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Five L.A. Internet Artists You Need to Know

A A A Comments (0) By Kyle Chayka Thursday, Dec 8 2011

...continued from page 1

The artist enables others to remake images just as he does via his PhotoRibbons iPhone app.

1 DISILLUSIONED FORMER SURF PUNK: CHRIS COY

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A member (along with Parker Ito) of the influential, lately inactive Nasty Nets surfing club — a group of artists who traversed the Internet looking for strange, provocative, funky or obscure images and posted them to a collective website — Chris Coy speaks about surfing the Web the way a monk might speak of meditation or a regular surfer might speak of, well, surfing. For Coy, it's an active sport that involves moving through and along the online medium as a surfer might move with a wave. (See image 1, which he calls posted two months ago.)

Though he continues an Internet-based practice, Coy's current sojourn as a student at USC's Roski School of Fine Arts has inspired a certain amount of doubt about the term Internet art. There was a "real camaraderie" in finding other artists online, and the surf clubs were "really exploratory, and not too serious," he says. "A lot of us were punks, in a way — just do it, who cares."

But those feelings have changed with the growth of Internet art. Coy's lament is that the informality of freewheeling discovery has been stymied by formal, structured social networks like Facebook and Tumblr. Whether to work with these large, commercial structures or fight against them is an increasingly serious conflict for those creating art online.