Confounding critics who have sounded the death knell throughout its development, Net art has continued to thrive as a conceptual medium for artists and arts organizations. A little more than a decade ago, artists began to harness networked technology's innovative and experimental potential. Ever since, the results have been all over the spectrum. Äda 'web, an early pioneer of Net art, featured simple point-and-click websites with text and pictures artfully tossed about the screen. But in subsequent years, Net art has embraced pop-ups and plug-ins, rollovers and recombined images, layers and logarithms to create a new medium of art that is both developed and experienced online.

Established art museums on both coasts, including DIA, SFMOMA, and MOCA LA, have commissioned works from artists such as Jeanne Dunning, Mark Napier, and Paul D. Miller that eschew membership cards and bored security guards in favor of high bandwidth and interactivity. In 2002 both the Whitney and the Guggenheim entered the fray with splashy projects. While the Guggenheim has faded from the scene, the Whitney continues to push the boundaries of interactive artworks in its recent collaboration with the UK's Tate Online. For example, Andy Deck's Screening Circle refashions the quilting bee into an online game where viewers can create and edit screen patterns with the click of the mouse. Golan Nevin, working with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, explodes the concept of database art and information visualization in Dumpster . Using data extracted from millions of blogs, Dumpster graphically plots the schizoid patterns and unique differences in teenage breakups along navigatable horizontal and vertical axes.

Smaller organizations such as Rhizome, an online platform for global new media art based in New York, and Turbulence, which comes out of New York and Boston, have taken the lead in showcasing and commissioning works with innovative applications of new technology. Turbulence sponsored Michael Mandiberg's Oil Standard , a web browser plug-in that converts any web page's listed prices into equivalent values of U.S. crude oil. For a unique cinematic experience, HRRAAGHP-TING! culls together Internet images and sound files that play off the visual, aural, and linguistic associations of a single word. In doing so, the project collapses the vast Internet onto a single screen.

Net art commissions have changed the landscape of contemporary art by giving online artists unprecedented access to new audiences and established art museums. At the same time, they have leveled the playing field for smaller arts organizations, allowing them to make meaningful contributions to the growth and development of this exhilarating new medium.

-SH