Website

A category for artworks that consist of code and a user experience on a web browser. While art practices on the web are dispersed and hard to pin down, the website as a platform for art-making was recognized in the early-90s. Since then, websites have been used to create a wide array of artworks, ranging from collectible websites where visitors play with objects rendered digitally, to those that take malfunctioning software as a starting point. Other websites present archives of images or objects, present a set of data interactively, or engage viewers with 3D renderings and animations. A more activist body of work deals with issues of surveillance, censorship and access to information. An ongoing issue with websites, embraced by some net artists, is their rapid obsolesce--at times to the point of no longer functioning on newer browsers. In order to preserve the history of the medium, Rhizome's ArtBase consists of an extensive database of web artworks and the corresponding original code.