{"id":3094,"date":"2021-09-17T18:23:59","date_gmt":"2021-09-17T18:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-8\/?p=146"},"modified":"2024-10-08T22:04:46","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T22:04:46","slug":"404-this-art-does-not-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-8\/404-this-art-does-not-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"404 This Art Does Not Exist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artist Owen Roberts collects series of screenshots from various missing art works – aka “dead art links” – in an attempt to patch together a timeline of when they were published, when they may have disappeared, and possibly even why they were left to die.<\/em>
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“Yet, what if a link turns into the representative of the artefact, the context and the exhibition at once?”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This was the guiding question<\/span><\/a> of TAGallery (2007-2010), an online gallery centered around the themes of linking, tagging, and the different contexts of web-based art. I’ve been teaching a lecture on internet art in many of my web classes since 2013, but other than a project here or there, the bulk of the works I show come from the early period of net.art, the mid-to-late 90s, with a few artists from the 2000s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The artists of the net.art <\/span>declared the movement dead<\/span><\/a> in 1997 and <\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/i><\/a> reported the same in 2004. And yet, many – perhaps most – of the works of that period still exist at their original URLs, including Heath Bunting’s <\/span>King’s Cross Phone In<\/span><\/i><\/a> (1994), JODI’s <\/span>wwwwwwwww.jodi.org<\/span><\/a> (1995) and Olia Lialina’s <\/span>My boyfriend came back from the war<\/span><\/i><\/a> (1996).<\/span><\/p>\n

But in the course of researching internet art after Web 2.0, I kept encountering 404 pages, spam sites and domain parking pages. Missing sites are known as <\/span>link rot<\/span><\/a>, the unintended consequence of new services, technologies and standards adopted by the web which together form the aesthetics of the broken internet. But an ambiguity arose from this search — even if a link can no longer take you to the art, is it really dead if it can take you to the site of its remains?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A narrative can be imposed on any sequence or series if you begin to look at that narrative from a certain perspective. Once I had collected enough of these screenshots to realize there was a trend, I began to look specifically for links that I expected might be dead. I also started noticing how many internet art works incorporated links and URLs that were intentionally dead, how much broken internet aesthetics were already being incorporated into internet art.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although those aesthetics have been present since the beginning of internet art, I still felt that there were more dead URLs from artists working after Web 2.0, social networks and smart phones, Post-Internet works. Finding a dead link where I expect to find art is frustrating. But there’s also a perverse pleasure in seeing the errors and odd sites that take the place of neglected websites. What is the relationship between a URL of a work and the work itself? Can the URL itself be part of the work? And if so, does that make the spam at that location part of the work, too? Is the URL more like a gallery, where the artwork will be displayed for a period of time until it is purchased or added to a collection or returned to the artist?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t