About
The Net Art Extinction Timeline documents how dependency changes — API shutdowns, plugin end-of-lifes, browser removals, platform closures — break digital artworks. It is a living archive of technological extinction events and their impact on creative works.
Many digital artworks depend on external services, browser plugins, or platform features that their creators do not control. When these dependencies disappear, the artworks break — sometimes overnight. This project tracks those moments of breakage, preserving the record of what was lost and how.
Who maintains this?
The Net Art Extinction Timeline is an official open-source project of ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, developed and maintained by Marc Schütze.
Why "extinction"?
Net-art works go extinct the way species do: not by being deleted, but by losing the environment they need to live. When the plugin, the server, the browser, or the platform an artwork depends on disappears, the work goes dark. This is a timeline of those moments — a record of what broke, when, and why. Its companion project, vmctl (also a ZKM open-source project), works the other end of the problem: bringing such works back to life inside faithful period machines.
Contributors
The archive grows through first-person contributions from artists, researchers, and witnesses to digital obsolescence.
- Sergio Maltagliati — Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence
Documented the loss of the VisualMusic YouTube channel and enriched five existing artwork entries from his own archive, including a bilingual dossier on the neXtOper@ / Oper@_PiXeL mobile media project (2001–2003).
- Event: VisualMusic YouTube channel removed
- Artwork: netOper@
- Artwork: autom@tedVisualMusiC
- Artwork: atlante_arte_2024 — Maltagliati entry
- Artwork: >neXtOper@1.01 for cell.phones
- Artwork: neXtOper@ / Oper@_PiXeL – Video documentation with students (December 2001)
Submit an event or artwork
We welcome contributions from researchers, artists, curators, and anyone who has witnessed a digital artwork break due to a dependency change. There are two ways to submit:
1. GitHub Issue Form (easiest)
Use our structured forms to report events or artworks. A maintainer will review your submission and merge it.
2. Pull Request
Fork the repository, add a Markdown file to src/content/events/ or src/content/artworks/, and open a PR. See CONTRIBUTING.md for templates and guidelines.
Cite this project
This project is archived on Zenodo: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19254683