In Rachel Greene's 'A History of Internet Art', she describes that the term 'Net.Art' came from a corrupted email mangled over transmission. And in my own experience as a computer science student, I've found that data can be represented in many ways and hold many subtle secrets.
These two images are derived from the same .jpg file. In Avanish Thapa's CTF 'Acid', he hides a secret key on the end of an image file. Although, not necessarily a piece of art, the CTF comes across no differently than the WebVenture project while also exploiting what Greene describes as peculiar to the internet 'the characteristics of immateriality'.
Beyond different ways of seeing data, there are numerous backend files or representations of data such as README, css, html, and php files; which are not shown to the user, but instead build what the user sees. These have become well components to NetArt and internet culture, where some noted art works manipulate those representations. The hypertext format is exposed to viewer's in Jodi's work and the hypertext objects are mangled and rearranged in Web Stalker's project. Those who have worked with these files and languages may find an art and aesthetic in the idea of webpages built from such a complex and cryptic language, which in actuality is very simplistic.
Some works have even uncovered special meaning in network protocols such as 404, by Jodi which denotes a Not Found error. Within the error it hides pages, thus the user has to find a page within a 404 not found page. The website utilizes unicode and the mangling of letters to encode a deeper message within its contents.
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