The Making of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology: Constant Dullaart's "The Revolving Internet"

In 2016, Rhizome launched Net Art Anthology, a major online exhibition exploring the diversity of practices called "net art" through the research, restoration, and exhibition of 100 important works. On January 22, an exhibition of seventeen works from the Anthology premiered at the New Museum in NYC. This Google Arts & Culture exhibit is one of five discussing preservation challenges in bringing the Anthology to life and making net art accessible for years to come.

"The Revolving Internet" is one in a series of browser-based works by Dutch artist Constant Dullaart that animated the iconic Google search page, drawing attention to the infrastructure that framed most users’ experience of the internet. By adding animation to the Google interface but retaining its functionality—originally, users could even check their Gmail through the work—Dullaart’s formalist experiments cheekily questioned the platform’s growing power.

With its heightened accessibility, net art often travels in unusual ways. "The Revolving Internet" reached a significant general web audience. Even today, 1.5 million visit the work each year (more than most museums see in that same time-frame.) The image above, for example, was shared by a user unfamiliar with Dullaart on the social media service Reddit to much conversation. Perhaps Google noticed the work, too—not long after the site’s launch, it introduced its “do a barrel roll” feature: if a user entered “do a barrel roll” into the Google search bar, the page would rotate a single time.

Not every work in Net Art Anthology needs the same type of rigorous preservation work, as certain technical standards can live on for many years. "The Revolving Internet" is still functional today, and is presented for the Anthology on the live web. That said, the work does require upkeep from the artist. Shortly after its popular reception, for example, Google removed the capability of embedding the search engine’s front page into other websites,, rendering Dullaart’s project temporarily nonfunctional–until a workaround was devised.