Net Art Anthology will play out in five distinct chapters. The first four will be chronological: early network cultures and early web (through 1998); Flash and blogs (1999-2005); surf clubs, early postinternet art, and social media platforms (2006-2011); and mobile apps and social media saturation (2012-present). The final chapter will reprise all time periods, addressing gaps that emerge over the course of the project.
Net Art Anthology aims to represent net art as an expansive, hybrid set of artistic practices that overlap with many media and disciplines. To accommodate this diversity of practice, Rhizome has defined "net art" as "art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it." Rhizome prefers the term "net art" because it has been used more widely by artists than "internet art," which is more commonly used by institutions, or "net.art," which usually evokes a specific mid-90s movement. The informality of the term "net art" is also appropriate not only to the critical use of the web as an artistic medium, but also informal practices such as selfies and Twitter poems.