The development of Internet art has been short and rapid and dates from the introduction of web browsers in the mid-1990s. Artists realized the potential of a medium and system of delivery that side-stepped the mainstream art institutions and allowed them to make direct contact with an audience. Their interventions have ranged from works that deconstruct the browser itself, to works that shade into political activism. Internet art has been international, with distinct contributions emerging from the US, the Far East, Europe, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and the Third World. As the sophistication, range, and numbers of works made for the Internet has burgeoned, major art institutions have moved in, attempting to host and curate them, to ambivalent responses from the artists themselves. Internet art raises fundamental questions about the definition and value (both aesthetics and monetary) of the art object, art's role, and its relationship to its public, and the future of the current art establishment.
I am a writer, curator, photographer and lecturer. I teach modern and contemporary art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and you can find a lot of my writings online at the Courtauld website, and quite a few of my photographs on Flickr. I am currently working on a book about war photography, particularly of the Iraq War, and I am taking photographs of suburbia, and the places where forest and houses meet.
In 2008, I curated the Brighton Photo Biennial, 'Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images'. I am hoping to publish the retrospective catalogue of the Biennial soon; it contains some remarkable interviews with photojournalists, some insightful critical essays, and--of course--many amazing photographs.
