Net.art vs Surf Club
ネット・アート / サーフ・クラブ
Both sit in Digital Art, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Net.art
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Treats the browser, the link, the transmission error and the network itself as both the material and the site of the work.
Surf Club
A movement that made the collaborative blog itself the site of the work. Nasty Nets, founded in 2006 by John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, Marisa Olson and others, was the first to popularize the term surf club, and other collectives took the label up. It grew out of link sharing on del.icio.us, so found images, screenshots of searches and targeted ads pile up in date order inside a default blog template.
| Net.art | Surf Club | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1990s– | 2006–2012 |
| Family | Digital Art | Digital Art |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Link structures / Browser UI / Errors / Participation and transmission | A default blog template left alone, with posts stacking in date order and no design applied / Screenshots of web searches, targeted ads and stock gradients posted as found / Posts answering other posts, so the same image returns altered by another member / Amateur material sitting in the same column as work, with nothing marking the difference |
| Best used for | Publishing work at a URL when it can only exist inside a browser · Making the mechanics of transmission and surveillance the subject itself | Showing what the late 2000s web felt like through a run of images left exactly as found · Running a project where the shared posting space is the work, and holding the line against tidying it |
| Type | Use default browser fonts and leave underlined links undecorated | Do not choose a typeface. Leaving the default in place is part of the meaning, and replacing it makes something else. |
| Composition | Make navigation the composition, assuming back buttons and several windows | One vertical column in date order. No editing and no curation, just the order things were posted in. |
| Material | HTML, GIF, error screens and slow loading treated as material | Leave found material as found. Keep the compression artefacts, the low resolution and the stock gradients. |
| Caution | Reproducing the early web look as a flat image leaves nothing that links, transmits or invites participation, and the network that was the site of the work disappears. | Cleaning up the found material and arranging it well removes the found state that the style is actually made of, leaving only collage. |