MTAA is a net art duo made up of Michael Sarff, who works as M. River, and Tim Whidden, known as T. Whid.,In 1997 they made Simple Net Art Diagram, an early GIF-based net art piece.The piece appears in later writing about early GIF and net art, including alongside discussion of Cory Arcangel's work from the same period.,
Writing on the preservation of early net art has singled out Simple Net Art Diagram as a work that treats the interaction between a viewer and their networked environment as its subject, rather than depicting a fixed image.In December 2005, MTAA made a piece for the “PodART” exhibition at the Fine Art Space in New York, one of a group of works, including one by Marisa Olson, made to be experienced on the iPod.
In 2004 the duo made 1 Year Performance, also known as samHsiehUpdate, a website built in Flash that reworked Tehching Hsieh's endurance piece One Year Performance, in which Hsieh punched a time clock every hour for a year.,Instead of the original's continuous ordeal, River and Whid posted a database of video clips of themselves sleeping, eating and inhabiting a space, which the piece digitally assembled into a simulacrum of a full year as visitors watched.It was shown at the New Museum in 2005 as part of “ArtBase 101”, a Rhizome-curated show of forty works from its online ArtBase archive that also included pieces by Amy Alexander, Casey Reas and John F. Simon.
In 2019, MTAA's work was one of sixteen pieces pulled from Rhizome's Net Art Anthology for “The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics”, a show curated by Michael Connor and Aria Dean at the New Museum.
