Editing Net.art (section)

== Tactical media net art ==
net.art developed in a context of cultural crisis in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990s after the end of the [[Soviet Union]] and the fall of the [[Berlin Wall]]. The artists involved in net.art experiments are associated with the idea of a "social responsibility" that would answer the idea of democracy as a modern capitalist myth. The Internet, often promoted as the democratic tool par excellence, but largely participating in the rules of vested interests, is targeted by the net.artists who claimed that "a space where you can buy is a space where you can steal, but also where you can distribute". net.artists focus on finding new ways of sharing [[public space]].

By questioning structures such as the navigation window and challenging their functionality, net.artists have shown that what is considered to be natural by most Internet users is actually highly constructed, even controlled, by corporations. Company browsers like [[Netscape Navigator]] or [[Internet Explorer]] display user-friendly structures (the "navigation", the "exploration" are landmarks of social practices) to provide the user with a familiar environment; net.artists try to break this familiarity. Olia Lialina, in ''[[My Boyfriend Came Back From The War]]''<ref>[http://www.teleportacia.org/war/ My boyfriend came back from the war. After dinner they left us alone.]</ref> or the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work. Their experiments have given birth to what could be called "browser art", which has been expanded by the British collective [[I/O/D]]'s experimental navigator WebStalker.

Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting have played with the structure of advertisement portals by establishing lists of keywords unlikely to be searched for but nonetheless existing on the web as URLs or metadata components: they use this relational data to enmesh paths of navigation in order to create new readable texts {{Citation needed|date=March 2009}}. The user is not exploring one art website that has its own meaning and [[aesthetic]] significance within itself, but rather they are exposed to the entire network as a collection of socioeconomic forces and political stances that are not always visible.

Rachel Greene has associated net.art with [[tactical media]] as a form of [[Detournement]]. Greene writes: "The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as 'tactical media'."<ref name="Greene"/>