The Digital Time of Internet Art

This paper examines the role of Internet technology as an important factor in the creative processes of art making. The paper’s focus is on digital time, the physical life of internet art and the artist’s choices relating to that. By examining the physical life of internet art, the paper highlights the time-based element of internet art and how internet art essentially unfolds and evolves over time. This raises issues on how internet art is being both preserved and experienced online and how its aesthetic, conceptual and historical identity evolves alongside the technological medium. The paper continues with an examination of the artist’s decision making process relating to the artwork’s digital time conditions from a political point of view. By choosing its present online conditions, artists can manipulate the artwork’s past and future, gaining unprecedented control over the artwork itself. Specific examples of artists are being presented and discussed throughout the paper to provoke and support the paper’s concept of digital time in internet art, as a very important factor that allows us to rethink how art operates within our contemporary conditions.