Post-Internet Art

Wiki:

Postinternet

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You are here: art after the internet

• In her ‘Note on Capitalisation’, Stephanie Bailey points to the heart of an issue grappled with throughout You Are Here: Art After the Internet.
• …the involves a  discussion of how the editorial team arrived at the decision not to capitalise the word ‘internet’. The question they faced, she points out, was of what kind of space the internet is –sure, in the 90s, as Jennifer Chan observes in the ‘Note’, the dot-com boom had it feeling like a corporate entity divided into commodities: hence the capital ‘I’ (and emphasis on the capital). Since then, our perception of what the internet is –as in where, how and why it exists –has lead to an uncapitalised form being widely preferred. You go on the internet as you would go to the park.

…dare ask the daunting question of how art has changed and is changing, and will change –in the digital age we now inhabit, you come across many renderings of how that public space might look.

it’s an unknowable yet tangible “afterlife of our experiences”, producing spontaneous counter-narratives alongside real word ones, constantly archiving to the second. It’s a space entirely dependent on, and entirely separate from, physical life.

• Proponent of Gulf Futurism Sophia Al-Maria sees it more earthily, talking of “terraforming the WWW”, bringing life from a whole new landscape as if giving birth to a second Earth.
• … how digital natives perceive no difference between the meaningful context of relationships formed online and IRL. If real emotions can be played out on online platforms, what’s to separate such platforms from ‘life’?
• …the explores the potential and actuality of the online realm as a curatorial space. He relays the experience of moving through algorithm-driven “recommendations”, and asks whether art that exists on this plane will soon be downloadable, in a sense crossing a physical boundary.
• In his provocation ‘Where to for Public Space?’, Constant Dullaart takes this internet-as-physical-space metaphor for a walk, delineating the unseen and largely uncontemplated differences between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces in cities, and drawing attention to the web’s status as a network of privately owned areas masquerading as a wide open public landscape. Touching on the still-murky realms of the deep web and encrypted codes as hidden spaces where art may yet be contained, Dullaart raises uneasy questions about the freedom of movement and information we associate with our digital world. One thing’s certain: “private” ownership means nothing good for your privacy.
• When considering this uncertain, tangible-yet-not, interconnected space that determines the shape of life and the creation and distribution (and content) of art, the notion of ‘post-internet’ as a genre becomes practically impossible to grapple with. You Are Here begins to tackle it by observing current trends in art as you might stare at an endlessly rotating 3D gif; there’s not much in the way of answers or definition, but plenty of absorbing examples viewed from a prism of different angles. Take the cross-section of Jon Rafman’s ‘Virtual Worlds’ presented here, excellently chosen shots of his recent ‘I am Alone but Not Lonely’ installation and stills from ‘Still Life (Betamale)’ video for Oneohtrix Point Never in particular. What both of these projects bring to visual realisation is the point or the boundary at which digital reality sits alongside the physical, providing something very real and engrossing that acts as a counterpoint to the decay and depression that surrounds it.
• With visual interjections like these, the form of the book reflects the volatility and dynamism of the subject matter elegantly, always implicitly asking the question of what our post-internet world means to publications and consumption of information, as much as art. 
• To quote Bailey again, she states in her provocation ‘OurSpace: Take The Net In Your Hands’: “as the internet continues to evolve, it might be worth admitting that its so-called ‘age’ is not yet ‘post-’ because it has only just begun.

Its future therefore remains, to some extent at least, in our hands.” And so we find ourselves here, wherever here might be, inside the ‘after’ signified by ‘post-internet’. If you need a hand navigating, You Are Here maps the movement as diligently as you could expect to map a movement still in motion.

http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/art-post-internet/
Art Post-Internet

Just as twentieth-century modernism was in large part defined by the relationship between craft and the emergent technologies of manufacturing, mass media, and lensbased imagery, the most pressing condition underlying contemporary culture today—from artistic practice and social theory to our quotidian language—may well be the omnipresence of the internet.

• Though the terminology with which we describe these phenomena is still nascent and not yet in widespread use, this exhibition presents a broad survey of art that is controversially defined as “post-internet,” which is to say, consciously created in a milieu that assumes the centrality of the network, and that often takes everything from the physical bits to the social ramifications of the internet as fodder.
• From the changing nature of the image to the circulation of cultural objects, from the politics of participation to new understandings of materiality, the interventions presented under this rubric attempt nothing short of the redefinition of art for the age of the internet.
• This understanding of the post-internet refers not to a time “after” the internet, but rather to an internet state of mind—to think in the fashion of the network.
• In the context of artistic practice, the category of the post-internet describes an art object created with a consciousness of the networks within which it exists, from conception and production to dissemination and reception. As such, much of the work presented here employs the visual rhetoric of advertising, graphic design, stock imagery, corporate branding, visual merchandising, and commercial software tools.
• It looks at changes taking place in the age of the ubiquitous internet, from information dispersion and artwork documentation to human language and approaches to art history.
• Perhaps because textual information often assumes a secondary role in the circulation of images today, including the digital milieu of the art world, many of the practices around the post-internet have not yet been sufficiently or critically introduced or interpreted; this exhibition aims to redress this imbalance by allowing for substantive commentary and conversation. Without a framework for contextualizing or identifying post-internet art, one risks grouping such work by voguish aesthetics alone.
• By contextualizing post-internet art within theory and art history, we hope to elude the inevitable relegation of these new positions to a fading trend.
• …acknowledges the agency of the artist in teaching us about the ever-changing world, these individuals often acting as consciousness-raising conduits between art and society. This tie to the outside world, and consequent shift against the hermeticism of the art world, is among the most revelatory aspects of post-internet art.
• Further, it would be a disservice to the artists in “Art Post-Internet” to not qualify the term “post-internet” as one that is as complicated and deeply insufficient as it is useful, and one that rapidly, and perhaps rightfully, came under fire for its opaqueness and proximity to branding. We acknowledge that the term to describe this phenomenon could be recast, yet the strength and relevance of such work remains.

The text in this pamphlet categorizes the artwork within “Art Post-Internet” into seven subthemes: distribution, language, the posthuman body, radical identification, branding and corporate aesthetics, painting and gesture, and infrastructure.

introduction to this wildly heterogeneous phenomenon.

What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement

Could it be? Are we already post-Internet?

• The key to understanding what “post-Internet” means is that, despite how it sounds, it doesn’t suggest that the seismic technological developments associated with the Net are finished and behind us. Far from it.
• Instead, in the same way that postmodern artists absorbed and adapted the strategies of modernism—fracturing the picture plane, abstraction, etc.—for a new aesthetic era, post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects. And while earlier Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online, the post-Internet generation (many of whom have been plugged into the Web since they could walk) frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world.

Artie Vierkant‘s 2010 essay “The Image Object Post-Internet” sparked much of the recent conversation surrounding art after the Internet. In it, Vierkant, an artist himself, surveys the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history. His argument is that in the pre-Internet days, it was difficult to effectively reproduce an artwork because the photographic, scanning, display, and printing technologies we have now simply didn’t exist yet; now, the opposite is true.

Oliver Laric, Installation view

Another artist associated with the post-Internet label, Oliver Laric makes work concerned with the Internet-wrought phenomenon of collective authorship and the effacement of the distinction between the real and the fake.

Other Web-based projects that investigate how images operate online include Jon Rafman‘s popular Tumblr project 9 Eyes, for which the artist spends hours sifting “step-by-step” through Google’s Street View function to find surprising, resonant, or simply beautiful stills that have accidentally been captured by the Google car’s 9-lens, 360-degree camera.

Jon Rafman – 9 Eyes, ongoing

Of course, both Cortright and Rafman also produce real-world artworks, objects that can be hung on the wall or placed on a plinth in a gallery; the most counterintuitive aspect of the post-Internet label is that it extends to work in the traditional formats of painting and sculpture. In fact, one of the features that distinguishes post-Interent art from the “Net Art” of the late ’90s and early 2000s is its ability to crossover between online and offline formats. While Net Art refers to art that uses the Internet as its medium and cannot be experienced any other way, post-Internet art makes the leap from the screen into brick-and-mortar galleries.

Seth Price – Double Hunt, 2007, a replica of a cave painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France screen printed onto a sheet of PVC

The transmutation of art that’s based on the Internet from online-only platforms to materializations in real life leads to an interesting question: what will this work look like 100 years from now, when the technologies that these artists are using, commenting on, and imitating either no longer exist or have been radically transformed? Only time will tell. Post-Internet art is distinctly of the now; and that quality, so far, is its most definitive feature

Alisa Baremboym, Invisible Sausages, 2012, archival pigment inks on cotton and silk

Karen Archey

If you’ve ever tried to introduce someone to the term ‘Post-Internet’, you’ve invariably been met with this rejoinder: ‘Post … what? But the Internet hasn’t ended!’

The slipperiness of the term, which has been milling around for more than five years, concerns a crisis in definition.

• Despite the neologism’s (newly coined word or expression) popularity  we’ve yet to reach consensus on its meaning.
• Even the previous respondents hesitate to directly identify any artist as being ‘Post-Internet’, referring only to work that has been ‘lumped’ together.
• So how do we define Post-Internet art? By proximity to a social circle  a shared aesthetic (corporate branding, commercial visual merchandising, stock photography) or, better yet, a conceptual framework?
• …points out that our dear leaders in major art institutions have conflated Post-Internet practices with art-historical movements such as Surrealism, confusing irrational assemblages evocative of Internet-age speech with a Surrealist dip into the unconscious.
• This hungry reach toward historicization (is a fundamental part of the aesthetic developed by the German modernist theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht – to interpret something as a product of historicaldevelopment) epitomizes the academy’s most common and ham-fisted flaw: rather than understand a burgeoning art movement vis-à-vis artists, art historians often chain the future to the nearest-fitting moment of the past – no matter whether Post-Internet art and the egalitarianism of the Internet might be allergic to the canon’s endemic hierarchies.
• We should instead rejoice that the category ‘Post-Internet’ challenges contemporary art’s hermeticism – (a religious, philosophical, and esoteric tradition based primarily upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; , a doctrine that affirms the existence of a single, true theologythat is present in all religions and that was given by God to man in antiquity) via its built-in connection to the outside world, one that describes a cultural condition permeating Western society as a whole.
• Rather, these comments should formulae through which we presently understand new art forms might be defunct in the digital age. Post-Internet art must be contextualized by both the societal conditions it reacts against as well as art history, specifically an art history tied to Post-Internet’s politically active forebears who often work through the screen: Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, Jodi and, later, Cory Arcangel and Seth Price.
• If Post-Internet art is produced with a consciousness of the networks that enable its production, dissemination and reception, then critics, curators and art historians should wake up to the presence of the network.

Zach Blas, Fag Face Mask – 2011–ongoing, mask generated from the biometric data of queer men’s faces, undetectable by facial recognition technologies.

Tyler Coburn

• There is no question that we live in an age of seismic transformations in the production, distribution and social organization of art, nor that an emergent cultural plurality offers fresh challenges to our working definitions. We should be careful, however, in assuming that the ‘Post-Internet’ artist’s ontological connection to the ‘outside world’ carries de facto critical freight.

 

Attention is fast becoming our scarcest resource.

• Whatever else unfolds on the cognitive trading floor, we may consequently benefit from new property rights conducive to rebuilding the ‘long circuits’ that, as Bernard Stiegler writes, facilitate cultural memory and generational transmission.
• ‘Post-Internet’ art should be promiscuous and non-deterministic in like measure.

MTAA, Simple Net Art Diagram, 1997, Digital image.

Hanne Mugaas

• While it’s important to look to projects such as e.a.t. to remind ourselves that there’s a rich history of artists engaging with technology, let’s not forget those long-ignored histories of media art and net.art.
• After all, 1990s net.art taught us about the possibility of having mean­ingful art experiences through our browsers – the artist duo mtaa’s Simple Net Art Diagram (1997) is a perfect illustration.
• In 2013, the audience is exponentially larger, more diverse and visually literate. If a photograph of a print of a photograph is posted online, this mind-melt has a pretty good chance of being read accurately; it’s not a substitute of seeing the print irl so much as an equally valuable parallel experience. Remember when the movie industry thought that video would kill cinema? It didn’t, but it did create a new kind of cinematic experience.

Today’s art institutions need to be as fluid as the art works they exhibit.

• The Internet is a semi-public space, where artists and art institutions have become operators who need to communicate and compete within the world at large (moma has a Facebook page, but so does Burger King).

THE PERILS OF POST-INTERNET ART

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/

• yields distinctive approaches to art-making.
• …interested in defining an epoch, one in which the Internet stopped being the domain of programmers and hackers and became an inseparable part of everyday life for people with no special interest in or knowledge about computers.
• But the widespread use of “Post-Internet” now obscures these writers’ work, displacing it with artspeak’s murky mystique—a doom prescribed, by the term’s self-seriousness despite the good intentions with which it may have once been used.
• Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what “Post-Internet” means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision.

It’s not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex—renders it lurid.

• [I propose that] the definition underscores this transactional sensibility

The Post-Internet art object looks good in a browser just as laundry detergent looks good in a commercial. Detergent isn’t as stunning at a laundromat, and neither does Post-Internet art shine in the gallery. It’s boring to be around. It’s not really sculpture. It doesn’t activate space. It’s often frontal, designed to preen for the camera’s lens. It’s an assemblage of some sort, and there’s little excitement in the way objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the mass-market products in it. It’s the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive in networks.

• …optimistic about the possibilities the Internet gives to artists to reach new audiences, he is not usually credited as a theorist of digital aesthetics. Still, his work may be important for understanding Post-Internet art’s relationship to its audience.
• His ideas are in Post-Internet art, albiet in a twisted form. Post-Internet art preserves Robbins’s assumptions about art’s essentially self-referential nature while eschewing his embrace of populist entertainment.

Post-Internet art operates on a mass platform but doubles down on precisely those qualities that Robbins found objectionable, including: “visual art’s fixation on the complex issues surrounding representation, visual art’s obsession with articulated interplay between form and content, visual art’s propensity for criticality [and] visual art’s narrow historicity.” If Post-Internet art has any of the directness and generosity that Robbins associated with “high entertainment,” it’s in its appeal to hipness, its instant adoption by the cool kids.

Agatha Wara

 

• Post-Internet defaults to an art about the presentation of art, playing to the art-world audience’s familiarity with the gallery as a medium or environment for art, as well as with the conventions of presenting promotional materials online.
• The way she equates installation photography with other image genres reminds me of the definition of Net art given by critic Josephine Bosma in her book Nettitudes (2011): art that can be present in several places simultaneously, that links its audience to other Internet cultures, “that is created from an awareness of, or deep involvement in, a world transformed and affected by elaborate technical ensembles.”
• Bosma’s definition of Net art—which rejects medium specificity, the idea that Net art only happens in a browser—is rather close to the definitions of Post-Internet art found in the writings of Olson and McHugh. But her emphatic disinterest in the art world’s institutions puts her far from what Post-Internet art has become. Post-Internet art, by contrast, is wholly compatible with art markets and art-world detachment—an “over it” attitude signaled by “Post-.”
• When Robbins writes about the Internet in High Entertainment he describes our time as “post-analog,” which is an easier label to accept. Not much new is happening with analog technology. But the Internet is always changing. The Internet of five years ago was so unlike what it is now, to say nothing of the Internet before social media, or the Internet of 20 years ago, or the Internet before the World Wide Web. And yet Post-Internet artists seem to have a clear idea of what the Internet is: a tool for promoting their work.
• Post-Internet art flaunts a cheap savvy about image distribution and the role of documentation in the making of an art career.
• But until then, Post-Internet art reflects an Internet where the only change worth thinking about is the extent of an installation shot’s reach.