Mark Amerika	Natalie Bookchin	Sara Diamond	Golan Levin	Jason Lewis	Jennifer & Kevin McCoy	Radical Software Group (RSG)	Warren Sack
FilmText	The Intruder	Code Zebra	The Secret Lives of Numbers	Nine	201: A Space Algorithm	Carnivore	Conversation Map

The Internet, as we know it, was designed as a communication tool. Some of the earliest creative applications of the Net were narrative projects that exploited its textual qualities and Net-based narratives took two primary directions: performance and hypertext. On the performance end, the evolution of digital picture making and storing devices fed the growth of "Digital Storytelling," in which artists like pioneer Dana Atchley would create narratives part filmic, part fireside chat. The work used the Internet more as a file-sharing device and less as a site-specific medium. Atchley and his peers were inspired largely by the hypertext-based work of authors like Michael Joyce. Relying on relatively simple linking technologies, these narratives existed in pieces that were at once very specifically-located, in the sense of their respective websites’ architecture, and ambiguously "nonlinear." Discussions of linearity, navigation, and performativity dominated the discourse surrounding Internet-based narratives into the late 1990s, with consideration of the conditions of the networks on which they were dependent taking a back seat.

More recently, artists have begun to explore the site-specificity of the Internet, while also reconsidering what it is that constitutes a "narrative." As database aesthetics pervade contemporary art, patterns of user behavior, the protocol of data presentation and retrieval, and the self-reflexive visualization of data have all emerged as narrative sources in their own right.

The artists in net.narrative are all working within this emergent genre. Golan Levin’s The Secret Lives of Numbers exhaustively catalogues and visualizes the relative popularity of integers on the Internet. While the results tell interesting stories, so too does the artist’s reliance on search engines, which have their own precarious modes of narration. The Radical Software Group (RSG) has given us Carnivore, a project that shares the nickname of the FBI’s packet-sniffing watchdog. Carnivore monitors traffic and the use of predefined "keywords" on localized servers. Founder Alex Galloway and a cadre of respected digital artists then create "clients" that uniquely visualize the results.

Both Sara Diamond’s Code Zebra and Warren Sack’s Conversation Map chart social interaction, with, on, and around the Internet. Using graphic interfaces, the artists have created semi-organic cartographies of discussion, so that the content of their "net.narratives" is less the verbal banter codified and more the language of engagement, and revelations about the impacts of network conditions on users’ identities and disclosures.

Jennifer & Kevin McCoy have taken content originally presented in a classic narrative format (the Hollywood film) and dissected both the text and its mode of presentation. 201: A Space Algorithm is an online program allowing users to re-edit Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 201 ponders authorship not only in co-opting Kubrick’s classic or acting as middlemen in the re-authoring process, but also in its alienation of author over algorithm.

Paying homage to literary genre-bender Jorge Luis Borges, Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder adapts the authors eponymously-titled short story. Bookchin’s version of the story is told in the format of the classic video game, Pong. Transforming readers into players , The Intruder toys with reader expectations while underscoring the participatory character of reading or activating a narrative.

The personal narrative is a widely established genre in the literary arts and its popularity extends to screen-based work. In Nine, Jason Lewis delivers an autobiographical tale of "how a Cherokee woman and an Island man produced a brown baby who was then raised by white folks." Asking important questions about the relationship between words and images in the storytelling process, Nine makes an appropriate mockery of the conventions of (non)linear narration, on the Internet.

Mark Amerika's FilmText takes the pioneer net artist’s narrative work to a new level, while still employing his trademark aesthetic of "surf-sample-manipulate." Drawing on a bank of images captured in the Pacific Rim, and created in the tradition of filmic montage masters Vertov, Godard ,and Marker, FilmText recodifies cinematic representation as a multi-linear navigational format. The artist/author’s chaptered text floats against surreal landscapes to bind space, time, and language in ironically captivating ways.

Marisa S. Olson,

September, 2002