1.
“Post Internet” is a term I heard Marisa Olson talk about somewhere between 2007 and 2009.
The Internet, of course, was not over. That’s wasn’t the point. Rather, let’s say this: what we mean when we say “Internet” changed and “post Internet” served as shorthand for this change.
So, what changed? What about what we mean when we say “Internet” changed so drastically that we can speak of “post Internet” with a straight face?
On some general level, the rise of social networking and the professionalization of web design reduced the technical nature of network computing, shifting the Internet from a specialized world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologically-minded and grandmas and sports fans and business people and painters and everyone else. Here comes everybody.
Furthermore, any hope for the Internet to make things easier, to reduce the anxiety of my existence, was simply over – it failed – and it was just another thing to deal with. What we mean when we say “Internet” became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from… sigh… It became the place where business was conducted, and bills were paid. It became the place where people tracked you down.
2.
Accompanying this change in what we mean when we say “Internet,” there was a change in what we mean when we say “art on the Internet” and “post Internet art” served as shorthand for this change.
On some general level, the shift of the Internet to a mainstream world in which A LOT of people read the newspaper, play games, meet sexual partners, go to the bathroom, etc. necessitated a shift in what we mean when we say “art on the Internet” from a specialized world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologically-minded and painters and sculptors and conceptual artists and agitprop artists and everyone else. No matter what your deal was/is as an artist, you had/have to deal with the Internet – not necessarily as a medium in the sense of formal aesthetics (glitch art, .gifs, etc), but as a distribution platform, a machine for altering and re-channeling work. What Seth Price called “Dispersion.” What Oliver Laric called “Versions.”
Even if the artist doesn’t put the work on the Internet, the work will be cast into the Internet world; and at this point, contemporary art, as a category, was/is forced, against its will, to deal with this new distribution context or at least acknowledge it.
“Acknowledge” is key here. It’s not that all contemporary artists must right now start making hypertext poetry and cat memes, but rather that, somewhere in the basic conceptual framework of the work, an understanding of what the Internet is doing to the work – how it distributes the work, how it devalues the work, revalues it – must be acknowledged in the way that one would acknowledge, say, the market. What Guthrie Lonergan called “Internet Aware.” To not do this would not be a sin (obviously most artists don’t care about the Internet at all and won’t start caring anytime soon; similarly, most artists probably don’t want to consider the market), but it would be a shame – it would be too bad. Somewhere, on a realistic level, there would be an avoidance of the context in which the work appears and, if the 20th century did anything to artists, it made them care about context on a realistic level. Duchamp changed the game by acknowledging the context in which the game is played. And the game now is played in the project spaces of Berlin, Sao Paolo and L.A.; it’s played in the commercial galleries of New York, and the global network of biennial culture; it’s played in museums and auction houses, yes – of course (obviously) – but it is also now played through the distribution channels of the Internet.
To avoid this last point is to risk losing the game.
NOTE: For alternative understandings of post Internet art, conducted in more depth, read The Image Object Post-Internet (2010) by Artie Vierkant and Within Post-Internet (2011) by Louis Doulas.