Yehwan Song
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April 11th, 2025 by Isaac Cheaz
Prof: J.H. Moon
NET ART (what is it?)
“When the machines are on and your fingers are on the keyboard, you are in connection with some space that is beyond the screen." -Robert Adrian
Net art is a form of digital art that exists primarily or entirely on the internet.
It's not just art that’s shown online, but art that is made for the internet, using the web's unique structures, interfaces, and cultures as both medium and message. It often questions traditional notions of authorship, interactivity, design, and audience, and may incorporate code, hyperlinks, browser glitches, and online systems as artistic material.
Yehwan Song is a South Korean designer, developer, and artist who challenges the aesthetic and functional norms of the internet through her experimental web-based work. She creates interactive websites that deliberately resist standard usability expectations—interfaces that seem broken, chaotic, or glitchy at first, but are actually carefully designed to make users slow down and question their assumptions about digital design.
Her work combines visual experimentation with critical design. She often avoids using templates or frameworks like Squarespace or Bootstrap, opting instead for handcrafted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that push the limits of how websites can look and behave. In doing so, Song confronts the commercial and homogenized nature of the modern web, especially the expectation of sleekness, speed, and ease-of-use.
Yehwan Song’s experimental websites and installations challenge the polished, user-friendly norms of mainstream web design by embracing glitches, non-linear navigation, and unconventional visual forms.
Her work aligns closely with the philosophy of Creative Coding Lab, where students use tools like HTML, CSS, and p5.js to push the boundaries of web aesthetics and embrace design as a form of artistic inquiry.
"Yehwan Song: Are We Still (Surfing)?"
random art
At CCLab, experimentation is prioritized over conformity, encouraging students from diverse cultural backgrounds to rethink dominant, often Western-centric, digital standards. Song’s approach serves as both inspiration and provocation, illustrating how the web can be reclaimed as a space for resistance, identity, and creative expression. In both Song’s practice and the lab’s pedagogy, the web becomes more than a functional medium—it transforms into a dynamic canvas for critical reflection and innovation.
(takeaways) What can we learn?
Yehwan Song’s work teaches us that the web doesn’t have to look or feel the way it does today. Through intentional disruption, we can challenge the dominance of “user-friendliness” as a design value and reintroduce weirdness, slowness, and friction as meaningful design strategies. In a time when web experiences are increasingly controlled by a few major platforms, her art is a call to reclaim the internet as a space for experimentation, resistance, and creative autonomy.
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