Most artists who lived through net art’s early days, its post-internet institutional embrace, and the NFT boom treat those as three different chapters. Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte treats them as one continuous line of inquiry — different expressions, in his words, of a single technological transformation.
Materials, not narratives
Leegte’s work isn’t interested in what images depict so much as what digital systems are structurally made of — closer in spirit to Minimal Art and 1960s-70s formalism, or to a fellow traveler like JODI, than to conventional web-based storytelling. Compressed Landscapes (2016) is five websites continuously fetching and heavily compressing nature imagery in real time, shown at the Van Gogh Museum alongside actual Van Gogh paintings — a direct confrontation between painterly texture and lossy-compression texture. JPEG (2022) pushes that further, generating color-field explosions purely out of compression artifacts, deliberately staged as a rebuttal to critics who dismiss NFT-era work as visually thin — the piece was shown again at Art Basel this June. Elsewhere, Ornament (2021) uses custom smart contracts to treat thousands of individual NFT instances as a single installation, and Buttons (2023) is a set of 256 NFTs containing HTML buttons that physically rearrange themselves as a viewer resizes their browser window. Leegte describes computing itself as “a space we’re gradually discovering” — stable, like electricity, but with implications nobody’s finished working out.
Why it fits here
Net art and post-internet work don’t always get treated as a living, continuous practice rather than a historical phase — this site’s own coverage of artists like Rafael Rozendaal sits in the same lineage. Leegte’s through-line is the more useful lesson: the medium itself (HTML, compression, smart contracts) is the actual subject, regardless of which decade’s technology happens to be carrying it.