Early net art is central to the story of digital art history, yet its central qualities – its embracing of experimentation and emerging technologies – also make it difficult to preserve. Dependent on browsers, software, and hardware that are no longer active and created by folks, many of whom are no longer practising artists, many early net artworks are now almost impossible to resurrect and reexamine.
These are the conditions that make net art so compelling and elusive. Emerging alongside the early public internet, it promised a radical rethinking of artistic circulation, works could be distributed globally, encountered in real time, and shaped through interactions between strangers and machines. Yet this same reliance on rapidly evolving technologies has rendered much of its history fragile, scattered, or entirely absent.
ANIMA, which went live in March 1994, belongs to this formative moment when web-based artistic practices were still in their nascency. Conceived in Vancouver, British Columbia as an experimental online environment, ANIMA functioned both as a curated platform and a collaborative space, bringing together artists to explore the aesthetic and social possibilities of the early web. The term “net.art” itself would not be coined until 1996, yet projects like ANIMA already embodied its core principles. As Rhizome described in the catalogue that attended Net Art Anthology, a survey exhibition of internet artworks from the 1980s to 2010s, “net art is art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it.” ANIMA operated in both senses: it was at once a site of artistic exchange and a platform shaped by the dynamic, unstable conditions of the network.
More than simply the creative use of the internet, net art encompasses practices that happen through encounters between users, interfaces, protocols, and infrastructures. Questions of preservation emerge almost immediately. How can net art be made to last without losing its variability? How can it be reperformed as their original contexts evolve? And how do we account for what has already been lost?
These questions became particularly urgent in January 2026 when I embarked on this project, Terminal City: Vancouver’s Earliest Art Online, in which I, led by ANIMA co-founder and prolific artist Oliver Hockenhull and supported technically by experimental animator and scholar Nick Fox-Gieg, undertook the project of restoring ANIMA and its descendant, digital eARTh. Developed later as an expansion and reimagining of ANIMA’s networked ethos, digital eARTh extended the project’s commitment to distributed authorship and ecological thinking, linking artists, data, and environments across digital space. Like its predecessor, it was not a fixed artwork but an evolving platform, one that depended on participation, connectivity, and technological contingency.
As with many archival projects rooted in obsolete media, the restoration process began without a clear roadmap. Nick and I were handed a collection of files that were fragmented, variably named, and at times corrupted. Even when files could be recovered, their meaning was not always evident. Where did they belong? How were they meant to function? And what did the files mean in relation to one another? Many works depended on now-defunct technologies such as Flash, Shockwave, and VRML, further complicating efforts to reconstruct the sites. We were at once restoring the website infrastructure as well as the artworks that it once contained.
The challenge was not only technical but also historical and interpretive. Several original contributors had moved on from their artistic careers; others were impossible to locate; some were no longer alive. We were tasked, in effect, with rebuilding a website neither of us had ever seen. In cases where restoration proved impossible, where links led nowhere or files could not be recovered, we chose to mark absence explicitly, using strikethroughs to signal loss. This gesture acknowledges what cannot be retrieved, foregrounding the fragmentary condition in which much net art now survives.
Open-ended, ephemeral, and deeply embedded in the infrastructures of the internet, works like those in ANIMA often persist only as traces, partial records of interactions that once unfolded across a network. The restoration of ANIMA and digital eARTh offers a glimpse of a time and place that can no longer be revisited.