital art, though its collapse has left the long-term implications unclear. Generative art platforms like Art Blocks have created new venues for code-based art that exists on the network.
The preservation of net art remains an active challenge. Rhizome's Net Art Anthology and its Oldweb.Today project, which allows users to view old websites in emulated historical browsers, represent the most sustained effort to preserve net art history. Lialina's own preservation work, including restoring Agatha Appears (1997) in 2020 and maintaining the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive, demonstrates the ongoing labor required to keep net art accessible as technology changes.
See Net Art in Person
Net art is best experienced online, in a browser, the way it was made to be seen. Visit Olia Lialina's works at art.teleportacia.org, where many of her pieces are accessible. Explore the Rhizome Net Art Anthology at anthology.rhizome.org, which provides restored access to key works from net art history. Visit Rafaël Rozendaal's works by going to their individual domain names, which are the artworks themselves.
For institutional context, the New Museum in New York has been a leading exhibitor of net art, including the 2019 exhibition The Art Happens Here. The Transmediale festival in Berlin programs net art and digital culture events annually. For more on related digital art practices, read our entries on digital art, generative art, and glitch art, or explore our blog post on how to read a painting to learn more about analyzing visual art across mediums.
