The World Wide Web has exploded with artistic activity in the last few years. Some even identify a unique category of Web art, with associated festivals, competitions, and debates about its aesthetics. The Web, however, has integrated itself into so many areas of human activity—for example, art, entertainment, education, science, commerce, government, and information archives—and assumed so many forms that it is a mistake to think of it as one activity. Like books, its form and intent can vary enormously. Nonetheless, it is a critical context for many kinds of artistic activity in the current era. Some consider it the most significant techno-cultural development since the printing press. This chapter attempts to clarify the concept of Web art and surveys the work of those artists who specifically emphasize the telecommunications features of the Web.

Other sections of this book describe artists who use the Web in other ways, for example, artists working with artificial life who use it as the “breeding ground” for synthetic entities , artists interested in geological or ecological concepts of the earth as a system and who use the Web as a place to integrate information. The Web has become the infrastructure for many kinds of art. Many artists are using the Web primarily as a distribution system. Artists who create images, sound, video, animations, or 3-D digital worlds can make their art available on the Web with minimal economic or technical barriers. For example, a young experimental band in Singapore can be heard by audiences in the United States who would have never heard it before. Although the unprecedented ease of finding international audiences is a cultural development of major import that calls out for analysis, these artists are not focused on explorations of the significance of the new technological capabilities per se. The use of the Web only as a transport system is outside the focus of this book.

The work of hypermedia artists is a slightly more complex issue. Many are using the Web to create exquisite, nonlinear multimedia events that can be navigated differently by each visitor. Many sites won awards because of the innovative ways the artists pushed the visual and media limitations of the Web. Technological developments such as shock- wave, dynamic html, streaming video, and Web programming capabilities such as java- script enhance the Web’s interactive media capabilities such that they approach everything possible in CD-ROMs. 

For much of the work in hypermedia or 3-D worlds being produced, however, there is nothing indispensable about the Web and its telecommunications infrastructure. The Web is an ideal base for this kind of work because the hyperlink is a core concept of the Web and has been built in from day one, but much of the work appearing on the Web could just as well have been distributed via CD-ROM or DVD.