Last update : March 14, 2013

The net.art generator is a project of Cornelia Sollfrank, a postmedia conceptual artist and interdisciplinary researcher and writer. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and Fine art at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg (1987-1994). Since 1998 she has taught at various universities and wrote on issues in the nexus between media, art and politics. In 2011 Sollfrank completed her practice-led interdisciplinary research at Dundee University (UK) and published her PhD thesis with the title Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property. She has a blog at artwarez.org.

The net.art generator automatically produces net.art on demand. The net.art generator is a computer program which collects and recombines material from the Internet to create a new website or a new image. The program requires the user to enter a title which then functions as the search keyword, and to enter a name as the author.

Since 1999 five different versions of the net.art generator have been realized in collaboration with six programmers. All the programmers have chosen PERL to program the generator. Since 2003 all net.art generator scripts are available under GPL (GNU General Public License) on the project’s homepage.

Cornelia Sollfrank published several books available at her shop, one is about the net.art generator.

The nag_04 – moiNAG The Dada Generator was programmed by Richard Leopold. The result is a webpage (HTML document) based on Markov Chains, a Dada HTML structure filled with Dada text.

The following image was created with nag_05 – THE IMAGE GENERATOR. This net.art generator was programmed by Panos Galanis from IAP GmbH, Hamburg, and was a commission by the Volksfürsorge art collection.

Image created with art.net generator