Lessons from Internet Art About Life with the Internet (original) (raw)

Art, Internet, Post-Internet: Between Theory and Practice

Although the term post-Internet emerged in 2008, since then many writers, critics and curators have been involved in the discussion of what it might mean. Some see it as the ’translation’ of net.art to fit the ecosystem of contemporary art, whereas others understand it as a form that is ’aware’ of its own environment and still carries the flag of institutional critique. Instead of using the Internet just as its material, post-Internet practitioners also take the Internet as subject matter and problematized topics like surveillance, infrastructure and control over the Internet. This dissertation puts an emphasis on theorizing the concept of post-Internet by referring to invisible infrastructures that shape the Internet, conceptualized by James Bridle as ’the New Aesthetic’; critique of neoliberal agents on the Internet as discussed by Zach Blas; the validity of distinction between digital and physical culture in the age of ’digital natives’ and the problems of authenticity, performativity and temporality in the post-Internetage. Opening chapters gives a non-linear development of the Internet as a medium and the subject of artistic practice, thus distinguishing net.art that is made using material gathered online from post-Internet. After ’defining’ post-Internet, the dissertation looks into real life applications and case studies in order to explore curatorial strategies and processes, especially focused on the rep- resentations of such works in physical spaces. Methodologically, theories are handled and explained using the practices of artists and other producers to point out the disappearance of difference between the theory and practice in life after the Internet.

Internet art, technology and relational aesthetics

2009

Some contemporary artistic practices, such as internet art, are difficult to understand, partly because their originality and relevance is not perceived. In this contribution, we look at internet artists’ relations to society, and to their position in art history. This can elucidate a number of important characteristics of this contemporary form of art. First, it is interesting to see that the goal of early 20th century avant-garde (in particular Dadaism), nl. to bring together social life and art, is motivated early internet art. The role of technology (the computer, the internet, hacking) is very important in this, and also implied the possibility that avant-garde strategies reached a more widespread public. Second, we present the main points of so-called ‚relational aesthetics’, a contemporary theory of art that considers contemporary art practice in terms of interhuman relations and small-scale social networks. Third, we question the possibility of considering internet art as an...

The Digital Time of Internet Art

This paper examines the role of Internet technology as an important factor in the creative processes of art making. The paper’s focus is on digital time, the physical life of internet art and the artist’s choices relating to that. By examining the physical life of internet art, the paper highlights the time-based element of internet art and how internet art essentially unfolds and evolves over time. This raises issues on how internet art is being both preserved and experienced online and how its aesthetic, conceptual and historical identity evolves alongside the technological medium. The paper continues with an examination of the artist’s decision making process relating to the artwork’s digital time conditions from a political point of view. By choosing its present online conditions, artists can manipulate the artwork’s past and future, gaining unprecedented control over the artwork itself. Specific examples of artists are being presented and discussed throughout the paper to provoke and support the paper’s concept of digital time in internet art, as a very important factor that allows us to rethink how art operates within our contemporary conditions.

Marie Meixnerová (Edited by), #mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation, Link Editions, Brescia + PAF, Olomouc, 2019.

#mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation,, 2019

What is Net art? Does its name refer to the medium it uses? Is it the art of the Netizens, the inhabitants of the internet? Is it an art movement or an art form? This book aims to provide a starting point in the search for answers to these and similar questions concerning the existence of Internet art. Edited by Marie Meixnerová, a Czech curator and scholar, #mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation approaches Internet art as a developing art form, through five thematic sections that map the “chronological” stages of this development. Featured authors include Katarína Rusnáková, Dieter Daniels, Marie Meixnerová, Domenico Quaranta, Natalie Bookchin, Alexei Shulgin, Piotr Czerski, Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, Ben Vickers, Jennifer Chan, Gene McHugh, Gunther Reisinger, Matěj Strnad, Lumír Nykl. For those who know little about it, this anthology can serve as an introduction to this specific area of Twentieth and Twenty-first century art; to the expert reader, it offers new and as yet unpublished information, and hopefully a new perspective on the phenomenon of Internet art. According to Domenico Quaranta: “#mm net art is an anthology edited and filtered from a very specific node in the network. This is exactly what makes it so precious: in a networked world in which all information seems to be available in the same form, at the same speed and on the same screens, your point of access is what actually shapes your point of view; and looking through another’s point of view is what allows you to think outside your own box, pardon, bubble.”

Where do we go from here? - An inquiry into the state of “Post-Internet” Art

Given the current state of networked existence, artists, theorists and media producers are faced with the challenge of quantifying meaning within these systems. To shed light on the ramifications of the hidden stack of processes that influence planetary life while traditional forms of politics, biology, and economics are breaking down along with the frameworks of spatiality and legality. Attempts have been made in this regard, and the following paper seeks to critique and link these ideas in a cohesive form that offers an idea of moving forward with work that aids in deciphering the times we live in.

Art and the Internet 1994 - 2014. Notes and Comments

Megarave - Metarave, 2014

Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of artists with a focus on desktop-based practices decided, where possible, to leave the technologies at home when they were invited to exhibitions. Software was converted into prints, videos, installations; performative media hacks were documented and presented in set-ups inspired by the ways in which conceptual and performance art manifest themselves in physical space; and the early adopters of the “post-internet” label, whose practice mainly consisted in appropriating and reframing internet content and playing with the defaults of desktop-based tools, naturally looked at video, print and installation as media to operate in physical space. This text has been commissioned for and first published in Megarave - Metarave, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthaus Langenthal / WallRiss Friburg 2014, pp. 37 - 46. Re-published in Domenico Quaranta, AFK, Link Editions, Brescia 2016, pp. 8 - 22