Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Listening Post, installed at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music in 2001. Image courtesy of the artists.
Art on the Internet and the Digital Public Sphere adds a new chapter to our histories of public art through its examination of the effect of the internet on the relationship between art and publicness. Focusing on works from the long 1990s that interrogate the popular notion that the internet represents a new, digital, and potentially global public sphere, the book makes the case for the critical role of art in understanding how and why we experience publicness online and the consequences of how digital publicness is defined. By mapping this critique onto the development of internet-based art practices, the book provides an historical account and critical analysis of internet art that encompasses not only its technological evolution but also its confrontation with the claims of publicness upon which our understanding of computer networks, and the art made on and about them, are founded.