| With the rapidly growing population of Internet users, many artists now utilize the Internet as a means to both access and create artworks, which themselves have a newfound opportunity to communicate with the greater public. However, the heavily technologically oriented medium still is in its initial stage of development. While post-secondary students utilize technology to make art, the field of Internet art is new and not understood, particularly in terms of effective pedagogy. The combination of art and technology has been evolving quickly and is difficult for some people to understand and accept, not to mention that the definitions of art change over time and place, and computer technology is rapidly evolving. Selected artists in this study revealed their processes of creating artworks, their aesthetic views, and their concepts of Internet art, which offered data for better understanding the new media and how it may best be taught to post-secondary students. From a humanistic perspective, this research project was designed to investigate the ontology and functions of Internet art within the contexts of aesthetics and postmodern culture, drawing implications for post-secondary education. The first part of the project attempted to delineate Internet art in various contexts and analytically describe a wide spectrum of varied genres of Internet artworks. In the second part of this research, I gathered further data by interviewing three selected artists with educational and professional backgrounds in painting, cinema, and installation, who now create Internet artworks. I investigated their technological and artistic educational experiences, their conceptualizations of Internet art in terms of art in a larger sense, their aesthetic experience of viewing Internet art pieces, and their further insights into this emerging new medium. I coded and analyzed the data gathered from these artists' interviews, using qualitative methods of analysis, and combined those data with initial findings to develop a practice-based definition of Internet art and its role in postmodern art and culture. I also made suggestions for the teaching and learning of technologically based studio art programs in post-secondary education, based upon the findings from the study. |
