Generative Art in the 1990s: The Net Era

“The 1990s witnessed a technological development of unprecedented speed for the digital medium—the so-called ‘digital revolution.’”

-Christiane Paul in Digital Art (2003)

The eminent Paul attributes this revolution to two factors: 1. Hardware and software improvements and affordability 2. The birth of the Internet

Many of these hardware and software developments occurred in our previous chapter on the ’80s. These include the release affordable PCs like Apple’s Macintosh and the Commodore 64 as well as software like Macromedia Director.

[For more context, we suggest youtube.com or open.spotify.com (transcript) to our Ch 7 Artist Discussion with Auriea Harvey⁠, ⁠Joshua Davis⁠, ⁠LIA⁠, ⁠Scott Draves⁠ and ⁠Vuk Ćosić⁠⁠.]

But the Internet, or this early public version called the World Wide Web, was a ’90s phenomena as Paul said.

We begin the decade slightly out of order at the end of 1990 instead of the beginning. We make this choice to emphasize the looming paradigm shift that is the Internet. It would come to dominate the rest of the decade and that, of course, was only the beginning.

For art itself and our story, the Internet not only brought us net.art, which we discuss at length in this chapter beginning in the middle part of the decade, but it also enabled the continued rise of mass-media art. This is the idea that art could be produced in infinite quantities and distributed globally in an instant. The rise of mass-media art can be seen as a theme throughout this decade, where artists, enabled by the Internet, could share their work globally in an instant. The ramifications that would have on art and the art world would be immense. The Internet has changed so much in our lives, it’s easy to forget how much it has also changed art.

By the end of the first year of the decade, Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee, with Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow, had created all of the tools required for a functional Web, including HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (WorldWideWeb), the first HTTP server software, the first web server (info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself.

The project would be compiled in its entirety and debuted just a few days later in January, 1991. Just as our decade begins, a foundational shift in human history occurs.