Colloquially referred to as the ‘Wild West’ era of the internet, the 1990s and early 2000s were known to be a period of productive creative output and experimentation. The origins of net.art were conceived in the 90s, and, inheriting the DIY and experimental ethos of the internet at this time, the artists that were a part of the movement were anti-institutional in nature. Artists used websites for unruly experiments, stolen material, political provocation and irreverent humour.

Anarchy carries that spirit across generations of artists. Here, software is deliberately misused, familiar interfaces turn against their users and the internet’s stranger corners become artistic material. Some works confront authority directly; others simply refuse to behave. What connects them is a willingness to treat the web as something open to interference, a place whose rules anyone can rewrite.

After the dot com boom, new business models emerged. In the mid-2000s and into the 2010s, the first social media platforms were founded and began drastically changing the way we interact with the web. ‘Surfing’ the web was replaced with ‘scrolling’, and the depth of the rabbit holes that one would previously wander into were flattened into feeds.

The theme of Abstraction is a double-entendre that addresses both an aesthetic trend and a technopolitical one. Creatively, the 2010s experienced a wave of artists using websites to display code-based generative artworks, which were often visually abstract. Websites became the vitrines for live, web-native generative visuals that could be experienced and displayed by anyone, anywhere in the world, with an internet connection. However, ‘abstraction’ can also refer to the abstraction of technology, the act of blackboxing and hiding away complex algorithms and processes in order to present seamless user experiences, often to the detriment of the individual. The artists working in Abstraction use the browser as a space for both visual exploration and scrutiny. We encounter the beauty of computational processes alongside a less comfortable question: how much of the technology we use every day can we actually see or understand?

In response to the centralization of the internet, webmasters, creative coders and artists began to informally organise a new movement towards reclaiming a more personal and expressive web. Sometimes referred to as Poetic Computing, this return to learning how to make one’s own website focuses on the slow and laborious task of hand-coding, personalization, decolonizing, decentralizing, and expressing one’s individuality. The movement advocates for code as a medium for narrative and care, proof that an internet serving diverse communities is still within reach.

Through landscapes, correspondence, games and journeys, these works invite a different kind of attention. You might linger, lose your way, encounter a stranger or find yourself implicated in someone else’s story. Against the familiar routines of posting and scrolling, these artists make room for intimacy and uncertainty, asking what kinds of connections a website might still make possible.

In June 2026, the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ officially became a reality, with over 50% of activity on the internet being generated by bots and AI agents rather than humans. The overarching sentiment in the 2020s is that the internet has become a place that is increasingly alienating and hostile towards humans. Methods of self-expression and connection with others reach an increasingly machinic audience programmed to scrape data, cause drama, or generate spam. The internet is now populated by countless ‘ghosts’ and autonomous spectres.

The theme of Ghosts explores the unease of an internet that can feel crowded and deserted at once. Abandoned domains and error pages are haunted with an unexpected presence; virtual properties and lands have become ghost towns; an AI agent moves autonomously across a screen, toggling through pages and highlighting important material on a website as if guided by a spectral hand… These works explore the missing or obscured spaces of the internet, questioning what is preserved and what disappears, whilst also confronting the reality of living and sharing netspace with non-human entities.