What Makes Webart Unique?

Webart often called Internet art or Net art, is art or cultural production which uses the Internet as a primary medium. Webart is often interactive, participatory and multimedia-based works.
This website is designed intentionally for art teachers to show how an artist can use the Internet as a new art form and how webart can support artists in new ways of thinking. This site shows how artists have employed online technologies to engage with the traditions of art history, to create new forms of art, and to move into fields of activities normally beyond the artistic realm.

The Internet has the ability to host many different media activities that artists have begun to use in a variety of aesthetic ways. In the past decade, Internet speed has increased with astonishing rapidity, which led to the widespread use of the Internet. The Internet can be a very powerful space for art. It's a world wide public space where, if you have access, you can explore and publish to world.

Webart interconnect with its emphasis on audience interaction, event-based works, and the use of text and networks. How does the interactivity affect the art practice? The interesting part of Webart is the relationship between the artist and viewers, and as more interactions are involved, the meanings of the art context will change constantly as well. Webart is intertwined with cultural influence and technology growth. Webart continually evolves within a history of art, and it is important to explore the theme of webart juxtaposed against earlier artists and movements. Webart is sometimes seen as emblematic of our culture, while at other times it is seen as the least valuable and immature art. People whose enthusiasm for webart such as critics, curators and Internet users, tend to support and understand the intention of artist and find fresh aesthetic experiences. For example, Boston Cyberart introduce various types of new media art, and they establish an online exhibition for webart.

How can those who have not explored webart discover the possibilities of artistic expression?

Grau, O. (2003), Visual Art: Illusion to Immersion,

" Artists from anywhere in the world can now participate in the creation of a work. Groups of artists separated geographically by vast distances, who might never have encountered or even heard of each other, can now collaborate, in structures similar to e-business, at the same time on various continents, in shifts, at different times, theoretically day and night. These open systems, connected by networks, open up endless and unimagined possibilities for distributed co-authorship (p.257). "

Our culture is closely connected with the Internet presently, therefore it is important to explore how websites could be an important art form. Webart is an experimental medium, and has similar characteristics of other new mediums. The Internet is a public space that anyone who is connected can share like the cultural arena of TV. The Internet has much more potential for interactivity and creativity than TV. There are many advantages to using the computer and the Internet, because they can manipulate media such as painting, video, photography and sound. These elements could then become a virtual media piece.

Computer-based media places new cognitive and physical demands on viewers (Wilson, 2002). For example, the Internet is one of the fully comprehensible subjects in terms of interaction between creator and viewer. The basic foundation of the hyperlinking that forms the basis of interactive media gives viewers the opportunity to think rather than just a movie click on a screen-based object and move to a new page, viewing a new image, or move to a new scene. Instead of physically interacting with the objects, computer media asks viewers what they think about the context before they move forward, which creates a totally new and different form of interactivity. In addition, the Internet is not individual play; it physically connects and enables interaction with others through a networked sphere.