Connectivity between Persons the Web continues and enhances traditional Internet environments for person-to-person distance communication (for example, chat or news groups).Web artists are exploring manifold ways of enhancing this activity, for example, by building artificial worlds to support chat, developing avatar systems, exploring the possibilities of integrating sound and video communication, and constructing unusual conceptual structures to orchestrate communication. Collaboration and Group Work In the non-art world, networked “groupware,” which enhances group creativity and productivity on work tasks, is a major focus of innovation. Artists have developed a variety of Web environments for real-time synchronous activity (for example, use of the Net for coordinated musical performance by remotely separated individuals) or asynchronous work (for example, “exquisite corpse” kinds of arrangements by which remote artists can all work together to create artworks).

The Creation of Distributed Archives Telecommunications does not only allow access to remote persons. It also allows access to remote information sources and indeed can facilitate wide participation in the generation, accumulation, and distribution of information (and also the control, surveillance, and perversion of information). Artists have, for example, created Web sites focused on unusual topics and collect ideas from widely disparate sources. Internationalism The Web enables unprecedented international communication across political boundaries. Some artists have built works that exploit this unique capability. Comment on the Web Context Since the Web has quickly become a central feature of social life, some artists have created Web sites that reflexively use the Web and its technologies to deconstruct and recontextualize developments in areas such as representations of knowledge, commercialization, advertising, privacy, censorship, surveillance, intellectual property, and cultural imperialism. They have also created Web sites that play with the interface and linking conventions of the Web. Because of the enormous amount of artistic activity on the Web, this chapter can only briefly survey the work to give an idea of the range of approaches. Web art deserves a book of its own. In the past this expertise usually has been only known to friends or the local community. The Web makes this knowledge knowable to an international audience and enables the collector to gather information from worldwide sources and to constantly update it. Artists typically differ from other information workers such as librarians in several intriguing ways. They can be more idiosyncratic in their definition of an area of interest or in the way they analyze a topic. They are more likely to use conceptual strategies such as mapping, decomposition, and unlikely linkages to represent a body of information. Also, they use image and media creatively as a way of presenting and navigating their Web offerings. This section describes a few examples of artist “information” sites.