It’s 1984, and Ryuichi Sakamoto is riding around town with filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard as she shoots Tokyo Melody, a portrait of the Japanese composer at the height of his fame. Between half-smiles and cigarettes, he ruminates on art and technology, answers oui and hai to unheard questions, then sits down at the Fairlight CMI digital audio workstation. “This is time. I’m making a loop.” He scribbles something on the screen and points to the image: an undulating wave of green. “In fact,” he hesitates, “… it’s more complicated.”
The term “net.art” is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous e-mail only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term “net.art” which he began using to talk about online art and communications. Spreading like a virus among certain interconnected Internet communities, the term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, e-mail, texts