From Net Art to Non-Fungible Token: A Brief History of the NFT

How 1990’s net art influenced NFT culture

Published in

Cardstack

7 min readMay 3, 2022

If there’s one mystery still puzzling Web3 newcomers, it’s the phenomenon of the NFT. Talk to anyone trying to enter the blockchain space and they’re bound to express confusion at the entire enterprise involving non-fungible tokens, from minting to the marketplace. Let’s be real though: the bafflement surrounding NFTs makes sense. It is difficult wrapping your head around why someone might pay $69 million for a JPEG of a collage or why someone would even want to collect digital images in the first place.

Much of this puzzlement can be quickly dispelled by pointing toward the more pragmatic utilities attached to NFTs. Someone new to Web3 might not understand why a CryptoPunk costs millions, but they can easily grasp why the former founder of a top athleisure brand would start a community loyalty and rewards program using NFTs. The use cases of NFTs as coupons, community access badges, exclusive offer promos, rewards tools, etc. are mostly straightforward and immediately impactful. (Indeed, we wrote an article about NFTs beyond collectibility back in September.)

But the question surrounding NFTs as collectibles still looms large. Why might someone shell out millions of dollars on a digital image that can be right-click/saved? And where did NFTs even come from? We think these answers can be found by taking a look at the history of the intersection between art and the Internet.

The Rise of Net Art in the 1990s

Perhaps the origin of NFTs can be traced back to 1994 with the arrival of what’s called net art. Not to be confused with digital art, which is simply art composed using digital technology, net art is art that’s made using the Internet and presented on the Internet. Though the term has different origin stories depending on who’s narrating the history, most attribute it to the Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic. Legend has it that Cosic was messing around with the then-vanguard technology of e-mail, when he opened one from an unknown sender only to discover that it contained a gibberish mess of code and letters, only the phrase “net.art” legible among the hodgepodge of computer language.

From there, the term exploded among artists working with digital mediums and the Internet, becoming a catch-all phrase for work that dealt with hyperlinks, e-mail, browsers, automated responses, hypertext, and other digital accouterments. Rather than focusing on creating beauty in the traditional, Mona Lisa sense, net artists explored the unique and exciting possibilities of the Web, playing with concepts such as immateriality, recursion, irony, networks, immediacy, and infinity. As a result of the novelty and boundlessness of the Internet, a playful and immersive quality pervades much of net art — two characteristics that can be seen throughout the NFT space, from the collectible goofiness of Bored Apes to the splashy galleries of The Doge Pound.

Consider one of the pioneering works of net art, World of Awe, by the Israel-American artist Yael Kanarek.

Presented on a desktop home screen, World of Awe offers an immersive travelog filled with cyborgs, love letters, and 3D landscapes. By clicking the icons cluttering the homescreen, viewers can jump to different digital worlds, read different entries of the travelog, and more. Its main goal is to build worlds from digital infinity while also relishing in its own cyber-novelty. The entire project carries the viewer through a unique blend of techgeek in-humor and exciting exploration, a mixture that feels very integral to Web3 and the NFT space. In fact, is this not the main aura surrounding NFTs? To playfully construct digital universes and explore new communities? More on this later.

Net Art and Online Communities

Forming online communities was central to net art from the beginning. As a result of the interconnectivity provided by the Internet and e-mail, many artists working within net art began communicating with each other and forming online communities that often spanned across the globe. Such extensive communication allowed for the creation of specific, niche communities to take shape; early online forums like The Thing brought artists together who were interested in cultural theory, political activism, and selling their work online. Rhizome, an e-mail list-turned-art database, served as a go-to for anyone interested in net art in the 1990s and beyond. These online circles collaborated to achieve real-world, often disruptive goals, much like DAOs and NFT communities today.

English artist Heath Bunting’s 1994 project, King’s Cross Phone-In not only highlights net art’s emphasis on anarchic fun and community but also feels particularly Web3. Bunting published the phone numbers of phone booths situated around London’s King Cross station to his mailing list and urged his community of fellow net artists to dial the numbers on a selected day. The flurry of calls led to total comic disruption, as many Londoners stopped their daily commutes to answer the phones and hold conversations with a global network of artists.

It’s precisely this meme-y, novel spirit at the heart of the NFT space. NFTs, like net art, are all about playful disruption, and Bunting’s phone games clearly anticipate the community-based hijinks of certain DAOs like ConstitutionDAO and BuyTheBroncos and NFT-based Discord communities like CrypToadz and Larva Labs.

So, where do NFTs fit into all of this?

As the Internet continued growing and becoming more ubiquitous throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, three problems emerged within the world of cyber art:

Authenticity: Digital technology ushered in a new mode of easy replication, i.e. users could simply right-click/save computer-based images and call them their own. This complicated the authenticity surrounding digital art; what counts as authentic in a world of endless copies?
Ownership: As a result of this ease-of-reproduction, questions around ownership also began troubling the net art world. How could ownership be proved in an immaterial space filled with copies?
Transferability: Within this quagmire of authenticity and ownership came a transfer problem, too. Say a collector did indeed manage to secure an original piece of digital art and wanted to sell it to another collector or a museum. There was no secure, easy way to facilitate these transfers. Moving computer-based art from owner to owner was always something of a headache.

NFTs solve all three of these problems. They ensure authenticity because they contain their own unique values, metadata, and standards that are recorded on the blockchain. The term “non-fungible token” itself essentially translates to non-interchangeable item. The distributed ledgers offered by blockchain technology also solve the issue of ownership, as blockchain-based transactions are openly recorded on-chain, allowing for ownership histories to be clearly discerned by buyers and sellers. The security and transparency of decentralized exchange platforms — perhaps most clearly seen in successful NFT marketplaces like OpenSea — have rendered the transferability problem a thing of the past by providing exchange mechanisms that place trust in the hands of foolproof computational algorithms rather than human entities.

With all this in mind, it’s fairly easy to see how net art gradually shifted into NFTs. Simply put, Web3 technology organizes and secures the exchange of computer-based art. Take a look at the images from OpenSea displaying a Moonbird NFT below. Notice the transparency of the ownership data, pricing history, properties, and offer list.

Sure, but — still — why would someone pay millions of dollars for a digital image?

This question yields many different answers depending on whomever you ask. But, to keep things easy, we’ve outlined three big reasons people spend lots of money on NFTs:

Collectibility: A central allure to NFTs is that they are collectible. Think about how much money art collectors have spent on paintings or how much money record collectors will spend on single records. The bottom line is that collectors will spend big money to find their holy grails, and that impulse is not lost in the digital realm. Besides, many NFT marketplaces often feel very real and material — check out NBA Top Shot’s digitized rendering of basketball cards, for instance.
Hype: NFTs also have an allure similar to, say, exclusive Nike sneakers. Where the sneakerhead will drop $500+ on a pair of rare Jordans to display on a shelf in their living room, the NFT collector will shell out big ETH to flex rarity or wealth in the digisphere, either on Twitter, Discord, or some other online community. The Pudgy Penguin as Twitter profile picture has become one of the most hyped online phenomenons.
Community: NFTs often come along with access to communities to which many want to belong. For example, purchasing a Bored Ape gives the buyer access to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which has become one of the most sought-after online clubs in crypto. Other NFTs provide access to big, small, exclusive, inclusive — you name it — clubs. When people buy these NFTs, they are also purchasing access to the community.

Net art’s playful, disruptive spirit, its emphasis on online community, and its need for dissemination and exchange laid the foundation for NFTs. As more and more of our world begins to move online, the more we will need to organize the digisphere. NFTs are a first step toward creating a more equitable, more secure mode of transferring digital assets.