Ellen Pronk has created over six hundred ‘presents’ just for you at lfs.nl.

In the process of opening these presents you will get to know Ellen. You will see that she lives a normal urban life and at the same time she has this pernicious streak to create stuff for you to play with.

Ellen’s work could be considered as a blog not of words but of graphically oriented code.

Some presents, like the days of Ellen’s life, are better than others and looking through all your presents can take a long time. A handy shortcut is to take a look at Ellen’s favorites.

KWAF2001 is probably very important. Is it the earliest exhibit of the art of the Internet still on-line?

The exhibited works are very much in tune with the spirit of where we think web art is headed.

Bodytag is a series of thought experiments or “web programming explorations” by Glen Murphy, a computer scientist. He describes himself this way:

Glen is an English-born Australian (Melbourne) who works as a UI Software Engineer at Google. At night he produces installation software artwork and human-computer interaction ’stuff’ for fun. When curators looking for an artist statement threaten him with pokes in the eye, he usually just says that he likes to “computationally connect wonder and reality”.

Bodytag is a gallery that displays the work by an artist/scientist. The Bodytag home page is an array of data boxes that resembles the periodic table. Each box links to a demo. Some are interactive such as smoke2 or gravity2 others are just videos – albeit programmatically generated. Every demo has been built with great care and with much consideration to visual appeal and a high graphic design standard. Of particular relevance is that this is a public exhibit or gallery of a series of works created over a number of years and yet presented and accessile from a single web page with its own URL.

See the Wikipedia entry for Superbad, one of the very early web art sites, created in 1997 by San Francisco artist Ben Benjamin.

The site involves dozens of web pages. You must discover where to click to get to the next page.

The more you zoom in or out the more you see. A very simple concept. zoomquilt.

It is interactive. It goes just as fast or slow as you, the viewer, want it to go. The artists is no longer in control. The artist has handed the work over to you.

You’ve left the paper world, the photography world, the video world, even the real world and you are in something that can only be done on a computer.

The graphics are rather more illustrations than high art. It would be nice if you could branch off and travel down different paths. And so and so forth. zoomquilt stands as a simple very straightforward (pun intended) example of the beginnings of art on the net.

DHTML Demos links to a number of projects created by Gerard Ferrandez. Mr Ferrandez is a programmer who excels in writing JavaScript applications. The common usage for JavaScript is to enable web pages to do things that cannot be done with HTML. A skillful programmer can take JavaScript into very sophisticated interactive manipulations. Mr Ferrandez is one of the skillful ones.

Mr Ferrendez’s web site is a showcase for his programming abilities. Unlike most such sites, his sites are attractive and his demonstrations involve creative use of images, text and sound.

trapped – an interactive zooming and panning photo gallery. Would it be possible for Mr Ferrandez to change the just the images and music and thus create a new web site that is a new work of art? Is the web site just a new soft of picture frame or is there something more here?

Yoshi’s Island – A 3D diorama of a cartoon land. Having so much activity controlled by a JavaScript program is quite special.

infinite loop – another very attractive zooming photo and text gallery.

i panicked – one of the greatest photo galleries ever in that from each image you can zoom into one or more images.

rubble – A strange way of looking at things with the wide angle view appearing where you might normally expect the zoomed view.

lately – a strange puppet on a string.

prometheus – Move your cursor and click your way through a gallery floating in 3D space.

Emails were sent to Catherine S, Benedict R and Gerard F to inform them of the existence of this site.

Welcome to Art of the Net. This is our first post – the start of a very exciting new project.