Idea Line
A Net Art Idea Line mapping lines of thought through time
by Martin Wattenberg

Martin Wattenberg's "Idea Line" – a timeline of net artworks – has been
launched on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to net art. The "Idea
Line" is designed to show both the variety of themes, technologies, and
media that net art has been using and the relation of each artwork to the
larger tapestry of all these diverse approaches. The timeline – a
visualization of a database of net art projects that have been created from
1995 until today – is arranged in a fan of luminous threads. Each thread
corresponds to a particular kind of artwork or type of technology. The
brightness of each thread varies with the number of artworks that it
contains in each year, so that one can watch the ebb and flow of different
lines of thought over time. The lines open up to reveal titles of artworks
and access information about them as well as the artworks themselves. The
net art database is publicly accessible and information about net artworks
can still be entered.