Terminal City: Vancouver's earliest art online

A restoration of ANIMA & digital eARTh

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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 practicing 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. Read more.

About ANIMA

ANIMA (Arts Network for Integrated Media Applications) launched to the public on March 1, 1994, and was produced by a Vancouver-based collective of media artists known as the WebWeavers. The platform connected artists, technologists, and cultural institutions through networked media art and aspired to create a distributed art infrastructure for the nascent digital age. Read more.

About digital eARTh

digital eARTh was an artist-led, non-profit digital arts initiative founded in Vancouver around 1995 by Thecla Schiphorst and Oliver Hockenhull. Hosted on a BCIT server but rooted in SFU and UBC communities, it provided a critical online space for web-based art, theory, and activism during the early web era.
Read more.