Photoshop CS: 1060 by 2744 centimeters, 10 DPC, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=1800 x=6800, mouseup y=8800 x=20180 (installation view), 2015
Why?
As you might imagine, the internet and its trappings have made a large impact on cultural production. People can learn new skills immediately on YouTube, artists can post their art for comment and for sale immediately on Instagram, art fair images from the other side of the globe can find their way into the hearts and minds of young students, and new aesthetics emerge around web design that are shaped by the software, languages, and technical limitations of the tools. Post-Internet art is not about art after the decline of the internet, but art after the advent of the internet and/or work that is influenced by the internet. The readings below explore the implications of the web as seen through artists’ production.
Required
What is Post Internet Art?, Widewalls
Read the article and peruse the videos, but you don’t need to watch them all the way through. Note: Ryan Trecartin's Center Jenny is replete with explicit language.
If the site is glitching, use this PDF with its links to videos.
Response Questions
Remember to cite specific instances from the text to support your views.
- How has your work been influenced by the internet? Remember this is still about the readings, so relate your thoughts on your work with the readings on Post-Internet art.
- What do you make of Post-Internet art as a concept, and concretely as the work that is placed within that category?
Supplementary Readings
- Post-Internet
-
What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement, Artspace
“It’s a bemusing term you may have heard floating around the art world recently, and now a new exhibition called "Art Post-Internet” at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—organized by critic/curator Karen Archey with writer/gallerist Robin Peckham—has set out to encapsulate the budding movement, which may be the most significant of its kind to emerge in a while. 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.”
Post-Internet Art: You’ll Know It When You See It, Elephant
“What is the ‘Post-Internet’—a faceful of virtual candyfloss or a thriving discourse around how the digital context is changing the meaning of art and images? Gary Zhexi Zhang goes in search of the art world’s New Big Thing and finds himself asking a further question—is it over already?”
Digital Desire — Post-Internet Art, Do Not Touch
Note: This is a bit NSFW.
“Laura is back! Today she’s giving me a glimpse into Post-Internet Art. Looking at art that hasn’t made the history books yet is uncharted territory for all of us. What will stand the test of time and how will we remember this era? Laura shows me how artists are responding to and being shaped by the internet in their art.”Art in the Age of the Internet, Tech Weekly Podcast
“In some ways the internet has made artists of us all. Whether we’re updating Instagram or filming on our smart phones, technology has given us new avenues for creativity. But what do the fine arts have to say about technology and it’s impact on global culture? How do artists use their skills to engage with the huge social challenges arising from the web and how our personal data is used online?”
The GIF’s Obsession With Compression, Peer Pressure: Essays on the Internet by an Artist on the Internet
pp 19–24
“The GIF’s straightforward looping mechanism revels in its own simplicity and the manner in which it professes to be nothing more profound than what 3 seconds of your time can possibly allow for as a work of visual art. In an online environement that exalts immediacy and ease of use, the GIF is not a fetishization of the past or WEB 1.0 culture—as many have argued—but a fetishization of the internet’s propensity for compressing information to the furthest degree possible.”Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art, 12.29.09 > 09.05.10
“Post Internet was a blog developed between December 2009 and September 2010 by the New York based art critic Gene McHugh, thanks to a grant of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. For almost a year, Gene McHugh kept filling this folder with his personal notes. Writing and posting became a daily, regular activity, that sometimes produced many posts a day, sometimes longer texts posted at a slower pace. However, Post Internet is not just a piece of beautiful criticism - it’s also, in itself, a piece of Post Internet art in the shape of an art criticism blog—‘criticism as performance’” (Domenico Quaranta).
“Post Internet went offline somewhere at the end of 2015. In 2019, Rhizome restored the blog and made it available online again through the Net Art Anthology. The 1st edition of this book was used in the restoration process, that Link Editions is celebrating with this 2nd edition.”
- General Internet Concerns
-
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
“Legendary master filmmaker Werner Herzog examines the past, present and constantly evolving future of the Internet. Herzog conducts original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as PayPal and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Internet protocol inventor Bob Kahn, and famed hacker Kevin Mitnick. These provocative conversations reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.”
Birth of the Internet, @theU
“In 1968, the nation’s top computer scientists and members of the U.S. government gathered inside the Rustler Lodge atop the Alta Ski Resort in Salt Lake County, Utah. They were about to change the world. It was during that meeting that this group talked about the novel idea of connecting computers together into the world’s first far-reaching communications network. A year later, four institutions—UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah—became the first “nodes” to that network, then known as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was the precursor to what we now call the internet.”
The Godfather, Wired
“Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology - from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web - and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, ‘To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush.’”
The Curse of Xanadu, Wired
“It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing—a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.”
