Dissolve the category of “new media” into art in general by creating work that has one foot in the history of art and the other foot in the experience of network culture.
Post Internet art is not about the Internet. It is not about art.
It is about both.
The Internet changed everything – that includes art.
Post Internet artists are, like Johns and Rauschenberg, ontological questioners.
They are philosophical.
Here is a passage from a March, 2006 interview between the artist Cory Arcangel and the Brussels-based curator Karen Verschooren:
Cory: […] you can’t just put a computer with a browser that’s pointing to a website. You have to somehow acknowledge that it is in a gallery, for better or worse. Video, I think, started to do that […] Paper Rad for example presented a huge sculpture, based on animated gifs. It wasn’t necessarily Internet art anymore, but it was art that could only exist because the Internet exists. That is definitely some kind of solution […] That is what is going to happen I think. It is not going to be pure strict Internet art, it’s going to be art that exists because of the Internet or is influenced by the Internet or there was research on the Internet.
Karen: That’s almost everything in art. Almost all contemporary art is influenced by the fact that we live in a networked society.
Cory: That’s fine you know. It is going to be seamlessly integrated into everything else. Which is what it should be. But pure Internet art, I think, should stay on the Internet.
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Also:
Karen: So, if i understand you correctly, you are saying that it is the responsibility of the artist to transform his internet art piece in that way that it fits into the gallery space. It is not the gallery that has to change its economic model of exhibiting because of their mission statement or whatever.
Cory: Yes.
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Verschooren sums up this strategy as roughly “the art needs to change to fit the gallery, instead of the gallery needs to change to fit the art.” Arcangel answers affirmatively, but I wonder if it is this simple. One thing I think is that Post Internet art does not just bend itself to work as “art,” it also changes one’s conception of “art.” Working in the confines of the white cube are not necessarily always limiting to artists. By playing with that history of what has been marked as “art” and successfully entering into that dialogue, these artists are changing what one thinks of as “art” in the same way that Daniel Buren, Michael Asher or earlier artists like Jasper Johns or (of course) Duchamp worked within the gallery to change what could be shown in the gallery and thus be reflected upon as “art”.
Here is one more excerpt from a Marisa Olson interview. This is one from July, 2008 with a Philadelphia blogger named Annette Monnier.
Olson is an interesting thinker as she brings acute knowledge from many fields including the cultural history of technology and art history, in order to show that, as fields, their boundaries are growing blurrier and blurrier everyday.
My favorite passage is when she brings in Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm in relation to technological paradigm shifts:
Marisa: Speaking of degrees, I don’t really have a degree in computer science but in the course of working on my PHD one of my official field titles was “The Cultural History of Technology” so I have spent a lot of time studying the history of batteries, televisions, telephones, and video games…
Annette: Is that like studying “the history and philosophy of science” or something?
Marisa: Yeah. Exactly, it’s very closely related.
Annette: I always liked those kind of courses. That sounds pretty cool.
Marisa: Yeah, me too. Thomas Kuhn is one of my favorite writers,“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
Annette: Oh, yeah. I remember reading that in a class called something like “history and science of philosophy 101” or something.
Marisa: I re-read it every single year. Twenty-four is my favorite page.
Annette: I have no idea what that refers to but i’ll look it up.
Marisa: It’s just this line about how science is trying to force nature into a conformed thought. It’s all about how science as a field is trying to confirm existing ways of thinking, existing paradigms, and you have to wait until enough things don’t fit into the box until you change the box. I dunno. I like stuff like that.
In a 2006 Time Out magazine group interview conducted by Lauren Cornell, another crucial figure in the development of Post Internet art, Marisa Olson speaks about her work not being “on the Internet,” but, rather, “after the Internet… the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading.” Here are some key exchanges between Cornell and Olson from the interview:
LC: When artists started working online, the internet wasn’t nearly as assimilated into everyday life as it is now. Popular culture is clearly influenced by e-mail, blogs, ebay and social software like myspace. Do you use these platforms in your work?
MO: In between my jobs, art and personal life, I’m online nearly 24/7. I think my recent work and that of many of my peers puts this consumption on display. I frequently work in blog format. In American Idol Audition Training Blog, I documented my attempt to become a contestant on the TV show. I was simultaneously indulging in and critiquing media culture.
LC: Does internet art need to take place online?
MO: No. What I make is less art “on” the Internet than it is art “after” the Internet. It’s the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading. I create performances, songs, photos, texts, or installations directly derived from materials on the Internet or my activity there.
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Olson delineates Internet art from Post Internet art. Internet art is on the Internet; post Internet art is after the Internet.
Post Internet art, if it is even something that exists, can be defined in many ways.
This blog will try to cover some of these ways.
Here is one thought to start: Post Internet art leaves the Internet world. It goes to the art world and mutates itself to correspond to the conventions of the art world. It is art world art about the Internet. A deeper goal, though, is that as the work mutates from the conventions of the Internet to the conventions of art, the work catalyzes the conventions of art to mutate to those of the Internet.
For these worlds to meet on good terms, you can’t simply snap your fingers. Each world enters a process, a series of adaptations in order to find its feet in the world of the other.
From Barefoot in the Head (1969) by Brian Aldiss:
Take pictures of yourselves, he had said, pictures every moment of the day. That’s what you should do, that’s what you do do. You drop them and they lie around and other people get into them and turn them into art. Every second take a picture and so you will see that the lives we lead consist of still moments and nothing but. There are many still moments, all different. Be awake but inwards sleeping. You have all these alternatives. Think that way and you will discover more. Cast out serpents. I am here but equally I am elsewhere. I don’t need so much economy – it’s the pot training of the child where the limitation starts. Forget it, live in all regions, part, split wide, be fuzzy, try all places at the same time, indecisivize time itself, shower out your photographs to the benefit of all. Make yourself a million and so you achieve a great unilateral trajectory, not longwise in life but sideways, a unilateral immortality. Try it, friends, try it with me, join me, join in the great merry multicade!