Markéta Baňková is one of the first generation of Czech internet artists. Although she is no longer active in the field of net art and is currently engaged in popularising science mainly through literature, her work remains crucial for mapping the beginnings of net art in the Czech Republic. A general interest in network structures can be observed in her work, whether this involve web-based works such as Město.html (1998–1999) and New York City Map (1999–2002), or in the exploration of relationships through genetics in the novel Maličkost / Bagatelle (2015).
The origins of net art date back to the mid-1990s, when the unified interface WWW, i.e. World Wide Web, was expanded. Net art, or Internet art, is characterised by its dependence on the Internet environment, without which the work could not function. As Marie Meixner, an artist and theoretician working in the sphere of net art, says, the first projects from the 1990s explored the possibilities of the new medium in cyberspace and were mainly socio-cultural in nature, based on the communicative possibilities of the Internet. Net art, through participation, allowed the viewer to disrupt time and space, mediating communication across continents and completely changing the nature of the perception of geographical boundaries. The “language of computers” was also a fundamental and frequent communication tool. Projects that made direct use of the aesthetics of computer language could only be understood by those who could read the source code and could therefore reveal the hidden meaning of the work (Meixnerová: Net Art before WWW: A Planetary Fellowship. (The Artists of Net Art 1.0 Generation as a Specific Subculture), in: #mm net art – internetové umění ve virtuálním a fyzickém prostoru prezentace, 2014).
The distortion of time and space is also characteristic of Baňková’s “web-based” works, for example the aforementioned and probably the most important and extensive work of the artist’s net-art period from 1999, New York City Map (https://www.nycmap.com/). A New York City internship funded by the International Studio Program and the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Prague enabled Baňková to create a hypertextual, interactive map of the city, combining authentic recordings of its traffic, photographs, animations, and more. “I had a vision of a hypertextual labyrinth in front of my eyes, which the layout of New York City resembles so much – over time, it turned out that the system of rectangular streets is very suitable for the web to process, and the form of a hypertextual web is a good way of expressing the poetics of New York.” (Baňková: NEW YORK CITY MAP [on-line], http://www.bankova.cz/marketa/prace/Marketa.html, accessed 13 November 2020). In all, she created a kind of “urban jungle” and “a project that she herself was trying to find on the Internet at the time” (interview with Markéta Baňková O NYXmap pro Berlínskej model [on-line], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty56wDYJHzs&ab_channel=MarketaBankova, accessed 13 November 2020). The significance of the project is also interesting in the context of platforms that did not exist at the time, such as Google Maps. It was the creation of a completely new, virtual environment that translated real space into a web interface that was accessible to anyone, from any part of the world. In 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center, traffic to this web-work increased rapidly, and Baňková therefore turned New York City Map into an information portal for a while.
The artist’s earlier project entitled Město.html (1998–1999) (https://www.bankova.cz/mesto/) works on a similar basis. The Internet novel, consisting of 42 web pages of text, presents the city as a living organism, a network structure based on the interweaving of individual people and their stories. As an Internet work, it characteristically ignores the temporal, purely narratival line and creates a network of texts, images, animations and sounds. Through their participation, the visitor interacts with the story and gradually creates a complex image of a system such as the city itself.
Scribble or Čáranice, CNN more in the picture(s) (2005), another net-art work by Baňková, is also collage-like in nature. It is a visual blog that “hacks” the pages of CNN world news and generates automatic drawings – scribbles – based on the content of the main article, which form a kind of subjective commentary. In the annotation to the piece, Baňková refers to the mindless doodling that people tend to indulge in when someone puts, say, a newspaper in front of them. As with previous projects, she encourages the visitor to interact with the work, either by contributing their own scribbles or sending their opinion to her by e-mail.
Baňková is currently writing books featuring her own illustrations, a direction apparent in her work from the very start. Her novels have moved from hypertext into real space, specifically into the field of science, which is now an area of active interest for her. Her debut book for children and adults, titled Magpie in the Realm of Entropy (2010), received the Magnesia Litera Award in 2011. Contact with the target user remains important for her work, and she encourages her audience to participate and further develop the work.
