Cary Peppermint: From 1997 – 2003 I created (in a then-unofficial collaboration with Leila Nadir) a series of internet based art works that now seem to have sniffed out and anticipated what is now called web 2.0. During this time I was concerned with the accelerating erosion of personal privacy and the commodification of the web. The feeling of anonymity and freedom to create that I experienced on the web in the late 80’s and early 90’s was changing fast. I wondered if it were possible to resist these changes in a web-based, performative way by burying myself in light, i.e. hiding in plain site by sharing my intimate moments with others via early incarnations of web 2.0 technologies like zing.com, ebay.com, mp3.com, and many others many of which are now defunct. What you see here on this page is mostly archived moments from a much larger and previously “live” site called restlessculture.net.
There is a downloadable .pdf of one of my artist statements from this time-period published in Leonardo, 2006. It pretty much sums up my approach to making internet art from 1997-2003.