Online Specificity: Live Event Artworks and the Inner Continuity of the Network.

This practice-based research analyses the encounter of Net/Web artworks, their materiality and their space-time condition. I analyse a selection of online-specific artworks to examine their materiality and experiential features in an investigation into how they can offer a varied encounter atypical to offline artworks. The research suggests that these encounters have the potential to disturb a familiar linear or chronological sense of space-time.

In line with this enquiry, the research explores qualities found in online-specific artworks that are analogous with the encounter of durée (i.e. duration). This concept was first theorised by Henri Bergson in 1886 as an experience of time with a heterogeneous nature that takes place in the inner self of human experience. I examine this theory to consider whether online-specific artworks are more capable of precipitating experiences associated with durée and its understanding of memory. In order to do so, I examine the materiality of these artworks (e.g. HTML/CSS) and their temporal existence in the network duration when online users establish a net connection to retrieve them (e.g. URL, HTTP). This research analyses the state of the network as a heterogeneous reality, as described by network theorist Tiziana Terranova (2004), in order to explore how such qualities impact the encounter of online-specific artworks as inherent assets of the network duration. The thesis proposes that the transitory reality of these time-based artworks are only operative in the live stream of the information flux that resides in the virtual state of the network. As a result, such encounters are analysed through a new notion of event described in the research as live events. From this perspective, the research explores similar experiential aspects that are shared between online-specific artworks and offline time-based artworks (e.g. Standing Wave (1920) by Naum Gabo) due to a live encounter during their temporal activation.

Subsequently, this research analyses the materiality of telecommunication technology, especially within the protocol system (e.g. TCP/IP) operative in the architecture of the Net/Web to illustrate the transitory reality of online-specific artworks. Furthermore, through a genealogy of historical references the research selects a number of offline and online artworks to analyse their experiential aspect in relation to their time experience, materiality and method of realisation. The nature of web-based artworks and their encounter is recognised in the research through the iterative possibility of their ‘assets’ in the network and their potential capability to introduce new memory experiences specific to an online encounter.