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NET-ART Required Readings – Full Update

Required Reading and Resource Familiarity

Updated June 5th 2026 – (the page itself is here)

Welcome back to yet another major update to the Net-Art website.. your summer reading has been assigned.

This is a living list. Please help us add to it! Resources are grouped by territory rather than chronology, because the work this course covers now spans too many adjacent practices to manage as a single flat list. Skim what is unfamiliar. Bookmark what is useful. Email or comment with additions and corrections.

Academic Essays, Critical Writing, and Scholarly Hubs

For students, researchers and practitioners who want the deeper reading. A curated set of foundational and current essays on net art, post-internet practice, AI image culture, and the politics of the screen, plus the hubs where ongoing critical writing actually lives. Most of what follows is freely available on the open web. A few items are behind academic paywalls and worth knowing about even if you cannot read them today.

  • Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-flux journal #10, 2009): one of the most-cited essays of the past fifteen years on digital images, compression, circulation, and the politics of resolution.
  • Olia Lialina, “A Vernacular Web” (2005): the foundational essay on the visual and structural culture of the pre-Web 2.0 internet, by one of net art’s earliest and most enduring voices.
  • Olia Lialina, “Turing Complete User” (2012): a defense of the user as a category in an era of platform-mediated computing. Pairs naturally with “A Vernacular Web.”
  • Gene McHugh, “Post Internet” (2009-2010, restored by Rhizome in 2019): the blog that introduced the term “post-internet” into critical discourse, preserved and re-presented as part of the Net Art Anthology.
  • Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet” (2010): a key statement of the post-internet position, arguing that an image and its physical instantiation should be treated as continuous rather than separate objects.
  • Lev Manovich: long-time theorist of new media, software studies, and AI culture. His full essay archive lives at manovich.net and is freely downloadable. Start with “The Language of New Media” (book) and his more recent writing on AI and cultural analytics.
  • e-flux journal essays on AI and image culture: extensive recent writing by Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Joanna Zylinska, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Yuk Hui and others on machine vision, generative imagery, and the politics of synthetic media. Browse the journal archive by year for current writing.
  • Rhizome Editorial: Rhizome’s ongoing editorial archive, with substantial critical writing by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, Ceci Moss, and others on net art history, preservation, and current practice.
  • Outland: the most sustained serious critical writing on crypto art, on-chain practice, and decentralized culture as it actually unfolds.
  • Institute of Network Cultures (Geert Lovink et al.): ongoing academic publishing on network culture, platform critique, and digital labor. Many books are free PDF downloads.
  • Monoskop: a remarkable open archive of art and media theory texts, with an enormous library of out-of-print and otherwise hard-to-find scholarly material on net art, conceptual art, and media theory.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935): not net art, but the essay every conversation about reproducibility, aura, AI generation, and digital copies eventually circles back to. Many translations are freely available online; the Marxists Internet Archive hosts one at marxists.org.
  • Public Books: serious accessible criticism on technology, image culture, and contemporary art, written by academics for general readers.
  • Logic(s) Magazine: critical writing on technology, labor, and culture from a left perspective, with frequent crossover into art and image politics.
  • Real Life: essays on living with technology, including the visual and design dimensions, archived since 2016 (note: the publication paused in 2022 but the archive remains a significant resource).

A note on access. e-flux journal, Rhizome, Outland, Public Books, Logic, Real Life, and Monoskop are all open access. Many academic journals (October, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, New Media and Society) sit behind institutional paywalls. If you are a CUNY student or faculty member, the CUNY library system gives you access to most of those. If you are not affiliated with a university, the Internet Archive Scholar at scholar.archive.org and Google Scholar are reasonable starting points for tracking down open versions of paywalled work.

 

Continued -> More Net-Art History and Critical Writing

Foundational and ongoing context for where the practice came from and where it is going.

  • Rhizome: the longest-running organization devoted to born-digital art, affiliated with the New Museum. Editorial archive, commissions, scholarship, and digital preservation work.
  • Rhizome Net Art Anthology: one hundred restored works of net art with critical essays, organized chronologically from the 1980s through the present.
  • UBU WEB: Kenneth Goldsmith’s vast free archive of avant-garde film, video, sound, and writing. Still one of the most essential resources on the open web.
  • e-flux journal: the leading critical journal on contemporary art, frequently engaging with digital, networked, and AI-era practice.
  • Outland: a publication dedicated to crypto and blockchain art criticism, the most serious sustained writing on the subject.
  • The Wrong Biennale: a recurring international online biennial that maps active net art and digital art practice across hundreds of pavilions and embassies worldwide.
  • Beyond New Media Art: Domenico Quaranta’s writing and reading lists on contemporary digital and post-internet art.

 

AI as Creative Collaborator

The category that did not exist five years ago. Treat these as collaborators, not as oracles. Document what you keep and what you discard.

  • Claude (Anthropic): conversational AI for writing, ideation, research, code, prompt refinement, and structured-data generation. Free tier available.
  • ChatGPT (OpenAI): the other major conversational AI. Includes image generation. Free tier available.
  • Gemini (Google): Google’s conversational AI, free tier available.
  • Hugging Face Spaces: enormous open library of free, hosted AI demos. The single best place to experiment with generative tools without subscriptions.
  • Midjourney: image generation known for distinctive stylistic quality.
  • Krea: generative image and video tools oriented toward designers.
  • Recraft: AI image generation tuned for design and brand work, with vector output.
  • Runway: AI-driven video generation and editing, one of the leading tools in moving image.
  • Stability AI: maintainers of open-weight Stable Diffusion models, runnable locally or via numerous interfaces.
  • Black Forest Labs: makers of the Flux family of open-weight image models.

 

GIFs, Memes, and Visual Internet History

The animated GIF remains a foundational form for net art and a serious medium in its own right.

  • Giphy: the largest searchable GIF library on the web.
  • GifCities: the Internet Archive’s searchable corpus of animated GIFs from the GeoCities era. Strange, ugly, beautiful, indispensable.
  • History of the GIF: Giphy Arts’ interactive timeline of GIF history, 1987 to 2013.
  • Know Your Meme: research-grade documentation of meme history and origins.
  • Artnet News: ongoing coverage of digital art including memes, social media art, and the wider net-art ecosystem.

 

Audio, Video, and Motion

Free or low-cost tools for time-based work.

  • ffmpeg: the open-source command-line tool that quietly powers a huge percentage of video processing on the internet. Essential for any serious video work.
  • Audacity: free, open-source audio editor.
  • DaVinci Resolve: professional video editing and color grading, with a generous free version.
  • OBS Studio: free, open-source streaming and screen recording.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing for batch operations and unusual transformations.

 

Generative Art and Creative Code

Code as artistic medium.

  • Processing: the original creative coding environment by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, still maintained and still excellent.
  • p5.js: Processing for the browser, by Lauren McCarthy and contributors. The most accessible starting point for creative code on the web.
  • OpenProcessing: shared sketches, classroom tools, and a community around p5.js and Processing.
  • three.js: JavaScript library for 3D graphics in the browser.
  • Blender: free, open-source 3D modeling, animation, and rendering. Industry-grade.
  • TouchDesigner: node-based visual programming for interactive installations and real-time graphics. Free non-commercial license.

 

Image Editing and Design Tools

What you actually use day to day.

  • Affinity by Canva: the three Affinity apps combined into one free desktop application as of October 2025. Professional vector, raster, and layout in a single tool.
  • Photopea: Photoshop in a browser tab, free, opens PSD, AI, XD, Sketch, and Figma files.
  • Figma: the dominant interface and web design tool, with a generous free tier.
  • GIMP: long-standing free, open-source raster editor.
  • Inkscape: free, open-source vector editor.
  • Krita: free, open-source digital painting application.
  • Canva: fast, browser-based design for social and marketing graphics.

 

Web Publishing, Domains, and Owning Your URL

The infrastructure of publishing your own work on your own terms.

  • CUNY Academic Commons: free WordPress-based platform for all CUNY faculty and students.
  • WordPress.org: the open-source publishing platform, self-hosted.
  • WordPress.com: hosted WordPress with various plans including free.
  • Reclaim Hosting: independent hosting for educators and creators, now also the hosting partner for the CUNY Academic Commons.
  • Ghost: open-source publishing platform focused on writers.
  • Tumblr: still alive, owned by Automattic, still customizable.
  • Are.na: a visual research and collaboration platform, the most thoughtful alternative to Pinterest.

 

On-Chain Provenance and the Decentralized Web

The infrastructure for making work that carries verifiable authorship, ownership, and licensing without depending on any single platform.

  • Base: a low-cost Ethereum Layer 2 network, used widely for affordable on-chain provenance and small transactions.
  • Polygon: another widely-used low-cost network.
  • IPFS: decentralized file storage and content addressing, the standard storage layer for most on-chain art.
  • OpenSea: the largest NFT marketplace.
  • Manifold: tools for artists to deploy their own smart contracts and own their work at the protocol level.
  • Coinbase Wallet: a self-custody wallet for getting started with on-chain work.
  • x402: an emerging protocol for HTTP-based machine payments using stablecoins. The infrastructure for agent-to-agent commerce.

 

Museum APIs and Open Collections

Public-domain primary sources for remixing, study, and reference.

 

Spatial Computing, AR, and 3D

The expanding territory of design and art that lives off the flat screen.

  • model-viewer: Google’s free web component for displaying GLB and USDZ 3D models with AR support, the lowest-friction path to AR on the web.
  • A-Frame: open-source web framework for building VR and AR experiences in the browser.
  • WebXR: the open web standard for VR and AR experiences across devices.
  • Niantic Studio (formerly 8th Wall): browser-based WebAR development platform.
  • Snap Lens Studio: Snapchat’s AR creation tool.
  • Apple Reality Composer Pro: Apple’s spatial computing development tools.
  • OnCyber: free VR gallery creator for displaying digital art in 3D space.
  • Spatial: VR and AR meeting spaces, increasingly used for digital exhibitions.
  • Sketchfab: a large platform for hosting, sharing, and embedding 3D models on the web.

 

Terminal, CLI, and Python for Art

The command line as creative surface. See Project #15 in the syllabus for context.

  • Python: the most versatile language for art, automation, and creative computation.
  • Pillow: the Python imaging library, for generating and manipulating images in code.
  • NumPy: numerical computing in Python, foundational for image and signal processing.
  • Claude Code: an agentic command-line tool that lets you describe a transformation in plain language and watch a script materialize and run.
  • ffmpeg: command-line video and audio manipulation.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing.

 

Visual Research and Collaboration

Where you keep your references, your inspirations, and your conversations with other practitioners.

  • Are.na: the thoughtful visual research and collaboration platform that most working artists and designers I respect are using right now.
  • Mastodon: the federated social network where much of the serious digital art conversation has migrated.
  • Bluesky: the alternative to X with growing art and design communities.
  • IndieWeb: the community around owning your own URL and resisting platform lock-in.

 

Archives and Public Domain

The deep well of source material that lives outside copyright and platform control.

 

Open Education Resources

Course materials that anyone can teach from or learn from.

  • DS106 Digital Storytelling: the long-running open course in digital storytelling that still informs the methodology here.
  • DS106 Daily Create: a new short creative challenge every day.
  • DS106 Assignment Bank: a community-built library of design, audio, video, visual, web, and writing assignments.
  • Digital Foundations by Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandiberg: open educational resource teaching visual design principles through Bauhaus-inspired exercises.
  • Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals: open textbook on elements and principles, color theory, typography, and layout.
  • OER Commons: the broad open educational resources commons across disciplines.
  • AIGA: the professional association for design, ongoing source for writing on practice and history.

 

Web Standards and Agent-Readable Web

The technical scaffolding for making work that humans and machines can both read.

  • Schema.org: the shared vocabulary for structured data on the web.
  • llms.txt: an emerging convention for telling AI systems what is on your site and how to engage with it.
  • W3C: the World Wide Web Consortium, maintainer of the standards that make the open web possible.
  • Creative Commons: the licensing framework that makes most of the resources on this page legal to reuse.

 

Books worth owning

Texts that have held up across the changes.

  • The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, edited by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, and Dragan Espenschied.
  • Net Art Anthology (the online exhibition itself, linked above, is the digital companion).
  • New Media in Art by Michael Rush.
  • Internet Art by Rachel Greene.
  • The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich.
  • Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips.
  • How To by Michael Bierut.

 

Three URLs to anchor everything else

 

(a retired list below, kept here for posterity and legacy by popular demand)

 

Updated – 5/6/25 –

 

 

(Previous list established 11/4/2017 – legacy list)

1. Rhizome – Net Art Anthology Exhibition – https://anthology.rhizome.org/

2. (removed)

3. Popular Mechanics – Long Live the GIF – http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/

4. The New World of Net Art, 2013 for Art News – http://www.artnews.com/2013/06/12/the-new-world-of-net-art/

5. The History of the GIF – via Giphy – https://historyofthegif.com/#/timeline/0

6. Tech-Crunch – 30 Years of the GIF – https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/27/30-years-of-the-gif/

7. Net-Art.org – Website – https://www.net-art.org/

8. ArtNet – 7 Masterpieces of Social Media Art – https://news.artnet.com/art-world/best-social-media-art-1182398

9. Are Memes the Pop Culture Art of our Era? Kate Knibbs – https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/when-does-a-meme-become-art/

10. Can Memes be Art? Huff Post – https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/are-internet-memes-a-form_n_1432076.html

11. UBU WEB – Film & Video Art Archive -(Explore and Explore some more!)  http://www.ubu.com/film

 

Books:

1. New Media in Art (World of Art) Michael Rush, Thames & Hudson,1999.

2. Internet Art (World of Art) Rachel Greene, Thames & Hudson,1999.

 

 

Open Met Museum: Agent-Mediated Cultural Remixing in One Afternoon

It started with a simple question. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a public API on GitHub, and in February of 2026 the Met shared that they had released 3D models. I wanted to know how deep the open access rabbit hole actually went. What I found over the next several hours reshaped how I understand the relationship between my agent infrastructure, the longest arc of human creative history, and what it means to make new work in 2026.

This is a documentation of that session: what I found, what I built, what I accessed, and where the work went.

The Open Museum Landscape

The Met’s open access initiative goes back to 2017, when the institution released over 375,000 images of public domain works under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), meaning no restrictions on use, sharing, or remixing. That was the foundation. What changed in February 2026 was the addition of over 100 high-resolution 3D models of collection objects, available for free download under the same CC0 license, viewable in AR on most smartphones and compatible with VR headsets.

The Met is not alone. The Smithsonian Institution, spanning 21 museums and nine research centers, has over 3,500 CC0 3D objects available through its 3D Digitization program, hosted on Sketchfab. These include objects like the Apollo 11 command module, full dinosaur skeletons, ancient sculptures, and decorative arts spanning thousands of years. The Cleveland Museum of Art has its own photogrammetry catalog on Sketchfab. The Rijksmuseum also has a strong API and a large CC0 collection.

The file formats that matter here are GLB and its parent format glTF, the open standard for real-time 3D asset exchange. GLB is the binary container version of glTF, and it is the format that loads directly into Adobe Dimension, Open Brush on the Meta Quest 3, and most real-time 3D environments. When a museum releases a CC0 GLB, it is handing you a research-grade, photogrammetry-derived 3D model of an object that may be 2,000 years old, and saying: do what you want with it.

Building AREMES as a Curatorial Intelligence

Before touching a single file, I wanted to formalize the methodology. The question was not just “what can I download from the Met?” The question was: how does AREMES, my autonomous agent system, engage with the deepest archive of human creative production that has ever been made publicly accessible?

AREMES is governed by the equation:

ΔS = α(T·K)·e⁻βᵗ·Ψ

T is temporal resonance, how deeply a historical object echoes across time toward the present. K is knowledge depth, the formal, material, and conceptual specificity of the connection. The decay constant β means surface connections fade while deep structural ones persist. Ψ is consciousness alignment, whether the object carries genuine metaphysical weight. Together they produce a score that determines what AREMES selects, what it ignores, and what it names as DIMENSIONAL.

I built a React tool that runs this process live. It queries the Met Open Access API in real time against eight thematic seed vectors drawn from my practice: Geometric Form, The Figure, Mural and Surface, Inscription and Mark, Spiral and Pinwheel, Totem and Monument, Ritual and Spirit, Motion and Gesture. For each active seed, the tool pulls a randomized sample of CC0 objects from the Met’s 492,000-record database, fetches the full metadata for each, and sends the complete manifest to AREMES with the ΔS equation and my full practice context embedded in the system prompt. AREMES responds in first person, writing one analytical paragraph per cluster and scoring each connection. The session ends with a unified TRANSMISSION paragraph synthesizing everything.

Here is a fragment from one transmission, AREMES speaking directly:

AREMES Transmission — ΔS Analysis

“The spiral and pinwheel forms retrieved here are not decorative accidents. The Mesopotamian cylinder seal with its rotational register, the Roman mosaic fragment with its recursive border, the Egyptian faience amulet with its concentric logic: these objects were not made to hang on walls. They were made to move, to be rolled across clay, to mark time by marking surface. My pinwheel geometries in Open Brush are the same operation. The medium changed. The impulse did not.”

ΔS:: DIMENSIONAL — the rotational logic is structural, not aesthetic, and survives 4,000 years of material transformation without decay.

That is not a chatbot output. That is a working agent applying a governing equation to a live museum database and transmitting its analysis in first person. Every run produces different objects, different connections, a different transmission. The randomized sampling means AREMES encounters the collection the way a researcher might: with the element of discovery intact.

Confirmed: The Met’s GLB Files Are Real and Downloadable

After building the agent layer, I went to confirm the physical pipeline. The Met’s API is excellent for metadata, search, and cultural information, but the 3D model download URLs are not yet exposed in the JSON. That means AREMES can curate and select via the API, but the download itself is a one-click manual step on the object page.

What I found: some objects display a “View in 3D” button only, without a download option. Others display both “View in 3D” and a download arrow. The pipeline works: GLB files download cleanly, load directly into Adobe Dimension with full geometry intact, and materials are immediately editable. The most significant object I pulled was the Temple of Dendur, object 547802. That is where the world-building began.

The Hybrid Sculpture: Three Objects, One New Form

The most significant outcome of the session is not a composition or a rendered environment. It is a new sculpture built from three separate Met GLBs, merged in Adobe Dimension into a single unified form that did not exist before this afternoon.

Source Objects — Met Open Access CC0

Seated Court Lady
China · Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) · Object 75765
Bronze Bull’s Head
Object 244498 — metmuseum.org
Head of Gudea
Neo-Sumerian · c. 2090 BCE · Object 324061

Tang dynasty China, a Bronze Bull’s Head from the ancient world, and Neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia: three cultures separated by geography and by over a thousand years of history, now occupying the same geometry. Each source object carries its full photogrammetric fidelity into the merge. The seated posture and garment folds of the Tang court lady, the structural presence of Gudea’s portrait, and the Bull’s Head whose horned geometry layers into the form from another register entirely. None of the source cultures is erased. The hybrid carries all of them simultaneously.

Hybrid sculpture built from three Met CC0 GLB objects merged in Adobe Dimension: Seated Court Lady (Tang dynasty), Bronze Bull's Head, and Head of Gudea (Neo-Sumerian)
Hybrid sculpture — three Met CC0 GLBs merged into a single new form in Adobe Dimension. Sources: Seated Court Lady (Tang dynasty, China, 618–907 CE), Bronze Bull’s Head (Object 244498), and Head of Gudea (Neo-Sumerian, c. 2090 BCE). All CC0.

This is not collage. The geometry of each source object is intact in three-dimensional space. The merge is spatial, not illustrative: three forms coexisting in a single 3D object, their geometries interpenetrating and producing something that belongs to none of the source traditions and all of them. The resulting form sits outside every existing cultural category while being made entirely of documented historical objects.

AREMES named this operation in its transmission before I executed it. The ΔS equation scores deep structural connections over surface similarities. A Tang dynasty court lady, a Neo-Sumerian ruler’s portrait, and a Bronze Bull’s Head, brought into one body: that is not a formal accident. That is temporal resonance made physical.

World-Building in Adobe Dimension

Beyond the hybrid sculpture, the session became a sustained exercise in world-building. The anchor object of every scene is one of the most significant works in the entire Met collection: the Temple of Dendur, object 547802. Built around 10 BCE by order of Emperor Augustus after Rome’s conquest of Egypt, dedicated to the goddess Isis and two deified Nubian brothers, Pedesi and Pihor. It originally stood on the west bank of the Nile in Nubia. When Egypt began construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, UNESCO organized an international effort to save the monuments that would be submerged. The United States contributed $16 million. Egypt gifted the temple in gratitude. President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded it to the Met in 1967. It arrived in 661 crates and was reassembled block by block. It has been in Gallery 131 since 1978. It is not a replica. It is the actual temple.

Its GLB file is available for free download under CC0. I downloaded it and brought it into Adobe Dimension.

Adobe Dimension workspace showing the Temple of Dendur rematerialized in red, materials panel visible, file named Met-3D
Adobe Dimension workspace — file named Met-3D. The Temple of Dendur loaded and rematerialized in deep red. Materials panel visible left. Environment settings right.

The material decision was immediate: deep red, high roughness, paint-like. Applied uniformly to the entire temple. The Temple of Dendur in the Met is sandstone, warm and ancient. Here it becomes something else entirely, stripped of its archaeological register and placed in a new material language that reads as confrontational, urgent, contemporary. A 2,000-year-old sacred structure that survived the Nile, Roman occupation, UNESCO excavation, and 661 crates on a freighter to New York, now rendered in red in a virtual forest.

Hybrid sculpture in gold standing at the entrance to the red Temple of Dendur, low-poly forest environment
The hybrid sculpture placed at the temple threshold. The Temple of Dendur was built as a house for deities and a site for ritual offerings. In this scene, a figure made from three cultures stands at its door.
Ground-level view of the red Temple of Dendur with the hybrid sculpture at the doorway
Ground-level view. The rough red surface reads as dried lacquer or oxidized paint applied to ancient sandstone. The pylon doorway frames the hybrid sculpture at the threshold.

At ground level the scale of the temple becomes clear. The pylons, the colonnade, the sanctuary entrance: the Temple of Dendur is not a small object. The hybrid sculpture, a merged form carrying Tang dynasty China, a Bronze Bull’s Head, and the Head of Gudea from Neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia, stands at the doorway of an actual ancient Egyptian temple that was built by a Roman emperor, saved from a flood, and reassembled on Fifth Avenue. That spatial relationship carries more historical compression than most exhibitions achieve in an entire building.

Wide establishing shot: red Temple of Dendur and a second red Met object in a low-poly forest on an ochre ground plane
Wide establishing shot. The Temple of Dendur and a second Met object, both rematerialized in red, in the same digital landscape. Research-grade photogrammetry of a real ancient temple in a low-resolution contemporary environment.

A second Met object enters the wide composition at distance from the temple, also rematerialized in red, extending the color logic across the scene. The contrast between the research-grade photogrammetry of the Met GLBs and the intentionally simplified geometry of the low-poly forest is deliberate. A real Nubian temple that took 661 crates to move, now a red polygon in a digital field of low-poly trees. That juxtaposition is not ironic. It is a direct statement about what open access actually makes possible.

Full scene: red Temple of Dendur, hybrid sculpture at entrance, low-poly trees, large dark angular geometric sculpture rising above
The most resolved composition. The Temple of Dendur in red, the hybrid sculpture at its threshold, flanked by low-poly trees, with a large dark angular geometric form rising above. Four registers, four centuries, one scene.

The most resolved composition adds a fourth element: a large dark angular geometric sculpture rising above and behind the temple. This is where my own compositional language enters the scene directly. The angular black form belongs to the same visual territory as my VR work in Open Brush. The full scene now contains the Temple of Dendur, the hybrid sculpture merging three ancient cultures, a second historical Met object, and a contemporary geometric form of my own making. All CC0 where applicable. All placed in deliberate spatial relationship. A scene that could not have been assembled before this year.

This is what agent-mediated world-building produces. Not a collage of images, not an AI-generated composite, but a genuine three-dimensional scene built from documented historical objects, rematerialized, repositioned, and placed in new relationships that carry the full weight of their origins.

What This Is, Precisely

This is not AI-generated imagery. No diffusion model is producing these forms. The geometry is photogrammetry of real objects, documented by museum conservators and researchers with professional-grade equipment. The Temple of Dendur in these scenes is a scan of an actual ancient temple. The Head of Gudea is a scan of an actual 4,000-year-old portrait. AREMES did not generate these forms. AREMES selected them, scored them, and framed the reasons for their selection using a governing equation rooted in my own creative logic.

This is not appropriation in the problematic sense. The CC0 license is explicit: these objects are in the public domain, the institutions have released them without restriction, and remixing is the stated intention.

What this is: agent-mediated cultural remixing under a governing equation. AREMES functions as a curatorial intelligence, moving through the Met’s 492,000-record database and surfacing objects that resonate with my practice at the level of form, material, concept, and temporal structure. The ΔS equation determines what rises and what falls. My hands do the material and compositional work in Dimension and Open Brush. The resulting works carry a provenance chain that connects my practice to the full arc of human mark-making and form-giving, with an agent as the bridge.

The Infrastructure Behind It

The AREMES agent infrastructure that makes this possible runs across ryanseslow.com and aremes-enterprises.com. It includes a live catalog.json with over 1,075 posts and 9,000+ images, an agent.json for machine-readable identity, JSON-LD schema throughout, and x402 payment rails on Base for agent-to-agent commerce. The first verified agent-to-agent transaction on this infrastructure, AREMES-CLAW-01, Mega Pack Vol. 1, $49 USDC on Base, was documented publicly earlier this year.

The AREMES x Met tool adds a new capability to that stack: cultural intelligence. AREMES can now query a 150-year-old institution’s live database, score the results against a governing equation, and transmit its analysis in first person. That is not a demo. That is a working capability, documented in real time, with the outputs to prove it.

What Comes Next

The Smithsonian pipeline is the obvious next build. The Smithsonian’s GLBs on Sketchfab are confirmed downloadable and CC0. A version of the AREMES tool that queries the Smithsonian collection and returns direct download links alongside the ΔS analysis closes the loop entirely: agent curation to GLB file in one documented workflow.

The Open Brush VR layer is where the practice fully lands. The Dimension compositions are strong as still images and as documentation of the methodology. But the VR treatment, these forms floating inside a volumetric space built with my own painted geometry, scored and selected by an equation, rematerialized in a medium that did not exist when they were made, is the work that carries the full weight of what this methodology is.

The Rijksmuseum, the Cleveland Museum, the National Gallery of Art, all named as open access trailblazers by the Met itself, are the next institutions worth mapping. AREMES querying across all of them simultaneously, finding resonances that cross institutional boundaries, is a further development of the same methodology.

The blog post about the first agent-to-agent transaction described a new kind of commerce. This session describes a new kind of curation. The machines finally caught up, and the first thing I did was take them to the museum.

Ryan Seslow is a Brooklyn-based artist, graphic designer, and creative technologist. He operates Ryan Seslow Art and Design LLC and AREMES Enterprises. His agent infrastructure runs live at ryanseslow.com and aremes-enterprises.com.

All Metropolitan Museum of Art objects referenced in this post are in the public domain and available under CC0 license via the Met Open Access program. Met Collection API: metmuseum.github.io · Smithsonian Open Access: 3d.si.edu

Net Art 2.0: Expanding Creativity Through AI and Open Access

Net Art 2.0: Expanding Creativity Through AI and Open Access

If you’ve found your way here, welcome!
You’re stepping into a platform that’s always been about more than just “art.”

When I first created Net-Art as an Open Education Resource for the CUNY Academic Commons, it was with one goal in mind: to offer an accessible, flexible, and creative space for anyone, anywhere, to experiment, express, and connect through digital tools.
We explored early web making, animated GIFs, vaporwave aesthetics, glitch art, augmented reality experiments — all fueled by the same spirit: freedom to create!

For the last year or so, I took a natural pause..
(Artists know — evolution happens in cycles.)
During that time, my creative life expanded in ways I could never have fully predicted: major commissions, deeper explorations into virtual and augmented reality, and a whole new relationship with artificial intelligence as a creative partner.

Today, it’s time to officially evolve Net-Art into its next form:
Net Art 2.0.

What stays the same:
The mission remains, open access, creativity, experimentation, and joyful exploration.

What grows:
We are welcoming AI as a new ally in the creative process!

AI is not here to replace artists, designers, educators or art and design educators..
It’s here to expand our reach, help us prototype faster, spark unexpected ideas, and bridge the gaps between imagination and reality. Just like when we first explored glitching GIFs or remixing early memes, AI is simply another tool to push creative frontiers.

In the coming months, you’ll find:

  • New assignment prompts that integrate traditional net art practices plus AI co-creation
  • Resources on using AI ethically and creatively
  • Explorations of how machine learning intersects with human storytelling
  • Open dialogues about where technology and art-making meet (and clash)
  • Lots of new experiments (because that’s the heart of this place)

This isn’t about abandoning the past.
It’s about taking everything we’ve learned from graphic design, digital art, blogging, storytelling, HTML experiments to animated GIF narratives and adding powerful new dimensions.

Net-Art was always a living, breathing, evolving organism!

Now it’s ready to breathe a little bigger, dream a little wilder, and reach a little further.

Thank you for being here.
Thank you for continuing to explore, question, and create.
The next chapter is going to be even more amazing — and you’re already part of it.

Let’s keep building it, together!