In the electric decades of the early 20th century, the utopian promises of the second industrial revolution inspired Fernand Léger to film pumping pistons and László Moholy-Nagy to build a rotating “light-space modulator.” By the second half of the century, electronics had replaced electricity as the technology identified with social progress. In the 1960s Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg founded the Experiments in Art and Technology program in order to pair up artists and dancers with engineers at Bell Labs; while Nam June Paik bent television signals by using crossed wires and magnets in an attempt to make good on the medium‘s promise to expand rather than limit audiovisual horizons. The introduction of the Sony Portapak camera in 1968 made it easy to capture video images, and more recently video installations by such artists as Gary Hill, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Bill Viola have upstaged painting and sculpture in many exhibitions and museum collections.

For artists to reach outside museum walls and compete with broadcast media, however, requires them to control distribution as well as production—which the personal computer made possible. In the 1990s accelerated processor speeds and plummeting hardware prices enticed artists to experiment with digital media. Just as critical was the research ethic of the early Internet, which privileged free circulation of ideas over copyrighted programs broadcast from a central location. A significant number of artists were already exchanging criticism and artwork in text form via online bulletin boards by the time the Internet became a visual medium with the introduction of the first graphical “Mosaic” browser in 1993, giving them an opportunity to shape a new medium at its very inception. Since the turn of the millennium artists have contributed to the proliferation of decentralized media through their innovations in Web design, streaming audio and video, and computer driven installations.