Ten years since it emerged as a medium for contemporary art, the Internet, and the work it inspires, is no longer confined by the browser window. The Web influences culture at large: it adapts to new technology, cultivates demographics, and evolves our cultural needs and norms. The works of Vuk Cosic, Lisa Jevbratt, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Thomson & Craighead, and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are testament to its expanding role in contemporary life.

In ASCII History of Moving Images Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic re-presents key moments in classic films as monochromatic waves of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) characters. Cosic’s use of this universal code to depict Psycho or Battleship Potemkin draws our attention to how culturally specific artifacts are translated and viewed across cultures, both on and off the Web.

The German based artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenscheid also examine issues of cultural translation in their work Online Newspapers. They re-imagine how our world’s newspaper sites would appear if they had been developed not by professional web and graphic designers, but by the lay journalists whose homegrown aesthetics defined the era before the dot-com boom.

Through their work Beacon, the British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead provide a real-time glimpse of the obsessions of our time by showing us, in a rhythmic, relentless stream, what people are “Googling.” The fragmented phrasing used in search queries is made public and becomes a poetic narrative-sometime shocking, other times mundane-of our culture’s almost tragic longing.

For YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ Travels in Utopia: A Brief History of the Internet, network technology is not only the subject, but also the means of distribution for their text-based narratives. With basic Flash animation, a limited palette of colors and fonts, and a soundtrack of 1960s style bebop, their stories reside somewhere between the novella and cinema and encourage a new type of reading.

Rather than focusing on the output and use of the Internet, Swedish/American artist Lisa Jevbratt looks at its base structure and organization. The Infome Imager works mine the vast database of existing Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Using predetermined guidelines (the date, URL, length of site, or network location for instance) she assigns particular colors and patterns to IPs in a specified range. The results are part portrait, part landscape painting and wholly beautiful and abstract visions of information itself.

Long working at the forefront of the medium, these artists explore the particularities of Web technology and its aesthetics and utility in projects that clearly transcend the specificity of “Internet art.” Internationally renowned and widely exhibited both on line and off these artists offer us compelling insights into our simple, everyday desire to be connected.