General Description
What we now know as the “Internet” began in the 1960s when the US military funded the development ofARPANET, the technical basis for what became the Internet. For the next two decades, use of the Internet (as it became known) was primarily restricted to the military and to the academic community who used it for the transmission and exchange of text-based data. It was not until the 1990s and the development of theWorld Wide Web that use of the Internet became widely popular. The development of the World Wide Web (www) facilitated the distribution of information and, in 1993, with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser and its protocols for using graphic images, the WWW entered a period of rapid development and expansion. Artists quickly took note of this new technology and the possibilities it offered as a medium for creating art and as a means for distribution. This module exercise focuses on “Net Art,” a distinct form of art that emerged from the technological revolutions of the Internet and WWW. Net art is work that is created solely to be experienced on the WWW.
Writing Task ( what you need to write)
This exercise requires you to write a critique in response to one of the Net Art sites listed below. Your response should be concise but thorough. Mark Tribe (of Brown University) has developed a handy guide for critiquing art works. While not all of the “steps” in the guide may be applicable to net-based art, many of them are. Use the guide (see below) as a helpful way to examine and consider your response to the site you critique.
Select one of the following sites for the subject of your critique. The works listed below are each very different and may, in some cases, challenge your concepts about what may rightfully be termed a work of art. Some of the sites may require plugins, or may work more effectively on one or another operating platform. If you encounter a site that doesn’t work on your computer, move on to another or try another computer. One of the greatest challenges for artists working in this form (Internet-based art) is the rapid obsolescence of various technologies and how it affects the functional longevity of their work.
• Grafik Dynamo! by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett: Grafik Dynamo is a net art work that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal parameter that comprises its structure.
• Color Code by Martin Wattenberg: This artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.
• We Fee Fine by Jonathan Harris: The artist’s website describes this work as “an exploration of human emotion. It continually harvests sentences containing the phrase “I feel” or “I am feeling” from the Internet’s newly posted blog entries, saves them in a database, and displays them in an interactive Java applet, which runs in a web browser. Each dot represents a single person’s feeling. The color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling it represents (bright dots are happy, dark dots are sad), and the diameter of each dot indicates the length of the sentence inside. Demographic information (age, gender, location, and weather) is also collected and displayed. Photo montages with text / image overlays are automatically constructed from photographs and feeling sentences that occur in the same blog entry. We Feel Fine collects around 15,000 new feelings per day, and has saved over 13 million feelings since 2005, forming a constantly evolving portrait of human emotion. It is a collaboration with Sep Kamvar.”
• Phylotaxis created for Seed by Jonathan Harris: This work “illustrates the delicate balance between science and culture in our world. Without the randomness of culture, science becomes dry and predictable, imprisoned in a strict square grid. Without the rational thinking of science, culture quickly teeters towards chaos. Only when science and culture act as peers can harmony be achieved, expressed through the astonishing Phylotaxis shape. The individual beads of the Phylotaxis represent an ever-changing zeitgeist of science news in our world, populated automatically every few hours by a computer program that scours a slew of online news sources and blogs that focus on science. The Phylotaxis is therefore beyond human control, autonomously composing its own new identity, based on what’s happening in the world of science.”
Successful participation in this Learning Module Exercise will demonstrate the your ability to:
• Identify and analyze issues and problems relating to contemporary art, artists, and the institutional frameworks in which art is experienced; and
• Define, apply, and convey his / her understandings of and opinions about contemporary art in discipline-specific written conventions.
The example is following:(make sure do not copy the example)
please add a reference like the example did.

Module Exercise 6: Net Art Critique
Face to Face
After reviewing Face to Face, I believe the project does a great job of promoting awareness for those who were affected by the devastating events of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Soon after Pearl Harbor, Japanese citizens in America were targeted by the FBI and had to go through humiliating tactics due to the actions of those in their native countries. The same can be said of Americans of Middle Eastern descent. Face to Face shows a different side to the story that is often ignored by the American public.
The overall content of the material is abundant and informational. The recordings of the victims invoke a sense of gloominess and sympathy. The authenticity of the recordings help the viewer create an image of what the victims had to endure. The formal qualities of the project are very simple and unique. Each box has the face of the victim speaking, and all the viewer has to do is sit back, listen, and imagine the situation. It is nothing complex, but is truly an educational experience. The color of black and white greatly suites the nature of the environment
The work is primarily engaged with ideas, emotional expression, and politics. Many of the victims were treated unfairly, were embarrassed, and were victims of an imbalanced political system. The victims were not given a chance to share their story of the events in the past, but through this project, their platform is now able to reach thousands of users on the internet. The overall goal of the project is to provide a different perspective that is often ignored. At the time these events occurred, the American public was mainly focused on retaliation fueled by anger. In domestic cases, this anger was often placed onto Japanese Americans during Pearl Harbor and Middle Eastern Americans during 9/11. These were unfair accusations, and the project is simply showing their perspectives on what the victims had to endure. I believe one quote truly embodies the goal of the project, “Put yourself in their shoes.”
This is a successful project because it is able to promote awareness of the consequences of each action that politicians apply. The recordings are educating people from across the globe. It is a testimony to the violence of the world and the unjust punishments that many people have to endure due to the actions of other people that may be thousands of miles away. My favorite component of the project is the authenticity of the recordings. These are first hand experiences that the victims are able to share with people. Often times, first hand experiences are very strong and influential. It would be interesting if the artist gathered the FBI agents and the victims in a conference. That way, the viewer would be able to grasp and understand both sides of the story. It is not fair to only have one side of the story present. The inclusion of an alternative perspective would bring the project full circle. However, the project still accomplishes the goal of promoting awareness and a side of story that is ignored due to the circumstances.
Reference

Mikuriya, R. Face to Face (Web Project). URL: http://archive.itvs.org/facetoface/flash.html.