The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities, from DeviantArt ... about:reader?url=https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rise...

artsy.net

The Rise and Fall of Internet Art

Communities, from DeviantArt to
Tumblr
Artsy EditorialBy Kelsey AblesApr 19th, 2019 5:44 pm
18-23 minutos

Today, sharing art on social media is like running on a

treadmill forever. At least, that’s how illustrator Lois van
Baarle describes it. “You have to post constantly,” Van Baarle,
who got her start in the early aughts on DeviantArt, explained.
“Otherwise, the algorithm decides you’re not interesting, and
will not show your posts to your followers.”

Before big tech shepherded the vast number of online users

onto a handful of sleek websites, there was a scrappier
internet—where offbeat chat rooms and eccentric niche
websites reigned, and carefully crafted “away statuses” were
a kind of personal branding—back when you could be away
from the internet. Until attention spans became a commodity,
the internet was dreamed of as a “bastion for people to direct
their own education,” as Charles Broskoski, co-founder of
internet bookmarking site are.na, remembers.

Artists, too, forged communities in the spirit of collaboration

and learning. From the gothic underworlds of Breed and
Abnormis, to hyper-specific pixel art sites, to larger
communities like DeviantArt, the internet presented a breadth

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of opportunity for all kinds of artists—often of marginalized

identities or with artistic interests unrecognized by institutions.

Wolfgang Staehle et. al., The Thing, 1991–95. Bulletin board

system. Courtesy of Wolfgang Staehle and the New Museum.

As digital imaging advanced, the internet expanded into the

multimedia universe we have today, and, perhaps
paradoxically, its art communities dwindled. Users traded
dedicated artist communities for major social networks,
leaving links to their new Instagram and Facebook accounts
on their abandoned profiles. In the 2010s, users asked on
forums if their beloved communities were indeed dead.
DeviantArt—though it remains active—has lost its culture.
And more recently, Tumblr, formerly a haven for LGBTQ+
artists, issued a major crackdown on adult content
—alienating many creators who found refuge in its sex-
positive, queer-friendly environment.

There are a myriad of reasons people leave platforms—an

unfriendly interface; outdated design; increased spam—but

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the shift away from tight-knit spaces for collective creativity

marks more than just a natural fall in popularity. As the
internet consolidated, it moved toward homogeneity and
passivity, and the internet’s once-vibrant art communities
became casualties in social media’s rapid, obliterative rise.

Art in the wild, early internet

Screenshot of the DeviantArt interface, 2019. Used with

permission from DeviantArt.

Before advanced search engines, information floated on

databases like a string of scattered islands. Communities
formed out of necessity to help early users surf the boundless
web.

Art discussions even appeared in the primordial text-based

internet on Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems
(BBS), and email listservs. In 1991, two years before the first
digital image was uploaded to the web, Wolfgang Staehle, an
early net artist, started The Thing as a BBS about art and
criticism; members traded links, shared gallery
announcements, and debated creative and cultural theory. In
1995, Nettime—a listserv for “cultural producers”—followed,
as well as Rhizome in 1996; in one particularly zany
“cyberdawg ramble” on Nettime in 1998, Jon Lebkowsky
declared that the internet was there to stay, “like rock ‘n roll.”

The first publicly available browser, Mosaic, came in 1993. It

allowed images and text to load in a single window, and the
masses joined in navigating the wild early web. GeoCities
launched soon after, introducing in 1995 the ability to

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organize personal sites by interest into “neighborhoods” and

“suburbs.” Computer sites could be found in “Silicon Valley,”
shopping sites on “Rodeo Drive,” and so on. In November
1995, GeoCities added the “Soho and Lofts” neighborhood
for the arts.

Before social-media profiles, artists primarily cultivated digital

identities through clunky personal websites. Broskoski, of
are.na, who was involved in net art communities in the 1990s,
remembered making a site called “Welcometohell.com,”
which listed links to other websites—a common practice at
the time. “You were sort of making or creating who you were
by pointing at the other things that you liked,” he explained.

Visiting early personal sites felt like stopping by someone’s

house, with quaint greetings like “Hello visitor” or “Welcome
to this homepage!” And if artists’ personal pages were their
homes, their social outings took place on forums. The Thing
was followed by more open art communities like Sijun and
Eatpoo: The former was known for its young, vibrant culture;
the latter for its lively and—as its name suggests—often
uncouth atmosphere.

Ellen Formby’s 2018 artwork, ellen.gif’s Wayback Machine

(video clip), which incorporates screenshots (extracted via
The Wayback Machine’s archive) of her websites constructed
on Matmice, an Australian webpage builder that offered free
webpage development similar to Geocities, c. 2007–08.
Courtesy of the artist.

Another forum, WetCanvas, greeted users with a cropped

picture of Vincent van Gogh next to the line: “If the web would
have been around during his time, we could have done

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wonders for his career.” Scott Burkett, an Atlanta-based

software developer, launched the site in 1998 after
developing an interest in oil painting. He often had to spread
the word the old-fashioned way, inviting artists to join over the
phone. The early site had forums for traditional art mediums,
and each night, at 9:30 p.m., members hung out in a chat
room called “Café Guerbois,” named after the famous
Parisian café that Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
frequented.

Screenshot of the Conceptart.org interface, 2019. Used with

permission from Conceptart.org.

Around the same time WetCanvas launched, a then-16-year-

old Matt Stephens had art ambitions, a computer, and a
pirated copy of Photoshop. He founded WastedYouth, a
website where he posted over 500 tutorials on art that
included lessons on creating desktop art, or “skinning.”

The first type of art made on computers was art made for
computers, and in the 2000s, the more customized desktop,
the better. Like true “internet kids,” the three DeviantArt
founders—Stephens, Scott Jarkoff, and Angelo Sotira—met
in a chat room and connected over a shared interest in
skinning. (In even truer internet fashion, to this day, Stephens
and Jarkoff have not met in person.)

When “Deliciously Deviant Deviant Art!” went live in August

2000, it focused on wallpapers and webskins, though it
eventually branched out into more digital and traditional art,
becoming the first large-scale online art community. Like
“deviating” your desktop, artworks are known as “deviations.”
Arts education is “very much about deviation,” Sotira noted,

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adding that artists learn from riffing off of one anothers’ work.

Unlike the quantifiable interactions such as “likes” and

“reactions” that pass for interactivity in 2019, there was
genuine engagement on DeviantArt.

From the outset, the DeviantArt founders envisioned a

community-oriented space. For the first six months, they
commented on every single post on the website with
constructive criticism. On the side of each page, a “shoutbox”
had a constant stream of conversation. “Our mentality back
then was [to] allow people to interact wherever we can,”
Stephens recalled. “We were inventing a lot of the stuff as we
went.”

In doing so, DeviantArt created templates for later social

sites, rolling out the ability to create avatars and write on each
other’s profiles, the latter of which would eventually be
adopted by Myspace and Facebook. In addition, “[DeviantArt]
had the ability to follow people long before that ever became
an idea,” Jarkoff explained.

Maja Wronska, a Polish artist who makes watercolor

cityscapes, was particularly sensitive to DeviantArt’s design
and atmosphere when she joined a decade ago. She had
been on Poland’s “wannabe DeviantArt,” but found the
environment hostile—owing in part to a feature where users
rated artworks on a scale of 1–5. Wronska said that some
users even made fake accounts to downvote her work and
elevate their own. In contrast, DeviantArt was warm and
welcoming.

Screenshot of Maja Wronska’s gallery page on DeviantArt,

2019. Used with permission from DeviantArt.

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Unlike the quantifiable interactions that pass for interactivity in

2019, such as “likes” and “reactions,” there was genuine
engagement in DeviantArt’s chat rooms and forums. “A
culture developed on DeviantArt where comments simply
saying things like ‘cool!’ and ‘nice!’ were frowned upon,” Van
Baarle explained. “People wanted in-depth comments and
feedback, with constructive criticism.” Today, she added, the
quality of conversation is “disappearing on the big social-
media platforms like Instagram.”

Such meaningful interactions were not limited to DeviantArt.

In 2001, artist Jason Manley announced plans to launch
Conceptart.org, which he founded with Justin Kaufman and
Andrew Jones under a similar premise: to educate and
connect artists. Inspired by Shamus Culhane, a Disney
animator, Manley built the site in the spirit of Culhane’s advice
for aspiring artists: “Find your circle.”

The internet presented a breadth of opportunity for all kinds

of artists—often of marginalized identities or with artistic
interests unrecognized by institutions.

The online community soon translated to real-world meet-

ups. At the first one in Amsterdam, Kaufman remembers
looking around, awestruck at artists from around the world
drawing in each others’ sketchbooks. At art school, he
explained, “you’re around other artists, but you’re
geographically limited. The thing that was amazing about
Conceptart.org was the fact that it was worldwide.”

This transnational nature of the internet spurred creativity in

and of itself. Burkett recalled a collaboration between
WetCanvas users that borrowed from the collaborative mail

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art of the 1960s: One artist painted a home that represented

the style of architecture in their country, rolled it up, and sent
it to another artist in another country, who would add to the
painting, and so on.

WetCanvas members around the world pose with a

collaborative painting featuring architectural scenes from
different countries represented in the online community, c.
2004. Courtesy of Scott Burkett.

But internet art communities didn’t just facilitate unlikely

friendships—they also launched careers. Domee Shi, who
won an Oscar this year for her short film Bao (2018), recently
credited DeviantArt for helping her find like-minded creatives.
And Emmanuel Laflamme, a Montreal-based artist whose
work blends the art-historical canon with digital
iconography—the Mona Lisa with emojis; Renaissance
figures holding tablets—said that DeviantArt gave him “the
push [he] needed when [he] started.”

On Conceptart.org, Kaufman recalled watching “hundreds of

kids grow into working artists.” Likewise, Manley said that
nearly anyone who works in entertainment art today has
some tie to Conceptart.org. Among them is one of Marvel’s
most esteemed comics, Marko Djurdjević, who painted the
cover art for comic titles like The Amazing Spider-Man (2007)
and Black Panther (2009).

Along the way, there were challenges: finding space to store

all of the data; managing digital platforms the size of cities;
and dealing with the effects of the dot-com bust that bottomed
out in 2003. But ultimately, these early platforms lost their
ethos as a changing internet made it impossible to sustain

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what originally made them so stimulating: community.

Screenshot of the Tumblr interface, 2019. Used with

permission from Tumblr.

In 2005, broadband surpassed dial-up in popularity in the

U.S., allowing the flow of faster and larger amounts of data,
and facilitating the rise of visually oriented sites like YouTube
and Facebook. Meanwhile, digital cameras had become more
accessible and affordable in the early aughts, spurring the
birth of photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket.

Sotira said that as the internet grew, DeviantArt lost the

portion of its users who were using the site primarily to host
images or chat with people. “We aren’t a photo-dumping site
and we aren’t a social network—we are an art community,” he
said. Though there is a case to be made that that DeviantArt
is still a popular platform—it’s still one of the top 200 websites
in the world—many artists feel that in 2019, the site is not the
same.

“What I liked most about [DeviantArt] then was the intimate

feel of the network because the audience was relatively
small,” artist Aaron Jasinski, who joined the site in 2002, said.
“That’s a hard thing to scale.” And Van Baarle, who has since
migrated to Instagram, commented that “the user base is way
less vibrant, young, aspirational, and motivated compared to
before.…DeviantArt is sort of a dinosaur or living fossil in the
internet world.” Kaufman had similar things to say about
Conceptart.org, calling the site “an empty husk.”

Screenshot of Aaron Jasinski’s gallery page on DeviantArt,

2019. Used with permission from DeviantArt.

The founders of DeviantArt foresaw the fracturing of the

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community early on. “There were probably 100 of us in the

original community, and that was already a lot of people trying
to have a conversation,” Stephens said. “What happens when
that chat room is now 500 people? Or 1,000 people? All of a
sudden, it’s a concert venue.” And the very concept of
“scaling a community” seems oxymoronic. It is a problem that
plagues the internet today: How do you make a now-
sweeping internet feel smaller?

As tech began consolidating around the big five—Amazon,

Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft— the experience of
the internet shifted away from the wacky and creative and
became more streamlined. Broskoski likened it to everyone
living in seven skyscrapers, when “there’s actually this huge
weird landscape [where] we could be building” eclectic homes
or “other small villages.”

As the internet moved toward homogeneity and passivity,

once-vibrant art communities became casualties in social
media’s rapid, obliterative rise.

However, in the mid-2000s, smaller villages still thrived,

cropping up around internet “surf clubs”—sites where artists
mused about internet culture and aesthetics. Nasty Nets,
founded in 2006, looked like a throwback to a classic,
cluttered GeoCities page, and featured 39 different artists
during its tenure. Co-founder Marisa Olson recounted their
influences in an email: “We were very inspired by Del.icio.us,
a social bookmarking site, and a culture of surfing, sharing,
and remixing material found on the web in an era that pre-
dated Tumblr.”

When Tumblr did launch in 2007, some surf clubs set up

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shop there, such as the extant Computers Club, which

focuses on digital renderings and illustrations; and R-U-IN?S,
which is known for its distinct futuristic aesthetic. Larger blogs
that centered around art also fostered community on Tumblr
—Jogging featured posts by 1,000 different authors.

Uninhibited by the austerity of banal Facebook profiles,

Tumblr is a bridge between the internet of yesteryear and
today. Pages are customizable, meant to be an extension of
your personality; and the platform’s reblog feature echoes the
link sharing of communities like Deli.cio.us, a favorite hangout
of net artists.

Molly Soda, an artist who uses the internet as a medium and

a platform, commented: “Tumblr was really the first space
that allowed me to connect with other people who were
thinking about similar things artistically.” A self-described
“hoarder” of images and files (such as sexy dancing girl
GIFs), Soda began “obsessively” posting them on Tumblr in
2009 and submitting to Tumblr zines, like Beth Siveyer’s Girls
Get Busy. She connected with other artists like Signe Pierce,
Maisie Cousins, and Grace Miceli through the platform, and
even met Arvida Byström, her co-editor on the 2017 book
Pics or It Didn’t Happen: Images Banned From Instagram, on
Tumblr. Soda also noted Tumblr’s strong influence in
contemporary visual culture—pastel colors in “millennial
aesthetics” can be traced back to Tumblr movements like
pastel goth and soft grunge.

Then, in the 2010s, Instagram capitalized on the mass

adoption of smartphones, and Facebook grew into a site
larger than any country in the world. And while artists have
made their mark on all of the major social-media networks,

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these new, bigger sites have changed the way we

communicate and consume. Algorithms steer us back to
similar content in echo chambers that inhibit both critical and
creative thinking. Platforms incentivized to keep users
scrolling discourage long-looking and render users as passive
consumers, rather than active seekers of inspiration. They
aren’t a space for productive feedback, either: Art takes on a
different tone when it’s surrounded by dog GIFs, political
memes, and your cousin’s baby photos.

Van Baarle, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram,

expresses exasperation at the platform. “It’s about posting
bite-sized content as frequently as possible,” she said, in
order to game the algorithms that choose what followers see
and reward frequency with more visibility. She also noted that
it is tempting to post simpler artworks to Instagram. “Most
social-media platforms don’t reward the extra time and effort
that goes into [detailed digital paintings] anymore.”

Even Tumblr’s influence has waned: In July of last year, one

writer called it “a joyless black hole,” citing rampant
harassment on the platform. And following the platform’s
decision to ban adult content this past December, media
outlets and Twitter users have all but predicted its death.

Adult content has been a hot issue on open platforms since

the early days of DeviantArt. The founders penned the first
policy: If it could hang in a museum, it could stay on the site.

With Tumblr’s new puritanical ethos, artists might just retreat

to the aughts icon, which is in the process of rolling out a new
redesign. Or they could move to other newcomers, like Ello or
Pillowfort, the latter of which received a flurry of attention after

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Tumblr’s NSFW ban. Either way, users will have to carve out
new communities in an increasingly monopolized cyberspace.

Art takes on a different tone when it’s surrounded by dog

GIFs, political memes, and your cousin’s baby photos.

Many sites vying for artists’ attention—such as Dribbble,

Behance, and ArtStation—are more suited for professional
artists building a portfolio of work. While they are valuable
tools, they don’t leave space for the same kind of learning,
open brainstorming, and wild experimentation seen in earlier
art communities. Today’s communities “aren’t quite the
same,” Stephens noted. “I was really lucky that there was that
platform for me to learn from other designers in a
collaborative and safe environment.”

Ultimately, today’s internet is full of contradictions. There are

more people to connect with than ever, and yet less room for
the exploration and creativity that cultivates strong artistic
communities.

If in the early days, we “surfed” the internet, today we are

submerged in it. But in the wake of data breaches, election
scandals, and studies that social-media sites are taking more
than just our time, another shift may be taking shape. Interest
in digital wellness and a “slow web” is rising as users are
looking for ways to spend their time online more meaningfully.

Some relics and rituals of the early internet are probably

better left dead—the acronym “TTFN,” the dial-up modem
tune, the wait for images to load line by line—but the
collaborative, creative culture it fostered is bound for a
revival.

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