I wasn't able to find the discussion of the net art specifically anywhere on the board if the thread on Net art exists on Lainchan, please, share a link to it, so I decided to make my first post on Lainchan.
Recently, I've found several artworks by Olia Lyalina mostly known for: https://web.archive.org/web/20040926075302/http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru/ and Jodi collective https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ and these works got me thinking on fragility of internet art present day, present time, hahahaha. We now have access to only a fraction of the vast body of internet art created at the turn of century. Of course, there are existing projects in the wired aiming at preserving the early net art, such as Net Art Anthology https://d1v7jayx2s9clc.cloudfront.net/ with its comprehensive collection of net art and digital media and, certainly, there are still plenty of interesting webpages to lurk through on the Web Archive, as well as get the idea what the digital folklore looked like in the past by visiting https://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/ for example.
However, it is still frightening to imagine how many Internet and Digital artists have gone completely unnoticed and all their artworks were lost in time like tears in rain, xddddd lol. And this tendency for losing internet artworks is going to be intensified due to the fact that plenty of internet creators nowadays are relying on Instagram, tumblr and other platforms with high level of censorship and the works of these people will also be forgotten as soon as they don't obey the (((community))) guidelines algorithms of these platforms or just when they stop to gain revenues for their netlord masters.
All these thoughts led me to a set of somewhat rhetorical questions, that I'd be glad to discuss with other lainons.
Is internet art worth it to be preserved for future generations, in your opinion?
If so, feel free to contribute to the thread by sharing pieces of your favorite net art/digital art, especially the ones that reflect on the themes of the wired and limitless opportunities for the humanity offered by it. Also, share your thoughts on possible future of net art.
Is there a chance for self-hosted net art projects to survive in the days of incredibly centralized internet, ruled by the principles of greatest benefits for advertisers, technological corpoRats and political ideologies?
Nowadays people seem to be hooked on recommendation algorithms that most parasocial media companies use.
The core idea of navigating the internet by links is soon to be forgotten, which begs the final question: "Is there a way out of this oppressive machine for internet artists and netizens in general, who still want their works to be noticed by the public?"
Me is cheap, Me is easy to control, Me is easy to channel, Me is slave of its own reflection, Me is a slave of the platforms that make the reflection glossy. Me is data. Me is data closest to metadata. This makes Me just perfect to satisfy advertisers and to sate neural networks.