In 1996 I proudly examined my first coded hyperlink, marveling at how one could, virtually without cost or permit, harness the power of a burgeoning Internet.

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Here we had a simple language, originally invented to ensure ubiquitous text-only communication across a rambling consortium of research, government, and university facilities, now enhanced with colorful imagery and freely available to turn anyone into their own almost-professional broadcaster. Move over, Gutenberg! -- this was the threshold of the non-press, of instantaneous publication and distribution, the network of networks, the mitosis point of a spreading central nervous system for the all-world computing organism - and with my snippet of code I held the key to making it work!

In retrospect, though, my Eureka! experience was not all that unusual. While perhaps a routine skill for real computer programmers, fluency in a language that internet browsers understood was revolutionary to a few enraptured artists, and by the time I embedded my first .gif on a webpage a number of them had already built the early scaffolding of a revolution. And as it turns out, there is little about previous art-making and display which is not uprooted and/or challenged by networked art.

From the beginning, net-artists saw themselves as a kind of rebel movement, confronting both the hard and soft-ware world of corporate start-ups and dizzying techno-growth, as well as the entrenched world of a gallery/museum complex that reigns over "traditional" contemporary art. Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) had liberated them, enabled them to become free-wheeling cultural taggers -- urban roving art-techs. They'd discovered the genie's lamp of artistic freedom - the ability to self-publish, to reach an audience without need of intermediary galleries, museums, critics, funding agencies, or expensive tubes of cadmium red. Much of this work was a self-reflexive and insubordinate brand of cyber-guerilla warfare , desiring to provoke a re-examination of the very context that gave birth to it. In this respect net-art was and still is somewhat modernist, assuming the same insurgent posture that propelled art history from Impressionism through conceptualism and that spilled into the delta of Postmodernism. It is a posture of skepticism, of critically regarding the assumptions and conventions of a preceding and/or pending generation -- a desire to embed criticality into the practice and production of art.

But net-art is quite different otherwise, and still largely unknown to the world beyond the browser-culture that created and nurtured it. Its presentation outside that world raises many issues both client-side (spectators, museum-goers) and server-side (artists).

Net-art's "tradition" (the meaning of which shrunk in the '90s to include anything remaining more or less unchanged for about twelve months) is to be accessed via a desktop computer and monitor - which in the object-sensitive atmosphere of a contemporary gallery or museum becomes a kind of ungainly shipping crate, an unwanted piece of commercial sculpture chained to the light ephemera it houses. And because this art is meant to be dispersed by the newest of mass media -- the great vast republic of the Internet -- isolating it in the rarified environment of a contemporary art gallery seems somehow to violate its original independent spirit. Further, mustn't a curator publish the site's URL (Universal Resource Locator) - its web address, in deference to this spirit? What then of the exclusivity that privileges museums as landlords of cultural experience? Why go to a gallery if one can simply "go" to the original art online - from anywhere? By showing net-art, is the museum like a portal site on the web, or is it like a zoo where these screen beasts are destined to become accommodating to the limitations imposed by their institutional keepers? Is net-art in a museum "live" on the Internet or is it stored locally, on the museum's computer, where the constant metamorphosis common to much of this art becomes frozen in time? Will the security guards attack if one wanders off the art and onto Yahoo!? Are websites borrowed by a museum with permission of the artist, or are they simply linked to -- as they were intended?

These questions are meant to be engaged by <img src>, but with the supposition that net-art will soon evolve beyond the range of their relevance. More important than the questions themselves, is that fact that they are being raised by an art forged in the paradigm-melting furnaces of late twentieth-century computer research - the territory of bytes and pixels, javascript and d-HTML, of browser conflicts and connection speeds, and that these arcane palettes were not inherited by net-artists from past art, but rather from new technology. Caught in an aqueous flow of change, the term "net-art" might well be as obsolete three years hence as the 14K modems of three years past. What will happen to net-art as it grows up? Likely it will evolve into something beyond the present event horizon, just as the Internet has changed in ways beyond those only recently imagined. The pace of that change is the only question, and like everything else on the Internet, (and in the flatland below) it awaits the advent of universal accessibility to high bandwidth. But the means by which net-art will cease to exist as novelty is surely by co-opting those art forms against which it is now contrasted - it will become less of a curiosity in the future because other art, to a progressively greater degree, will have been led by it to the network.

Stephen Nowlin
Director, Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery