Post Internet

Within Post Internet, Part One – Louis Doulas – Pool

-Post Internet is a term first conceived by artist Marisa Olson in 2008

-Her definition acknowledges that internet art can no longer be distinguished as strictly computer/internet
based, but rather, can be identified as any type of art that is in some way influenced by the internet and
digital media.
-Marisa Olson - “I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can
be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline.

-There have been different interpretations and variations on the term but they ultimately result in what is a
proposal for a new definition of art in a changing internet society: one that exists under technological
influence and compression.

-Harm van den Dorpel - “Doesn’t the impact of the internet on arts reach far beyond art that deals with the
internet?”

-”Thus, Post-Internet, specifically within the context of art, simply could be understood as a term that
represents the digitization and decentralization of all contemporary art via the internet as well as the
abandonment of all New Media specificities. Post-Internet then, is not a category, but a condition: a
contemporary art.”

-”What now exists is an art that is made before the internet—and thus before its worldwide assimilation into
the network— and an art that is made during or after this. It is because technology and the internet have
changed the way we understand, contextualize, curate, appreciate, create and critique art that we can say
the future of all art is, and eventually bound to be the product of these societal, cultural and political
technologic arrangements. All art will soon enough—if not already—fully incorporate, transition into, reveal,
embody or exploit these properties. Contemporary art and its participants redefine themselves through these
digitizations.” - This art has been effected by the “rhizomatic decentralized network of the internet along with
the properties of other media technologies and products.”

-”...there exists an art that relies on digitization and the internet to represent and disseminate itself into the
world network, simply for documentative purposes, merely as a means to an end, and an art that creatively
and critically engages these platforms either through physical realization, immaterial formats or both.”

-”As technology and the internet inherently inform and mediate the work of the contemporary artist, the
abandonment of New Media is marked with the abandonment of its specificities, recognizing that Post-
Internet encapsulates all of these conditions.” - specificities of the medium as technology and the internet
inherently inform contemporary artists.”

-”In a Post-Internet society we find that most of all our art experiences are mediated online, as an art existing
through various forms of digital documentation. If all Post-Internet artists have one thing in common it is that
all their artwork is digitized and may be regarded as existing in immaterial formats as immaterial entities,
regardless of intention.”

-”...certainly not all digitized, immaterial artworks have the same intentions.” - post internet isn't a movement,
its a condition

-”While all contemporary art may very well be immaterialized online and equalized in this vein, it is because
each artist utilizes these platforms so differently, for different purposes and with different agendas that
conflicting notions of display emerge. If we follow these conflicts, what we arrive at is an art that is digitized
through conversion and an art that is digitized from inception. The former would include art objects that have
been digitally documented, and the latter would include websites, digital images, videos, sound pieces, etc.,
essentially all media that doesn’t require exhibition outside one’s own private computing space; an art strictly
created on the computer (or through digital technologies) meant for viewing on the computer (or projection,
monitor, etc.).”
The Image Object Post-Internet – Artie Vierkant

-”...within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently
informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space
in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.”
-”Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with
which it is most often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism.” - This is because New Media relies
too specifically on the novel workings of the technologies it uses and Conceptualism “presumes a lack of
attention to the physical substrate in favour of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image,
context, or instruction.”
-”Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their
vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination.”
-Post-Internet is a societal condition at large and you cannot pinpoint any exact moment when it begins
-”Any cultural production which has been influenced by a network ideology falls under the rubric of Post-
Internet. The term is therefore not discretely tied to a certain event, though it could be argued that the bulk of
the cultural shifts described herein come with the introduction of privately-run commercial Internet service
providers and the availability of personal computers.”

-”In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one
would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the
Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of
these as edited and recontextualized by any other author”
-”For objects after the Internet there can be no “original copy.”
-”Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of
both its materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater
than any of its copies.”
-”While Conceptualism as outlined by Kosuth may be limiting in its reliance on art propositions as enclosed
tautological systems, its foundations - delineating progressive art with the same zeal Greenberg applied to
ascribing modernism its “purity” - hold true: “art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or
other) kinds of experience.” For us to receive a piece of art and determine from it some piece of empirical
information about the world at large would seem almost a bewildering proposition, even in a cultural climate
where we have accepted that the singular qualification for the moniker “art” is the intention of any one
individual to label it as such.” - This is about the continued relevance of some aspects of Conceptualism to a
post-internet society

-”The second aspect of art after the Internet deals with not the nature of the art object but the nature of its
reception and social presence.”
-”the nature of mass media is now profoundly different, in that we are both its subject and the engine behind
it.”
-”Whereas in previous times it was legitimate to conceive of culture as a greater system with impassible
barriers to entry and a finitude of possibilities, culture after the Internet offers a radically different paradigm...
This is not to say that we have entered a fully utopian age of endless possibilities but simply to claim that
culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same
image-creation tools used by mass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those
images, and gain free access to the majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of
higher learning.”
-”...culture Post- Internet is made up of reader-authors who by necessity must regard all cultural output as an
idea or work in progress able to be taken up and continued by any of its viewers.” - This still comes with new
issues though and the existence of networks creates a new management style not massively different from
the old type (pyramid hierarchy etc)
-”While art may no longer have to contend with an idea of “mass media” as a fixed, monolithic system,
instead it must now deal with both itself and culture at large as a constellation of diverging communities,
each fixated on propagating and preserving itself.”
-”Ironically, the most radical and “progressive” movements of the Post-Internet period would be those who
either pass by either largely unnoticed due to a decision to opt out of any easily-accessible distribution
networks, or else would be composed of a community of people producing cultural objects not intended as
artistic propositions and not applying themselves with the label of artist.”

-”The goal of some Post-Internet practices is to engage with this proliferation of images and objects
—“general web content,” items of culture created without necessarily being described as art—and proclaim
an authorial stance by indexing / curating these objects.”
-”Artists after the Internet thus take on a role more closely aligned to that of the interpreter, transcriber,
narrator, curator, architect.”
-”just as any object is conceivably any other object, our ubiquitous authorship marks a point in cultural
production at which the extraordinary is now also the ordinary—the myth is also the everyday.”
-An experience now “becomes encapsulated, transferrable and transformable in the same vain as everything
else, a “file” to be treated with all the levity we reserve for any other file.”
-”The goal of organizing appropriated cultural objects after the Internet cannot be simply to act as a didactic
ethnographer but to present microcosms and create propositions for arrangements or representational
strategies which have not yet been fully developed.” - The cultural status of an object is now influenced by
the attention given to it and how it is transmitted socially
-”Thus in the same way that all cultural images and objects become general ...so too does the authorial
stance of the artist become general.” - Any sorting of aspects of culture with a declaration becomes similar to
everyday life regardless to how spectacular the images are. What matters now is that an artist in presenting
these aspects proposes an alternate conception of cultural objects.

-”As artists come to self-sort and form international communities based on mutual investigations, it is absurd
to think of being able to act with any curatorial agency in selecting from the vast array of “contemporary
artists” without being in some way tied directly to those artists' social networks. The methods of transmission
these artists use become imbricated with the work they create, who accesses it, and the spaces they
ultimately show in.”
-”...the architecture of the Internet—an arrangement of language, sound, and images in which imagery is the
most dominant, immediate factor—helps facilitate an environment where artists are able to rely more and
more on purely visual representations to convey their ideas and support an explanation of their art
independent of language. This is a crucial point of departure from recent art history, as arguably it marks an
abandonment of language and semiotics as base metaphors for articulating works of art and our relationship
to objects and culture.” - After the internet, the most instantaneous and safe form of communication is
through imagery.
-”The strategy employed by myself and others towards this physical relationship has been to create projects
which move seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation, either changing for each
context, built with an intention of universality, or created with a deliberate irreverence for either venue of
transmission. In any case, the representation through image, rigorously controlled and edited for ideal
viewing angle and conditions, almost always becomes the central focus. It is a constellation of formal-
aesthetic quotations, self-aware of its art context and built to be shared and cited. It becomes the image
object itself.”

Harry Burke – Towards Narrative – Pool

-Talks about previous forms of art that involves a network in relation to the contemporary ”...if the previous
generation of artists worked to identify these patterns, to place their viewer (participant) within these hidden
structures, artists today begin to play with them, to construct narratives and explore new situations. In short,
if network art revealed these relationships, post-network art begins to question them.”
-Burke talks about projects by artists such as Ben Vickers that communicate with the viewer through the net
“...the online portal locates the projects in the shared language of the internet generation, and the implicit
agreement upon the heterogeneity of authentic or real experience upon contact with any device mediated by
the net. In the sense that language is heterarchical, so is narrative, and this is its importance.”
Heterogeneity - The quality of being diverse and not comparable in any kind
Heterarchical - a system of organization replete with overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendancy, and/or
divergent-but-coexistent patterns of relation
-”For with its direct intervention in lived situations, work such as that of Fornieles and Vickers can be
characterised as second person, weaving narratives and encouraging interaction amongst other people.
(Use of second person as opposed to third in this context accounts for the active role encouraged amongst
participants, it is intended to de-emphasise spectacle). This distinction seems a useful tool through which to
highlight the differentiation in this schema from first person narrative, in which the artist constructs her own
(invented) narrative, often integral to the work’s context.”
-Talks about the self mythologizing of works by artists like Jeremy Bailey and how this creates a narrative
with the viewer where they become “part of a shared narrative connecting artist and system.”
-”Whilst perhaps edging towards a celebration of the artist as self-mythologiser, this is true only in recognition
of a wider cultural trend of self-mythologising, as we invent ourselves almost daily on social networks,
negotiating the complex dynamics between what we post and what we do not post as we construct the
informatics of our mirrored selves.”
-”The play between the real and the virtual seems less radical every day. Thus the function of narrative
seems not just to identify this convergence, or even enact it, but to activate it, to bring into real space the
same fragmented moral zone we’ve created online, and to open this space for everybody. Thus, perhaps,
narrative makes the virtual real.”