The Rhizome Net Anthology presents visitors with a collection of Net Art projects by various artists throughout history. For this discussion, Mouchette, LOVE, Form Art, and A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century are the projects in focus. As a popular theme among Net Art, two of the four projects selected focuses on sexuality, innocence, and personalities; none of the projects focusing on such themes censors any of their materials and are fairly explicit to bring out a sense of rawness for visitors to personally connect with. The artworks that hold a close, personal connection with their artists and their audience members are Mouchette and LOVE while A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century and Form Art are on the exploration of Net Art media/distribution.
With Mouchette, audience members will navigate a blog-like website of a young girl named Mouchette; Mouchette is not a real girl, but is an online character made by Martin Neddam for herself and the public to become. Along with sexuality and innocence, Mouchette.org also heavily discusses death and suicide; on many occasions, Mouchette questions about suicide as if she were a fanatic and invites visitors to actively participate in her exploration of such topic. Apart from the themes Mouchette is interested in, the website’s design and function is highly thought out and relies on poetry, gifs, and images; all images have filters on to allow them to appear slightly pixelated in a similar fashion as classic early gif styles. Text used on the website do not have use a strict set of colors; instead they use colors that aesthetically match well with their webpages’ designs. When colors that are not aesthetically pleasing are found on a webpage, visitors can easily understand that the word/sentence selected is important and to be under focus for discussion. Unlike the four projects in focus for this discussion, Mouchette is the only project that utilizes motion in its texts (such as having sentences run across a page or paragraphs moving from bottom to top) and audio (such as sounds of moans, men speaking in foreign languages, and giggling voices of a girl/Mouchette.)
Following Mouchette is LOVE by Michaël Samyn. LOVE is a project made of seven different parts that each focus on different aspects of love from the view of Group Z, Belgium (a group made of nine “artistic alter egos” of Michaël Samyn.) According to Michaël Samyn, the seven parts of love the project presents are various forms of love, from innocent to explicit, that audience members can journey through. While the loves in focus are divided into parts, it is safe to say that the love present is mainly from Michaël Samyn’s lovelife and the emotions he felt when splitting from his past partners. Unlike Mouchette, LOVE utilizes simple pictures with filters with little to no gifs on its web pages; this decision to use such simple images and layouts sets the tone and aesthetic of the project.
A Cyberfeminists Manifesto for the 21st Century is a project from 1991 to 1997 that, unlike other projects in focus, directly interacts with audience members by presenting itself through “fax, snail-mail, paste-up poster, billboard, and online posts” (Rhizome, 2019). As one of the many projects that sparks Cyberfeminisim, the project main focus is on feminism while exploring the use of propaganda as an art form. The decision for VNS Matrix to use such forms of distribution paves the way for Net Artists to depart from traditional methods and experiment new ways of communication through ways never thought to be relatable to art.
Form Art by Alexei Shuglin is another project that explores distribution of art through experimental methods. Rather than presenting its work visually through images, Form Art is a projects that works mainly with HTML and its bare elements. Eventually, Form Art departs from only working with HTML and begins to explore innovative methods of distributing art that engages with its audience members. Examples of such methods include live outdoor performances and contests.
While all of the projects discussed above have designs that appear scattered, all designs present are actually following models that their making a comment on. With Mouchette, the layout is similar to a blog post in the 90s where many introduce visitors to its page with a short, bulleted bio; visuals relate highly to the dark, edgy humor seen in many of the online teen blogs during the time. LOVE also follows a similar take on layout as Mouchette by allowing each of its page appear like a blog entry by one of the nine personalities of Michaël Samyn. As mentioned before, A Cyberfeminists Menifesto for the 21st Century presents itself with methods used in propaganda to make a statement on future feminism; much of the visuals for the project use simple designs with layers of images and texts to have the iconic style of early Net Art but with a different distribution method. Form Art embraces the core of Net Art with html while also expanding mediums of Net Art to become more interactive with audience members (thus following it's name of Form Art.)
