The Whitney is preparing to turn a quarter-century of art made for the internet into a physical museum exhibition. artport: A History of Internet Art opens Nov. 21, marking 25 years since the museum launched artport, its online gallery for net art and digital commissions.

The anniversary matters because artport began in 2001, when the web was still commonly treated by museums as a communications tool rather than an exhibition space. The Whitney used it as a venue in its own right, commissioning artists to make work that depended on browsers, networks, screens and the peculiar habits of being online.

The new exhibition will take place both online and on the Whitney’s sixth floor. More than 100 works commissioned for artport will be represented, organized around the programs that shaped the site over time.

Those include the Gate Pages, made from 2001 to 2006 as portals to artists’ websites; the main commission series, which has continued since artport’s launch; and Sunrise/Sunset, a series that briefly interrupted the Whitney website twice a day from 2009 to 2024. Its successor, On the Hour, continues the idea with 30-second works appearing at the top of each hour.

Putting this history inside a gallery creates an obvious problem, and therefore an interesting exhibition. Internet art was often made precisely to avoid the conditions of the gallery: fixed walls, stable objects and a viewer standing in one place. Browsers change. Software breaks. Links die. Screen dimensions shift. Works designed for a dial-up connection can behave differently on a modern phone.

The Whitney says the sixth-floor installation will use an open plan intended to suggest floating browser windows. That is a visual solution, but the deeper question is how to exhibit a medium whose original context has disappeared. Preserving internet art means preserving behaviors, interfaces and technical assumptions as well as files.

The show also offers a compressed history of how online life changed. A work made in 2001 arrived before social media became an organizing force of daily life. Later commissions encountered smartphones, platforms, surveillance, streaming, algorithmic feeds and artificial intelligence. Seen together, the projects can register technological change without becoming a gadget timeline.

For the Whitney, the exhibition is also institutional self-history. Museums have spent years debating how to collect and preserve digital work, but artport gave the Whitney a continuous commissioning platform rather than an occasional digital initiative. The archive now spans enough time that the web itself has become historical material.

Member previews run Nov. 18 through 20 before the public opening Nov. 21. The exhibition is a useful reminder that “internet art” is no longer a prediction about art’s future. Some of it is old enough to need conservation.

The Whitney has more information about the exhibition.