The idea of the website as an art form is back in vogue: not as scaffolding for content, but as a medium of its own.

Olia Lialina has believed this for thirty years. In our new conversation with the artist, she describes browsers and servers as sculptural material, while admitting that the web she fell in love with is dying, giving way to an “agentic web” built by bots, for bots. Where once she would have rejected the label of “web artist”, she now insists on it to preserve the web as a space for creative experiment.

She’s not alone. A new exhibition in New York, “WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!”, brings twenty artists to Armory Week (and online, of course) for Rhizome’s 30th anniversary, with the browser standing in for the gallery wall. MoMI’s new “Site Interruptions” series allows artists take over the museum’s own homepage, currently haunted by Steve Pikelny’s beautifully untrustworthy build, while LACMA has also handed its own website over to the artist John Gerrard. The Whitney’s longstanding Artport program continues to commission net art the old fashioned way, directly for the browser with no gallery wall needed.

Lialina’s point is that none of this happens by accident, and none of it lasts without someone insisting on it. At a time when it feels like the internet is being engulfed by AI, individuals and institutions are insisting on the power of online art.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

Right Click Save’s Forum section is a discussion board for the digital art community. It has attracted posts and comments on a broad range of topics, not least on AI, its creative power and potential, as well as its perils.

With this week’s newsletter we highlight a question of language in the Forum: a conversation started by the artist duo LoVid, and continued by the artist Primavera De Filippi, about the pros and cons of the terms “digital art” and “media art”. You can follow the debate here.

The Right Click Save Index is a knowledge bank drawn from across the magazine’s editorial coverage. It shows how people, artworks, events, organizations, and ideas connect in our archive of more than 450 articles.

Rather than a comprehensive biography or dictionary definition, each page surfaces the salient elements from our ecosystem. Readers can access the Index from the navigation bar of the website, through the Search window, and from in-article “cards” that link to Index entries, or direct to articles in the Magazine archive.

As Rhizome this week celebrated its 30 years’ work in New York, as a host to industry-defining events, creator of seminal publications, and for its work in preserving born digital culture for posterity, we were glad to explore the Right Click Save Index for articles that touch on Rhizome’s invaluable contribution to the digital art ecosystem. Those articles include this 2023 conversation involving Rhizome’s executive director, Michael Connor.