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1994 -</title></head><body>
<div>https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kf3x456<br>
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<div><b>Art on the Internet and the Digital Public Sphere, 1994 -
2003</b><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>* Author(s): Driscoll, Megan Philipa<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>* Advisor(s): Kwon, Miwon<br>
(2018)<br>
<br>
This dissertation narrates the development of internet art, a diverse
set of practices united by their interrogation of the technological,
social, and/or political bases of computer networks. Covering the
period from 1994, when internet art coalesced around the rise of the
World Wide Web, to 2003, when both internet art and internet culture
writ large began to respond to the rise of social media and web 2.0
technologies, the dissertation homes in on specific net art projects
that variously engaged or challenged this period's most persistent
claim: that the internet is a new, digital public sphere. By studying
how these artworks critiqued this claim, the dissertation uncovers
three major models through which net art has asserted the publicness
of computer networks-as an interpersonal network that connects or
unites strangers into groups; as a virtual space akin to physical
spaces of public gathering, discourse, and visibility; and as a unique
platform for public speech, a new mass media potentially accessible to
all.<br>
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Claims for the public status of computer networks rest on their
ability to circulate information and facilitate discussion and debate.
This definition of publicness is rooted in the concept of the
classical public sphere as theorized by Jï¿1Ž2rgen Habermas. The
dissertation thus reviews Habermas's model of the classical public
sphere, and its most significant critiques, in order to interrogate
the terms of a digital public sphere. The dissertation also engages
Michael Warner's work on the formation of publics, counterpublics,
and the mass-cultural public sphere; Oskar Negt and Alexander
Kluge's analysis of shared experience as the foundation of the
formation of public spheres and the role of mass media in this
process; Henri Lefebvre's articulation of the social production of
space; and Gilles Deleuze and Alexander Galloway's respective
analyses of the role of network logics in systems of control.<br>
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<div>As a whole, the dissertation provides an historical account and
critical analysis of internet art that encompasses not only its
technological evolution but also its confrontation with the claims of
publicness upon which our understanding of computer networks, and the
art made on and about them, are founded.</div>
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