The Bre Pettis Collection of Computer Art

Art Websites and Net Art we like

July 31, 2026

These are net art websites we love — not part of the collection. The Pettis Collection of Computer Art is built from works we own and archive; net art, by contrast, is made to live on the net and can't really be owned the way a plotter drawing or a print can. So this is simply a personal, admiring list of web-native artworks — things we like and want to point people toward. Every card links out to the work itself: click through and experience it where it was built to live.

Net Art Anthology (Rhizome)

The complete Net Art Anthology — Rhizome's re-presentation of 100 seminal works from the history of net art (99 here):

Simple Net Art Diagram
MTAA (1997): two terminals joined by a line and a red lightning bolt labeled “The art happens here” — the field's most-quoted image.
Arcangel Surfware
Cory Arcangel's “non-aspirational lifestyle brand” of comfortable products for web surfing — commerce as conceptual art.
Natural Process
An installation that renders the circa-2003 Google home page as a large painting, then back to digital via webcam — a double remediation.
Vote-Auction
UBERMORGEN (2000): a platform, launched during the US election, claiming to let Americans sell their votes — provoking lawsuits in a dozen states.
386 DX
Alexei Shulgin's “world's first cyberpunk band” — a singing PC running Windows 3.1 that busked covers on the street.
The World in 24 Hours
Robert Adrian X (1982): a 24-hour networked happening linking sixteen cities, with Ars Electronica as the hub — telematic art before the web.
StarryNight
A glowing night-sky interface to Rhizome's email archive; each star a text that brightens as it is read.
Untitled
Wolfgang Staehle's live-streaming webcam works — continuous real-time views of iconic sites; one inadvertently captured 9/11.
Garlic=Rich Air
Shu Lea Cheang's participatory work imagining a 2030 post-capitalist society where community wireless is the only internet.
Mobile Image
Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz's pioneering telecollaborative works (incl. the 1980 Hole-in-Space) — “new ways of being-in-the-world.”
Post Internet
Gene McHugh's 2009–10 blog of art criticism-as-performance that named and grappled with the “post-internet” condition.
Nasty Nets
A collaborative “surf club” blog (2006–12) sharing found media and original collage from across the internet.
netart latino database
Brian Mackern's hand-coded, text-only index of hundreds of works and discussions by Latin American net artists.
Processing
Ben Fry & Casey Reas's free, open-source coding language for visual art — a foundational tool for generative and creative code.
Lungs
YoHa (ex-Mongrel): a software poem/memorial that counts, in breaths, the labor embedded in a former ZKM munitions site.
R-U-In?s / Garden Club
Kari Altmann's collaborative projects documenting a shifting, globalized post-internet aesthetic.
The Thing
Wolfgang Staehle (1991): a New York BBS for contemporary art and theory, later an ISP — a foundational node of the early art internet.
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied's ongoing preservation and restaging of GeoCities, the early web's amateur agora.
m9ndfukc.0+99
A work by Netochka Nezvanova, the massively influential, many-named online entity of the turn of the millennium.
ÄDA 'WEB
A pioneering 1990s net-art commissioning platform (founded by John Borthwick & Benjamin Weil) hosting Bunting, Holzer, Piper and more.
A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century
VNS Matrix (1991): the founding cry of cyberfeminism, splashed across billboards and screens.
Reabracadabra
A 1985 animated visual poem made for Videotexto, Brazil's pre-internet public telecom network.
My Boyfriend Came Back From the War
Olia Lialina (1996): frames and hyperlinks tell a cinematic story of a reunion after war — a canonical net-art narrative.
The File Room
Antoni Muntadas (1994): an open-ended online and physical archive of censorship cases through history.
FloodNet
Electronic Disturbance Theater (1998): a Java applet for “virtual sit-ins” in solidarity with the Zapatistas.
Mouchette
The ever-expanding, anonymously authored home page of “Mouchette,” a fictional 13-year-old obsessed with death and strangers.
Mezangelle
Mez Breeze's invented online language mixing code and speech — “codework” that dissects and rearranges English.
Form Art
Alexei Shulgin (1997): monochrome compositions built entirely from HTML form widgets — buttons, checkboxes, fields.
BIT Plane
Bureau of Inverse Technology flew a camera-equipped RC plane over Silicon Valley — surveillance turned back on the tech industry.
Heritage Gold
Mongrel (1997): a reworking of Photoshop whose tools manipulate race, class and identity instead of pixels.
BlackLash
Mongrel's mod of a virus-shooter videogame, turning “disinfecting cyberspace” into a critique of race online.
The Dollie Clone Series
Lynn Hershman Leeson's telerobotic dolls (CybeRoberta & Tillie) whose webcam eyes let anyone watch through them online.
The Web Stalker
I/O/D (1997): an artist-made browser that stripped pages away to reveal the raw link-structure of the web.
LOVE
A grid of seven HTML stories for Netscape 2 mapping the experiences of romantic love.
Documenta Done
Vuk Ćosić's act of piracy that cloned a Documenta X site — a jab at net art's uneasy relationship with institutions and archives.
Female Extension
Cornelia Sollfrank (1997): a hoax that flooded a net-art competition with 200+ invented female artists.
Bodies© INCorporated
Victoria Vesna's 1990s platform for building digital avatar bodies — an early study of online embodiment and ownership.
Automatic Rain
One of JODI's earliest browser works, drawing on the timed sprinkling of a lawn — the computer explored as material.
Communication Creates Conflict
Heath Bunting's platform for sending messages by fax, postcard, or a sign held in a Tokyo subway.
Brandon
Shu Lea Cheang (1998–99): the Guggenheim's first online commission — a year-long web narrative on gender and the case of Brandon Teena.
Black Net.Art Actions
Mendi + Keith Obadike's 2001–03 suite, incl. the auctioning of “Blackness” on eBay.
Samsung
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries' signature text-and-jazz Flash animations, delivered as a fictional corporation.
skinonskinonskin
Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn's 1999 series of interactive Flash “love letters” exchanged as they fell for each other.
Marisa's American Idol Audition Training Blog
Marisa Olson's year-long project of training to audition for American Idol as an artwork.
Gatt.org
RTMark's fake WTO website — a piece of “corporate identity correction” before the 1999 Seattle protests.
World of Awe
Yael Kanarek's multi-chapter journal following a Traveler through a desolate virtual landscape between sunset and sunrise.
Airworld
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy's 1999–2000 interventions into global capitalism, from pirate radio to a corporate-jargon generator.
Neen
Miltos Manetas & Mai Ueda's 2000 art movement of “single-serving” websites and Neenster disciples.
Velvet-Strike
Schleiner, Leandre & Condon (2002): a Counter-Strike mod adding anti-war “protest sprays.”
Screenfull
Abe Linkoln (Rick Silva) & Jimpunk's loud, crowded 2004 blog of glitch, spam-aesthetics and browser chaos.
Telepresence 2
Corpos Informáticos's late-1990s webcam performances probing the body and communication networks.
Data Diaries
Cory Arcangel used his computer's RAM as raw material for a daily series of abstract, glitchy videos.
Rent-a-Negro
damali ayo's satirical “DIY Reparations” website advertising Black people for rent to white clients.
Re-move
Lia's generative audiovisual compositions balancing organic form with fin-de-siècle Viennese abstraction.
Epithelia
Mariela Yeregui's early Argentine net art exploring the screen as a membrane between body and machine.
alpha 3.4
tsunamii.net walked the physical distance a Google search “traveled,” performed for Documenta 11 — the net's infrastructure made bodily.
Life Sharing
Eva & Franco Mattes: for three years the artists made their entire home computer public — total self-surveillance.
Dispersion
Seth Price's art-historical essay-as-artwork arguing that distribution, not the object, is the medium.
How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database
A 2004 response to post-9/11 surveillance, rendition and deportation, built as a “warm” counter-database.
distributingmartin
Pope.L's web work distributing fragments (hair, dirt, skin) said to be from the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.
Hell in Lamb UC
Pedro Vélez's epistolary fiction staged across intersecting Myspace characters — a fragmented social-media novel.
into time .com
Rafaël Rozendaal's crucial shift to abstract browser compositions — a full-screen work that lives entirely as a URL.
EverythingIveEverWantedtoKnow.com
Martine Syms's drop-down menu of three years of her own Google searches — a self-portrait in queries.
Nine Eyes of Google Street View
Jon Rafman's ongoing collection of uncanny, poignant moments captured automatically by Street View cameras.
Art Thoughtz
Jayson Musson's YouTube vlog as “Hennessy Youngman,” dispensing sharp, satirical advice on the art world.
Domestic Tension
Wafaa Bilal lived under a 24/7 internet-controlled paintball gun for a month — a networked durational performance on war.
Scandalishious
Ann Hirsch's 18-month YouTube performance as “Caroline,” a camgirl persona probing femininity and online attention.
VVEBCAM
Petra Cortright (2007) stares into her webcam amid floating clip-art — an early landmark of YouTube-as-medium.
Blind Spot
Miao Ying's work on the “Chinternet” — life, censorship and aesthetics behind the Great Firewall.
93.1 JACK FM Los Angeles 2008
Guthrie Lonergan logged every song a classic-rock station played over a day — the everyday web as readymade.
Refresh
Kristin Lucas's performance of legally changing her name to (and from) itself — identity as a networked update.
I-BE AREA
Ryan Trecartin's frenetic feature-length video giving cinematic form to the rise of social media and reality TV.
RMB City
Cao Fei's fantastical city built inside Second Life — a virtual metropolis of Chinese hyper-development.
Versions
Oliver Laric's video essay on the endless copying and re-appropriation of images through history.
Grobari
Aleksandra Domanović's thousand-page PDF “paper stacks” printed as sculptural objects.
Transborder Immigrant Tool
EDT 2.0 / b.a.n.g. lab's phone app to guide border-crossers to water in the desert — art as survival tool.
The Revolving Internet
Constant Dullaart's browser work that literally spins the iconic Google search page.
Spirit Surfers
A “surf club” group blog blurring artist, curator and audience around internet culture and aesthetics.
Paperrad.org
The website of Paper Rad, the DIY collective whose maximalist GIF-and-pixel aesthetic shaped 2000s net culture.
Untitled/Clefa
Devin Kenny's one-time 2013 performance re-enacting a circulating Tumblr meme.
Image Objects
Artie Vierkant's works that exist as installation, documentation and endlessly editable digital image at once.
Ethira
Amalia Ulman's 2013 anonymous, self-erasing message app — an artist's social platform as artwork.
Contra-Internet
Zach Blas's screen-recorded work cutting and pasting critical theory toward an “outside” of the internet.
I'm Here and There
Jonas Lund streams his own browsing in real time — a live performance of privacy and transparency.
Sister Unn's
An enigmatic, never-opened flower shop that appeared in Queens — a physical-world fiction wired to the net.
Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom
K-HOLE's trend-forecast PDF that coined “Normcore” — corporate research as conceptual art.
Consciousness Engine 2: absentfatherbot
Bogosi Sekhukhuni's chatbot simulating a relationship with his estranged father.
Material Speculation: Isis
Morehshin Allahyari 3D-printed reconstructions of artifacts destroyed by ISIS, each embedding its own data.
Death Imitates Language
Harm van den Dorpel's gallery of ~100,000 machine-generated paintings from an evolving composition system.
I'm that angel
Tyler Coburn's project centered on the “content farmer” who writes disposable articles to drive web traffic.
/INB4/
A virtual fashion magazine and online community (est. 2014), moderated by Liz Mputu — “a club that never sleeps.”
#PAYBLACKTiME
RaFia Santana's post-2016 project routing “white-money transference” into free meals for Black and Brown people.
Psycho Nymph Exile
Alexandra Marzella / Signe Pierce–adjacent “multimedia survival kit for another dimension” — a fractured sci-fi narrative across platforms.
Image Atlas
Taryn Simon & Aaron Swartz's tool comparing image-search results for a word across countries worldwide.
Mexiconceptual
A commissioned website of institutional critique built around Mexico City's art scene.
Daily Times (Performer)
Siebren Versteeg's algorithm remixes the New York Times front page into a new composition every morning.
AGNES
A self-identified spambot commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery to inhabit its 2014 website.
DIS Images
DIS collective's alt-stock-photo agency of artist-made images subverting the homogeneity of commercial stock.
The Game: The Game
Angela Washko's dating simulator putting the player opposite real pickup artists and their seduction tactics.

Whitney Artport

The Whitney Museum's Artport has commissioned net art since 2001 — browse more via its Gate Pages:

{Software} Structures
Casey Reas (2004): software as art after Sol LeWitt — text “structures” run as 26 small programs.
The Dumpster
Golan Levin (2006): a visualization of tens of thousands of teenage break-ups mined from blogs.
CODeDOC
Twelve artists (2002): a show comparing the code behind each work, not just its front end.
IDEA LINE
Martin Wattenberg (2001): a timeline of net artworks drawn as a fan of luminous threads.
VOYEUR_WEB
Tina LaPorta (2001): webcams collapse the private and public spheres of an apartment.
Screening Circle
Andy Deck (2006): the quilting circle reimagined as a collaborative online drawing space.
The Battle of Algiers
Marc Lafia & Fang-Yu Lin (2006): Pontecorvo's 1965 film recomposed as a cell-based system.

The rest of the commissions. The seven above are the ones we keep going back to, but Artport has commissioned net art continuously since 2001. This is the full run — an index, not a gallery; every title links to the Whitney's page for the work.

On the Hour. Commissioned works that mark every full hour, unfolding over thirty seconds, organised by Christiane Paul, the Whitney's Curator of Digital Art:

Two more Artport strands are worth a wander: Sunrise/Sunset and the Gate Pages. And the museum's own collection holds Douglas Davis's The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994), restored in 2012 — a genuine classic of the form.

From an X conversation

Gathered from a thread started by @sssluke1 on X (July 29, 2026) asking for “websites that are deliberately created as Artworks.” Credit and thanks to sssluke and everyone who replied.

jodi.org — JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)
A seminal work of net.art that greets you with a screenful of frantic, blinking green-on-black gibberish whose chaos resolves, only in the page's view-source code, into a hidden ASCII schematic of a hydrogen bomb — the browser weaponized as glitch.
Maintenance Web
A self-referential early-web relic on the legendary thing.net art server, spelling out "M A I N T E N A N C E W E B" in spaced lettering and populating the void with animated-GIF characters — Carl, Diane, Big Joe, and a spinning "logooloop" — that turn the mundane ritual of website upkeep into a lo-fi digital theater.
Cameron's World — Cameron Askin
A sprawling, scrollable web-collage stitched from thousands of salvaged GeoCities pages — a maximalist shrine of animated GIFs, glitter text, and "under construction" banners that resurrects the gloriously amateur, pre-corporate internet of the 1990s.
Windows93 — Jankenpopp & Zombectro
A fully interactive parody operating system that boots inside your browser, dressed up as a surreal Windows-95-era desktop crammed with glitchy fake apps, absurdist games, meme relics, and dial-up-internet nostalgia.
One Million Checkboxes — Nolen Royalty (eieio)
A single scrolling grid of one million real checkboxes that everyone on the internet shares and toggles in real time, turning a mundane web form element into a collective, ever-shifting canvas of strangers checking and unchecking together.
The Million Dollar Homepage — Alex Tew
A 1000x1000 pixel canvas selling internet history one dollar-per-pixel at a time, its grid a chaotic mosaic of tiny advertiser logos frozen as a monument to mid-2000s web culture.
Donnie Darko (redux) — Hi-ReS! (Alexandra Jugovic & Florian Schmitt) with Richard Kelly
A faithful revival of the cult 2001 Donnie Darko promotional website — the legendary interactive Hi-ReS! net-art puzzle that turned film marketing into a cryptic, time-travel-laced digital labyrinth — rebuilt and preserved as a work of net art in its own right.
The HTML Review — Issue 05
An annual browser-native literary journal whose Issue 05 table of contents is itself a gallery of experimental web works — CSS botany, cursor-driven playgrounds, and browser poetry made to live only in HTML.
screen toys — Gavin Shapiro
A whimsical net-art arcade that greets you with a randomized deadpan pleasantry and then invites you to poke at a grid of absurd interactive browser toys — dancing skeletons, explosive pomeranians, cars raining onto invincible cows, a chuck-the-pieces game of "Chess 2," and a firewood-splitting simulator — all fronted by a squad of marching flamingos.
Tendrela
A hushed, minimalist net-art shrine to the Buddhist idea of dependent arising (རྟེན་འབྲེལ), where visitors move through a "daily ritual" and a "liminal lexicon" that treat the browser as a space for contemplative practice.
someblob.art — office ca
A deliberately spare, single-idea net-art page that hands its whole ".art" domain over to the notion of "some blob" — a minimalist conceptual gesture credited to office ca, where the amorphous digital nothing IS the artwork.
dungeonscrolling
A surreal, scroll-driven browser artwork where atmospheric narrative fragments about becoming "pure data" are interleaved with eerie CAPTCHA challenges, egg-hatching and angel animations, and ambient dungeon sound, turning bot-verification rituals into a meditation on digital metamorphosis and human-machine identity.
Balloons In The Sky — Bård & Jennifer Ionson
A curated on-chain gallery that floats a collection of 172 digital artworks like balloons in an open sky, sorting each piece into "Latest Acquisitions" and "In Flight" as it drifts from pending to acquired.
Why Was He Sad — Rafaël Rozendaal
A single-serving net-art website by Rafaël Rozendaal (2003), part of Miltos Manetas' collection, that turns a lone domain name into a minimalist interactive artwork living entirely at whywashesad.com.
We Will Attack (wewillattack.com) — Rafaël Rozendaal
A 2002 Rafaël Rozendaal net-art website — a full-browser interactive piece whose very domain name, "we will attack .com," is the artwork, treating the URL and the web itself as sculptural material and now held in the collection of Neil Hutchinson.
lovegameset.com — Rafaël Rozendaal
A 2011 Rafaël Rozendaal browser artwork whose tennis-scored title (love-game-set) frames one of his signature full-screen, single-concept net-art pieces built to live entirely as a URL.
OUTSIDERS — The Immersive Constellation
A navigable 3D starfield where every glowing point is an artwork someone witnessed, letting you fly through the dark with WASD, click lights to reveal the works and creators behind them, and gather favorites into your own constellation-gallery.
The Oversoul — Apocalypse Studios
A black-void net artwork where the entire classic emoji lexicon swarms, drifts, and rains across the screen — Apocalypse Studios' sprawling collective-unconscious mosaic of "144 contiguous pieces, one great artwork."
Number Research Inc.
A deadpan conceptual web-art piece posing as a corporate research initiative, inviting "volunteer" visitors to type integers into a search box to help "find and document all available numbers" — an absurdist, endless bureaucratic quest to catalog every number that exists.
The Room (THEROOM:\>PRESS ENTER)
A retro-terminal net-art dwelling you "enter" and inhabit — a cyberpunk ASCII room where you water a virtual plant, sift a floppy-disk inventory, and coax mantras from a meditating sprite, a nostalgic meditation on isolation and digital existence.
noun.wtf — Neural Treasury — NOC (noun.wtf)
A living, force-directed "neural" map of the entire Nouns DAO — its 102,000-ETH vault surrounded by hundreds of glowing builder, delegate, and participant nodes wired together by animated money-flows you can scrub through time, filter, and search, all framed by a scrolling ticker of the community's on-chain chatter.
⍀ҞRIST (kristwood.com) — Krist Wood
A deliberately sparse, glyph-and-glitch net-art landing page where a stylized ⍀ҞRIST logo, color overlays, and repeated "kross" motifs form a cryptic visual gateway into artist Krist Wood's world.
moodyvib.es — Claudia Maté
A pitch-black void where dozens of glossy retro emoji — a VHS tape, a pager, a satellite dish, a floppy disk, a lone poop — drift like scattered constellations, turning obsolete digital iconography into a melancholic emoji star-field.

Anthology summaries are condensed from Rhizome; the thread works were auto-summarized and checked live.

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