Postinternet is a term for the artistic movement and criticism referring to society and the forms of interaction that followed the expansion of the Internet. It was created thanks to a discussion on Internet art led by Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh and Artie Vierkant,. The unfinished discussion causes the definitions for the term post-internet to differ. It is often mistaken for the first generation of Internet artists known as net.art. These were based on programming, mistakes and pitfalls of Internet technology. In contrast, post-Internet art is a profile of heroized users and primary consumers of virtuality.
All contemporary visual art is often referred to as the post-internet. The concept is also associated with a certain visual style, which consists mainly in the combination of digital collages with digital painting in the form of two-dimensional digital prints, videos or sculptural objects. The post-internet includes art created outside the internet network, but it is created directly for presentation on the internet.
Post-Internet describes art that is derived from the Internet’s effects on aesthetics, culture and society. The term emerged from mid-2000s discussions about Internet Art by Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh, and Artie Vierkant. Since the 2010s, the term has been adopted in music fields, where it was most popularly associated with the work of the musician Grimes.
According to a 2015 article in The New Yorker, the term describes “the practices of artists who… unlike those of previous generations, the Web just another medium, like painting or sculpture. Their artworks move fluidly between spaces, appearing sometimes on a screen, other times in a gallery.”
We define it as the result of the present moment. However, a significant part of post-Internet work is still presented primarily or exclusively on the web. It can take the form of videos uploaded to YouTube, art blogs, posts on social media debates, an online magazine, or a store.
Postinternet means that artists can both work with traditional media and have the ability to cross between online and offline events. The difference between postinternet and net.art is that while net.art artists created art exclusively digitally, postinternet artists use digital or analog tools that do not only touch topics connected to the internet. Postinternet art is art that reflects the influence of the Internet and the Internet on culture and society.
Definitions
In an accompanying essay to the Art Postinternet exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, curators Karen Archey and Robin Peckham write that postinternet art “seeks nothing less than a definition of art in the Internet age,” defining the term “postinternet.” in the context of contemporary art as a designation for “an artistic object created with the awareness of the networks within which it exists, from conception and production to dissemination and reception”; Archey and Peckham, according to whom most of the leaders of this tendency “use the visual rhetoric of advertising, graphic design, stock imagery, corporate brands, visual business methods and commercial software tools.”
“Post-Internet is a moment, state, ownership and quality that includes and transcends new media.”
Features
From digital to physical
Forms that do not exist in the real world come to life thanks to post-internet artists.
Three-dimensional icons
Now the badges, icons and arrows familiar to us on the Internet can be seen in three-dimensional space.
Digital Textures
Textures that previously could only be seen on the desktop can now be touched.
Vivid and unrealistic colors
The gradient and too bright color, clearly created in Adobe Photoshop, in a real-life picture will also tell that this is the work of a post-Internet artist
Futuristic minerals and stones
Sculptures from the future, made from unusual stones or minerals.
Digital Technology Matter
Any material that does not exist in the real world and is clearly created using digital technology.
History
The exact date of origin of the term postinternet cannot be determined, as every artistic production that has been influenced by network technology falls under the term postinternet. Therefore, this term does not necessarily relate to one particular event.
The basis of the emergence of post-Internet and post-Internet art has become 2.0 websites, which allow a greater scope of sharing and the user can work on the content. This enabled the creation of blogs, interactivity, communication, extended sharing and tagging. All this gave rise to social networks with micro-blogging such as Youtube, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Several online publications that appeared around the turn of the decade have contributed to the spread and popularization of various variants of the term “postinternet.” It is thanks to these texts that the temporal data “post” acquires a more general meaning of capturing a new paradigm in culture.
The post-Internet art movement is the successor of Internet art, significantly inspiring at the beginning of the 21st century (2000-2005). It has its roots in the dada movement, flux and conceptual art. It arose from a discussion of Internet art led by Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh and Artie Vierkant, although the movement as such has not been defined in more detail.
Unlike Internet art, the post-Internet is less influenced by telematics, it affects communication technologies (the Internet) rather than the Internet as such. Postinternet was talked about thanks to the work of Petra Cortright.
The first used the term “postinternet” by Marisa Olson in 2008, but in 2006 she spoke about the art of “after the internet”. With these terms, Olson sought to characterize his “performances, songs, photographs, lyrics, or installations,” which were created as a result of “compulsive surfing and downloading.” The time indicators “post” or “after” in this case should not indicate any new phase in the culture, but simply describe a specific method of work. In an interview with the We Make Money Not Art website, she acknowledged that Internet art can no longer be strictly distinguished as Internet / computer, but rather should be identified as a type of art that in a way affects the Internet and digital media.
From 2009 to 2010, art critic Gene McHugh ran a blog called Post Internet, on which he published daily genre-diverse texts. In McHugh’s view, he refers to “art that responds to a situation called ‘post internet’ – when the internet is no longer a novelty and becomes banality.
Around 2010, when the key characteristics of post-Internet art emerged, this concept and the related debate circulated within a relatively narrow community of artists (established mainly in New York and Berlin) connected via social networks. The term “post-internet” has come to the forefront of the art world over the next few years, thanks in part to panels and publications devoted to its critical revision.
At the turn of 2013–2014, an ambitious exhibition Speculation on Anonymous Materials is taking place in Kassel, which seeks to bring the work of post-Internet artists closer to the time-parallel direction of speculative realism in philosophy.
In the spring of 2014, a balancing exhibition Art over the Internet was held in Beijing. At the same time, the debate awaits summary book publications.
In 2014, actor Shia LaBeouf joined a project that “was a partial response to how post-Internet artists use social media to promote their work, and how that promotion becomes the work itself.”
Famous Artists
Artie Viercant – coined the term “post-Internet.” This artist creates works from color film, which are a symbiosis of sculpture and photography.
Oliver Larik – his works are videos and images based on the “common” content downloaded by Internet users.
Katya Novichkova – calls her research area digital ecology. Creates consciously designed installations that are similar to graphic file processing results.
John Rafman – using the Google Street View system, the artist acquaints viewers with shots that have fixed any non-standard situations, but that exist only in the network, through the prism of the virtual world. He seeks to show how the World Wide Web interacts with human emotions and feelings.
Sandra Anderlon – a favorite technique of the artist – a collage. It combines thousands of images from the network into one large-scale picture. Her works are completely new worlds depicting life in all its manifestations.
Works
Post Internet Survival Guide is a project created by Estonian installation artist Katja Novitskova. The project consists of a book, an installation and a series of exhibitions.
Excellences & Perfections (2014) by Argentine artist Amalia Ulman. The work is a performance on Instagram that was played for about five months. The Telegraph characterized the work as one of the most original and prominent works of art in the digital age and the Slate portrayed Ulman’s performance as “an art-world sensation.”
VVEBCAM (2007) by American artist Petra Cortright. VVEBCAM is an audiovisual work Cortright published on YouTube in 2007.
Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. In 2008, Rafman began collecting screenshots of Google Street View images and publishing them on blogs, as PDFs, in books, and as large C-prints for gallery exhibitions. The photo project examines the meaning and function of these images and their implications for artists and creators.
Influence on contemporary art
Today, post-Internet art is considered one of the most popular trends in contemporary art. No-art is losing its popularity, as society has ceased to consider the Internet a safe place where you want to “escape” from the world with its problems and dangers.
The Dutch artist Constant Dullart, exploring the problems of the interaction of art with the World Wide Web, cites the fact that although the Internet today is the most important media in the world, changing the lifestyle and point of view of the majority of the world’s inhabitants, however, together with millions of people, the authorities begin to master and regulate it structure. Consequently, the Internet is no longer considered safe and comfortable in terms of privacy. This is the reason that no-art artists are forced to go beyond digital reality and go into the space of post-Internet art.
The influence of post-internet art on contemporary art is confirmed by the fact that the curators of the Berlin Biennale in 2016 were members of the DIS Internet group, which directly influenced the development of post-Internet art, and even actually became its face. So, we can expect that after the Biennale, post-Internet art will occupy the niche of one of the most significant cultural trends of modern reality.
Problems
One of the controversies arising around the term post-internet is the prefix “post”. You can not say that it is “after” the Internet, since it continues uninterrupted, and its popularity and number of users is systematically increasing. Gene McHugh explains this by giving an example of postmodernism and post-impressionism that did not arise because of the end of one of these currents. Post-internet is a post to, like its predecessors, oppose the ideas of the current they are opposing. In this case, the internet itself.
Despite some inaccuracies in the definition and controversy about it, several theses can be accepted as binding, although incomplete. Any work of culture that was inspired by new technology can be called post-internet. However, this term is not associated with any specific event and that is why it is difficult to talk about any breakthrough here. Post-internet was born in the face of many changes that occurred with the spread of personal computers and wireless Internet access. The basis is that post-internet art does not exist only within the Internet itself. It goes beyond its limits and mutates, establishes a dialogue with both low and high art. Its purpose is to mix Internet conventions with art conventions until it adopts the Internet convention. This phenomenon is better explained by Marcin Pisarski:
The term post-internet refers to the situation in which the internet, having emerged from the technological niche into the mainstream, became a tool of universal use – and thus lost its “newness” as a medium – ceases to be a source of inspiration and a reference point for art in a way what happened before.
Post-internet redefines the original-copy relationship. It is primarily based on reworking what is available on the Internet. Very rarely, authors create fully original compositions, with each modification having the value of the original and being assessed regardless of the original source. An example here are memes, i.e. combining the image with the text, which is the key to interpretation and does not necessarily refer to the original. As a result, even if the original, for example a frame from the cartoon is found, no one treats the meme as something less valuable than the cartoon itself, because they are two originals.
Criticism of the concept
The term postinternet is often criticized as an opaque and controversial neologism. However, it still took over and is used in the current discourse on contemporary art and culture. However, there is no generally accepted definition of postinternet. This concept is constantly being discussed and the concept as such is being redefined. Marisa Olson also corrected her statement later, so according to her, all currently emerging works can be described as post-Internet, because they are created in the post-Internet period.
Critics of the post-Internet claim that the term falsely suggests the existence of art that was supposed to have originated logically after the Internet ceased to exist. Another argues that the term describes art, the essence of which is in the effects of the Internet on aesthetics and culture.
Post-Internet art has been criticized as art that lies solely in the Internet itself rather than purely in the art of the Internet, in the manner of Net Art. Post-Internet art thus loses much of the structural advantages of Net Art, because post-Internet art exists primarily through physical galleries, it is rooted in the older traditional notion of the role of art. It is an art based on internet content and creation that can be monetized. In this sense, post-Internet art is sometimes negatively described as art born on the net and sent to galleries or for sale.
Postinternet is an elusive term also because it is not just art that can be found on the Internet, or that works directly with the Internet. Thanks to the extension of the influence of the web sphere to other areas of human life, the production of images is no longer a specialized discipline. Visual creation is massive in the post-Internet era. All people are artists – all with profiles on social networks, posting photos and videos. Visual representation of our lives is important in personal and professional life. Post-Internet artists are also facing this paradox. Their work is less and less different from other people active on social networks.
They discover critical voices stating the failure of post-Internet art as an attempt to take into account in artistic practice the change in cultural conditions due to the Internet. According to some critics, it failed, among other things, precisely because of the “concentration of discourse around a specific concept”
Postinternetové arts
It is often mistaken for the first generation of Internet artists known as net.art. These were based on programming, mistakes and pitfalls of Internet technology. Unlike post-Internet art, it is a profile of heroized users and primary consumers of virtuality. It can be understood as an attempt to answer the question of what a work should look like, which wants to reflect the conditions and possibilities of culture, following the example of the avant-garde, but in the time on the Internet.
Post-Internet art represents a wide range of approaches that respond to the post-Internet situation in culture. Works with multiple identities are created, which exist both on the web and physically in the gallery. These works question the difference between the original and the copy, and at the same time, due to the tension between them, they reveal the manipulative nature of the digital image (for example, the Image Objects of the New York artist Artie Vierkant).
Images from stock banks, representing a model example of visual material available on the Internet and connected for commercial purposes, have become a wide subject of interest for artists associated with the post-Internet. Digital watermarks, which overlay images from photobanks and are intended to prevent their unauthorized use, are also popular among post-Internet artists.
The “conscious” approach of this wave of artists to the Internet means above all the interest in what the images with which the Internet floods us today – that is, the technological processes (as well as their political and economic background) that determine the existence of these images.
Post-Internet artists subscribe to the multiplied and moving identity of the work and make it clear by creating works that exist simultaneously in several media and levels.
The pioneers of net.art in the second half of the 1990s, such as Olia Lialina or JODI, focused mainly on the possibilities and pitfalls of web design technology. In a kind of parallel with the modernist self-reflection of the media, new websites were created as works of art, which were to attract attention to the web tools themselves.
In contrast, post-Internet art, in response to the breakthrough associated with Web 2.0, seeks non-media-specific work that reflects the broader social significance of the Internet and the relationship of the digital image to contemporary art presented in galleries. In short, while net.art was the art of programmers and programming, the postinternet is the art of users and the use of the Internet. As a hybrid practice that transmits the impulses of the web to the gallery environment, the postinternet is “the left side of net.art and contemporary art.”
Postinternetová situation
Critic Gene McHugh used the term “post-Internet situation” to describe a situation where the Internet is no longer perceived as a novelty, but rather as something banal – it permeates our lives to such an extent that the boundaries between the online and offline worlds are blurred.
This also has significant consequences for culture. In a post-Internet situation, meeting a work becomes primarily an experience of its digital documentation. This can be interpreted as deepening the aura’s decline. If you want the artwork to come to us, just enter the term you need in the Google Images or YouTube search boxes. The pages of galleries and art magazines or specialized blogs allow viewers to browse exhibitions in the world’s leading galleries on their screens and thus get a perfect idea of the presented works and their spatial constellation.
Representatives postinternetového arts
The main representatives of the post-Internet include Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh and Artie Vierkant. Marisa Olson was the first to use the word postinternet in connection with her work in 2008. She defined the term in such a way that Internet art can no longer be defined only by the Internet or computers, but rather as any type of art influenced by the Internet and digital media.
The term postinternet was also addressed by Gene McHugh, who followed the work of Marisa Olson. In his critical blog “Post-Internet”, he defines post-Internet art as “art corresponding to a condition defined as” post-Internet “- a situation where the Internet is banality rather than novelty – has already lost its novelty.”
The artist James Bridle stands for the term “new aesthetics”, which “refers to contemporary work based on the Internet experience, points to the growing presence of the visual language of digital technologies and the Internet in the physical world, mixing virtual and physical.”
Another author promoting postinternet is, for example, Jennifer Chan, author of the essay ” From Browser to Gallery (and Back): Commodification of Net Art 1990–2011 “, where she informs about the presentation and monetization principles of Internet and postinternet art until 2011.
Post-Internet artists thematize the fading and mobility of authorship by appropriating and processing blog content (US-based German media artist Marisa Olson or New York post-conceptual artist Cory Arcangel) or by revealing the irrationality of the system by accelerating mass culture practices and commodity aesthetics.
In this context, Steyerl paraphrases, without some sarcasm, the avant-garde cliché that almost everyone becomes an artist. All you have to do is join the transmission and post-production cycle – publish tweets, Facebook statuses or photos on Instagram, mark posts that we “like” on social networks, download, edit and send memes.
Gene McHugh
Several online publications that appeared around the turn of the decade have contributed to the spread and popularization of various variants of the term “postinternet.” It is thanks to these texts that the temporal data “post” acquires a more general meaning of capturing a new paradigm in culture. From 2009 to 2010, art critic Gene McHugh ran a blog called Post Internet, on which he published daily genre-diverse texts. Contributions from this blog include a summary of debates about the concept, characteristics and interpretation of strategies associated with post-Internet art, reflections on the work of many artists who seemed relevant to the author, but also performative textual experiments that allow characterizing the blog as a work of post-Internet art.
Artie Vierkant
“The use of language can too violently illustrate the ideas behind the painting, or lower the level of the work – if the text does not reach the intellectual or aesthetic level of the painting. Language can also be excruciatingly restrictive for those trying to think outside the established “media”, especially since language in the ordinary Internet is reduced to the ability to readily recall appropriate search terms, keywords, and tags: it’s simple, but at the same time grossly limiting architecture. ”(Artie Vierkant: The Object of Painting over the Internet, Workbook for Contemporary Art, VVP)
In his work, he refers to For a case study of a networked community involved in art production that does not call itself an “artist,” see Brad TROEMEL’s anonymous essay “What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn from 4Chan”; where they claim that the most radical and “progressive” movements of the post-Internet era are those that either mostly escape our attention as a result of their own decision to do without easily accessible distribution networks, or are formed by a community of people who do not even call themselves artists, producing cultural objects not intended as works of art.
“The object of the image over the Internet”, which is both a theoretical reflection of the so-called post-Internet situation in culture and a manifest of one of the forms of post-Internet art.
Václav Magid
Czech painter and doctoral student at the Department of Aesthetics, Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, who wrote Echoes of Bad Laughter. Post-internet art and cultural industry.
Generation Smart
In 2015, from 12 May to 13 June, an exhibition called Generation Smart took place in the Gallery of the National Technical Library in Prague. Artists who performed: Kryštof Ambrůz, Filip Dvořák, Jakub Geltner, Katarína Hládeková, Ondřej Homola, Martin Kohout, Martin Kolarov, Adéla Korbičková, David Krňanský, Ladislav Kyllar, Martin Lukáč, Kristýna Lutzová, Black Media, Andrea Mikysková, Richard Nikl, Olbram Pavlíček, Julius Reichel, The Rodina, Lucie Rosenfeldová, Barbora Švehláková, Ladislav Tejml, Nik Timková. The theme of the exhibition was: How do contemporary young artists in their work reflect the everyday natural presence of digital images, smart technologies and social networks?
It is based on the basic idea that the topic of post-internet is a current area of “high art” in the specific approaches of the young generation of creators of the local local scene, which in their eyes is certainly not local, because “the finger is the gateway to the world”. news.
In the gallery, we will encounter technical data carriers, and a characteristically homogeneous (mediated) substance essence, rather than anything else. It is dominated by combinations of digital or moving video images, 3D animations, multiplied digital photographs or light materials such as cords, ropes, shoes, polystyrene, mirrors, wood and plexiglass. The ubiquitous and perhaps even symptomatic element is water, symbols of fluidity and framed pouring. After the water, it is the blue color of the background, hand, fingers or shaping of unsteady states of vapors into the form of clouds.