Net Art East: Post-Socialist Artists' Networks and New Media

The proposed doctoral research aims to break new ground in the understanding of 1990s art and networks in the former USSR, the Soviet satellite countries and former Yugoslavia by studying the effects of the internet on creative developments in countries with little institutional support for contemporary art.

Opening with a survey of the material legacy of digital art from this period (by tracing early social media such as listservs, and finding out what 'net art' still exists and in what form), this research project will adopt a comparative methodology in assessing how the critical and historical positions adopted by net art in former Eastern Europe were inflected by different experiences of post-socialism in the aftermath of so-called 'transition'. To what extent did digital culture align itself with or seek to oppose the ideological shifts that accompanied debates about neoliberalism and globalisation in different political contexts?

Much European net art of the early period, both from the former-East and from the former-West, had an activist dimension. It experimented with avant-gardism and with legacies of conceptual art, playing up collaboration across national boundaries and playing down commodity status and overt technical sophistication. It was often sceptical towards the established art world. The research seeks to address the shortage of historical perspectives on a field in which the most prominent artworks are hard to access at a time when the salience of art that engages with Internet culture is increasing