Instructor Spotlight: Eden Weissman and Mofe Akinyanmi

What inspired you to teach this course? 

Mofe: I have always been very interested in media, and Eden and I found ourselves constantly sharing different net artists and other online culture critiques with each other. We took a leap of faith and applied to teach the class, because we wanted a reason to really study the topic in depth and were excited about the prospect of sharing our interest with others.

Eden: In all honesty, this course was born from long FaceTime convos with Mofe where we would talk to each other about our experiences of growing up online, surfing web forums and Tumblr blogs. We both felt like our identities had, in many ways, been shaped by the different online platforms we went on most, and often our conversations turned to the nostalgia that we had from the more intimate internet of the 2010s. We really wanted to create a space on campus for other students to take seriously how personal identity has been shaped and mediated through online culture, and to delve into how artists also explore identity through the web as a medium.

Do you have a favorite net artist?

Mofe: I don’t have a favorite, but an artist duo that I really admire is Mendi + Keith Obadike. Much of their work centers around the investigation of race dynamics online, and their pieces really poke fun at some of the more serious ways that race played a role in the early internet, despite claims that it was a place void of discrimination or bias due to the equalizing nature of online presence.

Eden: There are so many that inspire me, but one of my long-time favorites is Chia Amisola, a Filipinx internet artist and programmer. They have created some beautiful web pieces that attend to various specificities of digital culture within the Philippines, as well as written extensively on how website-making can be a poetic force that re-claims the internet from larger corporations to instead center communal preservation.

For students who are looking to enter the sphere of net art, where do you suggest they start?

Mofe: Eden and I started getting into net art through Instagram accounts and curious web searches. A good place to start looking at pieces would be the net art anthology on rhizome.org, which is a net art archive that has pieces from the 90s forward. You can also look at your favorite museums and see if they have a net art archive of their own from past exhibitions. I also like the site are.na, where users have shared many links to net art pieces that I might not have seen before.

Eden: The Rhizome Net Anthology is such an incredible resource. It’s one of the only archives of prominent net art pieces from the past few decades. You can view and work through around 100 net art pieces in the archive, and for older pieces, the archive is programmed to preserve the look and feel of how a web interface or browser from the 90s and early 2000s would function.

Mofe Akinyanmi is a senior pursuing an NEC dual degree in Music Composition and Sociology.

Eden Weissman is a senior studying Anthropology.