Is there a good place to start in order to get going with Web-Art? Most certainly. The correct starting point is Rhizome.org – ever since 1996.

Rhizome does it all correctly. It commissions web sites as works of art. It writes and about them and proselytizes. It encourages and supports artists and artistic movements. It curates, catalogs and gives prizes. It will even help you set up web hosting for your site. Rhizome is Web-Art.

So where’s the best place to start in Rhizome? Of course, it’s in their collection of Web Art at ArtBase. You will access over 2,000 sites by title artist name, title, keyword and even using a Java time line.

Why aren’t there more Rhizomes?

Michiel Knaven is a Dutch artist living in Zwolle, Netherlands with a web site at michaelmedia.org. He seems happy working with images, electronics, mechanical engineering, music, coding and so on. He’s a also techie.

He has been exhibiting works since 1993 so his education and early development occurred well before the Internet came into wide usage. But if somebody is an artist and a techie is it not natural and perhaps almost inevitable that such a person might want to produce web-art?

In Michiel’s case, his output flows fluidly from installations to photography to web-art. His web site moves seamlessly from depicting his traditional media to engaging you in little on-line interactions. He’s seems at his happiest working in Flash but works with JavaScript as well. My favorite work (of the things viewed so far) is Leonardo’s Flight which references both the inventor and a legendary “Flying Dutchman”.

One part of Michael’s web site is quite special. It is a web-art-portal with over a hundred links last updated in 2004. It lists many early web-art sites. If you want a good and quick overview of what web-artists were doing during the dot com boom Michel’s *** Net Guide is a great place to start.

The Museum Of Online Museums is portal to many web sites that are themselves museum or gallery web sites for collections of (sniff-sniff) old stuff. Often the main sites are quite well known. What is special is that MOOM takes you to a page on that site that you might not have yet considered visiting. For example the link for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art goes to their fascinating Timeline of Art History. As you double-click around the site you end up in more out-of-the-way locations. A fun place to look around is in the Annex.

Somehow in all of this, as you click back and forth between MOOM and other sites you begin to understand that you are wandering in a space or frame of reference that could occur only on the Internet.

After a while, you may step back a bit and ask yourself “Where am I actually?” It turns out that MOOM is “edited by Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce”.

As you begin exploring the other pages Coudal site, you will come across much more stuff that as a totality becomes web-art. For example Layer Tennis is a delightful mash up of graphic destruction design and crowd-sourcing.

As we so often see, the web-art parts are portrayed as portfolio demos or presentations of skill sets. But deep down you can can hear, coming out from the web pages you are visiting, that primal scream: “I am an artist“.

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.