The Internet of Art Things, or simply artThings, is an infrastructure for creating connected digital artworks. It allows artworks that use micro-controllers, computers, or web browsers to exchange data and to respond to sensors. artThings makes use of MQTT, a lightweight and flexible messaging system.

artThings is essentially two things: 1) a standard hierarchical message topic, for routing messages between artworks; and 2) standard data formats to enable messages to be understood by receiving artworks. In principle, these standards could be used with any network service, but MQTT was chosen because it can be used on a wide range of platforms and is robust, even on slow networks.