Typically, the problem with net art is often reduced to stereotypical comments that justify its rationale and delivery. These can include: Net artists use screen-based presentation because they find gallery exhibition problematic … Net artists use digital media and the internet because they're interested in interactivity, collaboration, or different modes of distribution … Net artists combine text image, and sound as a means of investigating the ephemeral nature of information in the Digital Age.

This is the peculiar nature and infliction of computer technology - it is young when compared to previous technological developments, but ironically so culturally pervasive and part of our daily cultural fabric. As a result, Net art, which has existed for a decade, and many would argue still hasn't been truly accepted by art establishments, gets typecast, stereotyped, and 'understood' as if it were a movement that dated back much further than it does.

Such is the seemingly paradoxical situation that faces Lisa Hutton, a net artist working out of San Diego. Though she characterizes net art as avant garde (given its comparative youth, and its conceptual parallels with previous avant garde movements), she also concedes that the medium's accessibility is vital to the experience of viewing her work. The medium is thus new and yet not new; exciting, but pedestrian; both original and banal.

I recently had the chance to interview Hutton about her practice via email, discussing her process and practice, as well as other sentiments (she doesn't like chicken wings). Our discussions focused on recent piece she created entitled Actions (after Lewitt, Baldessari, and Kaprow).

A bit of an overview will frame the origins of her practice. Hutton completed both her BFA and MFA at University of California San Diego; she has been exhibiting work, primarily digital or net-based projects, since 1993. She describes herself as competent with computers ever since 1981 . An increasing interest in interactivity has led to a series of net-based works commencing in 1996 onwards.

Hutton's body of work since its inception is not easily categorized and also exhibits a wide breadth of endeavours. While a number of works place significant emphasis on an explicit deconstruction of their originating medium (CYBER*BABES, 1996, Victorian.net, 1997, and Alt.Zygote pieces from 2000 and 2005), many others use the recombinant potential of digital technology to investigate a broad array of subjects and concepts. Woman Words, from 1997, presents a complex network of links where users interact with cultural complexes expressed by words like 'girl', 'goddess', 'queen', and 'mother'. Another work Revisiting September 11, 1972, (produced in 2002) is a collaboration with composer and pianist Mark Polishook, exploring ways in which "trauma erodes the complexities of memory and perception". In a similar tangent Police Blotter Ellensburg Washington, from 2003, uses image, text, and sound exploring how allegations of inappropriate and/or illegal behavior unify and distort perceptions of place. Rather than limiting herself to medium-specific debates, a pitfall common to many new media artists, Hutton is proficient in utilizing select digital medium to discuss and pertinent conceptual material.

Actions (after Lewitt, Baldessari, and Kaprow), which Hutton completed this year (2005), may be her most conceptually divergent piece to date. The work is in fact a collection of small vignettes - a series of 34 web pages with titles like Bloom, Cloud, Shadow, and Flutter. Each page features an image (either moving, or still) found or created by the artist in her hometown of Mission Beach. This work is further complemented by an excerpt from Sol Lewitt's 1969 Sentences on Conceptual Art2 (not in order) and also contains links to another 33 pages of her work.

The images and videos found on Actions (after Lewitt, Baldessari, and Kaprow) are simple: seagulls in flight; surf rolling up onto the beach; words chalked onto the surface of a rock; a pattern etched into the surface of the sand. Most have been altered- "Variations", a looping video of seagulls in flight, represents many copies of the same video, stretched, distorted and superimposed over the background. These images are fragmented in a variety of ways, highlighting the subject's interaction with interstitial areas of the frame.

Footnotes:
1 1987 being a notable year in computer history for the introduction of the IBM PS/2, the first IBM computer to make the 3.5" disk drive, graphic array, and use of a mouse standard.
2 Transcribed here: http://www.altx.com/vizarts/conceptual.html