The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet art. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet art history, than a specific genre. Early precursors of the net.art movement include the international fluxus (Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (Mark Amerika) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site.
The term "net.art" has been wrongly attributed to artist Vuk Cosic in 1997, after Alexei Shulgin wrote about the origin of the term in a prank mail to the nettime mailinglist.[2] According to Shulgin's mail net.art stemmed from "conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term 'net.art')".[3] The term was however used by nettime initiator Pit Schultz as a title for an exhibition in Berlin in 1995, in which Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin both showed their work.[4] It was later used with regard to the "net.art per se" meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste in May 1996, and referred to a group of artists who worked together closely in the first half of the 1990s. These meetings gave birth to the website net.art per se,[5] a fake CNN website "commemorating" the event.