I was online from the “beginning” and first made a reputation as a web designer/net artist in 1996. My site was called Entropy8.com (its still there, sort of.) I had the nebulous honour of winning the first two Webby awards for net Internet Art, beating out larger contenders, ha.
https://www.webbyawards.com/winners/1997/web/general-website/art/
https://www.webbyawards.com/winners/1998/web/general-website/art/
I was part of the (legendary?) net art collective hell.com with jodi, 0100101110101101.org, etc. and there is where I met Michael who was going by Zuper! at the time. And he was part of ada.web… I’m wondering if you know net.art history, but yeah, it was a big deal at the time.
Right before I left for Europe, in 1998, I got the commission from Walker Art Center to make a project for their online project Gallery9 http://ananatomy.walkerart.org It’s still there, but it does not work, it ran on flash, cgi scripts and an idea about the Internet that doesn’t exist anymore.
Michael and I used hell.com in 1999 to create what was perhaps the first net art pay-per-view work called skinonskinonskin
http://e8z.org/skinonskinonskin/
and people did pay to see it.
Recently that artwork was resurrected, in emulation, by Rhizome.org for their Net Art Anthology https://anthology.rhizome.org/skinonskinonskin
skinonskinonskin is featured in the catalog and was shown at the New Museum in “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics” the physical manifestation of the Anthology.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BukOFtxFk8e/
We were awarded a huge prize by the SFMOMA in 2000
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/12/technology/couple-wins-30000-online-art-award.html
and the acceptance speech is worth your time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEv9MuLZUv4&feature=emb_title
yes, that’s Bill Viola we are embarrassing, one of my proudest moments.
We also made a much lauded online performance called Wirefire. Again, not viewable anymore. http://e8z.org/wirefire/
The project’s CV included the Brooklyn academy of Music and many European art festivals.
And the last thing I’ll mention, all of that lead to us being a part of a, long forgotten but very important and interesting at the time, exhibition at SFMOMA called 010101: Art in technological times.
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/010101/
For which we were comissioned by the museum to make Eden.Garden. The project itself, like the site for the show, is completely unviewable now.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/entropy8/albums/72157600005384815
It was a web browser, a parser, which creates from each webpage, a paradise. That pretty much sums up how I felt abut the web at the time.
But that time ended, and we moved on to the Videogames. We wanted to make Interactive art and saw video games as a way forward. We saw art galleries and museums as a dead end for interactive work, whereas games made for computers, played on consoles, and everywhere else, played by large numbers of people, were just starting to come alive as a medium for artists.
p.s. kiss.entropy8zuper.com
https://vimeo.com/365031
https://www.flickr.com/photos/entropy8/albums/72157594500928662