As a project for an Art History class, C.C.N.F. is, necessarily, speaking to a past web aesthetic. Specifically, the aesthetic of early narrative websites might include: simple text, icons, and small images (for the lower bandwidth access of the past) rather than Flash animations and “slick” menus. Consider such examples as Sunshine69, Delirium, and Oliana Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War.”
As Christiane Paul wrote on page 114 of her text Digital Art, “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” of 1996 was “…developed into an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system.” This, Paul notes, is a special condition of Digital Art, and WWW art, in particular, as museums can generally neither contain nor tolerate this flexibility and remixing of an artist’s work.
Inspired by Lialina and in order to make my text accessible for the same sort of remixing, I will offer a downloadable text document containing all of the original writings if anyone wishes to remix it into a new presentation!
C.C.N.F. is, in part, a tribute to Alexi Shulgin’s Form Art Competition (1997) which encouraged people “…to create art out of formal elements, such as radio buttons, scrollbars, and pull-down menus.” (Digital Art, Christiane Paul, p. 113) except that I am adding narrative and using a more contemporary “formal” element system than HTML: CSS (cascading style sheets), as I have discussed in previous posts (See: Alternate Style Sheets” and “HTML & CSS: Structure and Appearance“).
I am inspired by the aforementioned works Sunshine69, Delirium, and Oliana Lialina’s “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” and their use of simple elements to create vast pathways of exploration in the fields of Internet Art and Narrative.
Early internet art was produced between the years of 1995 and 1999 and dealt largely with the network itself. (Galloway 219) As Alexander R. Galloway wrote in his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, “…the first and most important theme of Net art is the Internet itself. Net addresses its own medium; it deals with the specific conditions the Internet offers. It explores the possibilities that arise from its taking place within this electronic network and is therefore ‘Net specific.’ Net art plays with the protocols of the Internet, with its technical peculiarities. It puts known or as yet undiscovered errors within the system to its own use.” (Galloway 216).
(Alexander R. Galloway, “Internet Art,” in Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004, pp. 208-233)
