Page 113 - Fundação MEO - Net Arte no Triângulo das Bermudas

13. In addition to Lino and artists trained in the Fine Arts, interested in the
Fernandes, Miguel Palma points creative and often playful exploration of the new tech-
to the work of Antoni Muntadas
in the survey carried out by nological platform at their disposal. Others were artists
the Anamnese project. See Hafe
Pérez (2004). with dynamic professional careers who had no tech-
14. Together with the artist nological interest in using the new platform, but were
Cristina Mateus, they are excited by its communicative possibilities.
the founders of the cultural
association Virose, whose The beginnings of net art in Portugal are difficult
website is a centre for
various projects and events to pinpoint, and trying to identify the first creative
related to digital art, net uses of the Internet is risky. The ephemeral, amateu-
art and techno-culture.
rish, parodic and extremely uncompromising nature
15. The designer and artist
co-founded the website of artists’ and enthusiasts’ interaction with the early
cronicaelectronica in 2001
to host and disseminate an Internet contributed to the rapid disappearance of most
activity based on experimental of these artistic experiments. The variability of the
electronic and computer music
and involving other artistic aesthetic-artistic experience of the proposals reflects
practices.
an asymmetrical understanding of its creative potential.
16. Like most of the artists
mentioned here, Sier began This is perhaps one of the characteristics of the net art
teaching at the university phenomenon in the country, reflecting its exploratory
level in the fields of
multimedia and digital art, nature at the time. We therefore assume that the works
helping to strengthen the
environment of experimentation we have included in this chronology are only a small
between art and technology part of what has been happening on the Internet since
in the university ecosystem.
1995. We stress the possibility that other (possibly
unrecoverable) artistic projects may emerge that are still part of the
legacy of techno-artistic experimentation in the country. We also have
a duty to document them and perhaps, in the future, find a way to
integrate them into a more permanent chapter of history.
The most fruitful period for net art in Portugal took place over the
course of a decade, between 1997 and 2007, to be precise. In 1997,
Miguel Leal publicly presented his project, the website O Museu
da Estratégia Moderna. In 2007, the first website of
the Museu do Chiado – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea,
created in 2002, was replaced, leading to the disappearance of its
online gallery — named Site-Specific — which included the generative
artwork % by Lia and Miguel Carvalhais. During this decade, some
artists used the Internet as a means of critical reflection on current
social or cultural issues, without much technical knowledge of the
computer languages that support the tool, such as Miguel Leal and
Fernando José Pereira , while others are primarily interested in the
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medium’s possibilities for artistic and technological experimentation,
such as Miguel Carvalhais and André Sier . The majority, however,
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use the Internet to create experimental projects, such as XANA’s
Entre as Galinhas e Kosovo (1999) and António Olaio’s
Lucy Plays Genetics (2000), parodying the possibilities of
the hyperlink, or Susana Mendes Silva’s conceptual and performative

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Sofia Ponte & Luis D. Rivero-Moreno
Sofia Ponte & Luis D. Rivero-Moreno