Digital Art and Literature

Artport Withney supports, according to their "about" information, net art and digital arts. They encourage innovativeness and originality. In comparison, Rhizome.org supports more traditional art but that is using new technologies. The support preservation of contemporary art that is using new technologies rather than encouraging new ideas as Artport Whitney does. The artwork at Artport Whitnay appeals more to me, they are exploring and stretching boundaries of traditional arts while the works on Rhizome seem more static and held back. I do not argue that the cultural quality of the works on either site would be better, only that the works at Artport Whotney makes me start thinking and makes me more involved in what is taking place.

Artport Withnay stated that they support “net art and digital arts”. Netart is according to Wikipedia defined as art that “uses the internet as its primary medium”, while they define Digital Art as “art created on a computer in digital form”. Rhizome is more interested in new technologies and New Media, which Wikipedia describes as “media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing”. Rhimzome seems to focus on remediation, repeating old forms of media, traditional ways of art, but with a new medium. Artport Whitney on the other hand might end up remediating things but do not have that as goal, rather they are trying to create something as unique as possible.


Ilovebees is an alternate reality game where players participate in story. The story takes place in real time and is affected in how the players respond to it. The story is basically a mystery that needs to be solved, in the Ilovebees case, the players tries to find out what happened to the ilovebees.com website.

Implementation is a collaborative novel. Every piece was printed on a sticker and handed out to different persons that was instructed to place the sticker somewhere in a public space. I would describe that work as collaborative literature, but simultaneously art, like street art but also in a sense new media art since the stickers directed the user the homepage where the project was explained further.

What you can see in Digital art, net art, New Media, ARGs and in novels like the one above, is the importance of collaboration. All of these things have some element of collaboration involved, some more than others, like the novel. Maybe we have reached a new era where cultural works are not anymore mainly to be seen as a one man creation, but rather as a participatory, collaborative group process.