• to become familiar with the varieties of artistic representation, collection and display online
• to understand how the digital medium influences our access to and experiences with art
• to investigate the role of the digital medium in making more art more accessible to more people
• to examine how the presentation of art on the Internet influences our perceptions and definitions of art

I
Visit a site which lets you experience a virtual museum exhibit. Choose a Web site which has has its primary purpose the display of art for artistic appreciation. Here are some museums online (try also Fluxus Online, including Nam June Paik in the 90's: the Electronic Superhighway) but don't feel you have to limit your search to these sites. You could type in the name of a favorite artist in a search engine, for example, to find online exhibits of her/his art.  Concentrate on the artistic representation experienced on the online tour, not information about the artist. 

II
Now visit a gallery of digital art. Here is some digital art galleries and exhibits:

digital art exhibits

OR

galleries and exhibits (Click on "Bibliography," then "Art Galleries and Exhibits") 
 

Again, concentrate on your experiences identifying, exploring and thinking about the art on view. 

III
Now write about your online experience with the art. 

• Describe your process of finding your art online.  What art did you choose by what artist(s)?  Describe your chosen art examples in as much detail as possible.  Focus on a couple of works.  Ideally, finding an art work that you have seen in person might help give you some perspective on those art objects that have no conventional physical existence.
• How does the experience of encountering art online, and encountering art that has no tangible, 'real' existence, differ from the experience of visiting a museum?
• How is your role in experiencing the art different to/the same as a physical walk-through of a physical gallery?

 

-	What is your impression of the user-friendliness of the online museums and exhibits?  Could you easily find your way around the "museums"?  What strategies did the sites include to help you find your way? If you encountered problems with navigation, what were they? To what extent were you able to solve them?
	To what extent is digital art art? What criteria do you apply to visual representation to decide whether or not it is art? How is your encounter with digital-only art different to your encounter with the digital representations of physical art objects? What are the pleasures/problems of digital-only art?
-	Could you "zoom" in on the artwork to get a closer look? What other manipulations could you execute? To what extent are your chosen art examples only accessible through your interaction with the exhibit (or your interaction with your computer which triggers an interaction with the exhibit)?
-	How might your viewing of the art be influenced by the quality of the display on the monitor you are using?  How does the art change when you use a different computer? (Compare your personal computer's image to that on a lab. computer or try one of the Macs (if you have a PC) in the NCC lab, for example, or view the images in both Netscape and Internet Explorer)?