Postinternet denotes an idea in arts and criticism that refers to society and modes of interaction following the widespread adoption of the internet. The term emerged from discussions about Internet Art by Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh, and Artie Vierkant, however the movement has not been thoroughly defined. Guthrie Lonergan and Cory Arcangel have mentioned it as a term for being "internet aware", which some believe to be more accurate. Generally it is described as art that is about the internet's effects on aesthetics, culture and society.
Contents
- History and context
- Criticism and philosophy
- Notable artists
- Notable works
- Websites Forums and magazines
- References
Critics of the term claim that it falsely implies that there is a kind of art made after the internet has ceased to exist (and artists such as Rafael Rozendaal have criticized the ambiguity of "post-" in this instance).
History and context
The idea of art post internet was born in the wake of Internet Art, which gained significant traction in the early- to mid-2000s. Much like Internet Art, the postinternet art movement has roots in Dada, Fluxus, and exploration of net culture in general. Unlike Internet Art, postinternet art is less heavily influenced, at least in form, by telematic art, being more concerned in commenting on communications technology (the internet) than in being medium-native to the internet.
Works created within the postinternet paradigm often shares the aesthetics of the Internet Art, net.art and DataDada Art. It differs in that it does not use the internet only as a tool to produce art, but addresses the internet as a force that has altered social structures in both digital and physical spaces. Postinternet art is not necessarily art produced on the internet, but art that reflects the internet and the internet's effects on culture and society.
Postinternet art has gained some attention because of Petra Cortright's work, BRIDAL SHOWER and notably also Katja Novitskova's work, Post Internet Survival Guide. Postinternet art by Harm van den Dorpel has been covered on the Creators Project. In 2014, Shia LaBeouf took part in a collaborative art project that "was partly a response to how post-internet artists were using social media to promote their work and how that promotion became the work."
Some critics have also applied the ideas of postinternet art in discussions of the use of the internet by some contemporary British and American poets, for instance Steve Roggenbuck, Sam Riviere and Steven Zultanski. Encompassing work otherwise frequently grouped under Alt lit, flarf or conceptual poetry, postinternet poetry articulates the ubiquity of the experience of internet and social media usage among poets, similar to the ideas in visual art described above, such that the internet touches all elements of a poem's composition and distribution without necessarily being an explicit focus of the work itself. As the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith remarks in The New Yorker, a postinternet poem "seems to view the Internet with a shrug".
Criticism and philosophy
Postinternet art has been criticized as being art about the internet, rather than art of the internet, in the manner of Net Art. In doing so, postinternet art loses many of the structural benefits of Net Art, namely that postinternet art exists through the institution of physical galleries. While Net Art sought to redefine a space for its work, postinternet art is more rooted in an older, traditional notion of the role of art. The crisis of postinternet art is often characterized as a question of how the inherently intangible and democratized work resulting from internet content-creation paradigms can be monetized, and in this sense postinternet art is sometimes negatively described as the image of network-native art repackaged for the gallery or for sale.
On the contrary, it has also been proposed that postinternet is more like a condition for art making and critical thinking. Since the internet is no longer an option but a necessity in our society, one must also be critically aware of the internets impact on society when making art. This is also clearly stated by Marisa Olson in an interview with "we make money not art"- blogger Regine Debatty;
"There doesn't seem to be a need to distinguish, any more, whether technology was used in making the work - after all, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything. What is even more interesting is the way in which people are starting to make what I've called "post-internet" art in my own work (such as my Monitor Tracings), or what Guthrie Lonergan recently called "Internet Aware Art". 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. Of course, it's an exciting challenge to explain to someone how this is still internet art.... If that really matters".
Furthermore, it has been proposed by Stefan Heidenreich in discussions with students at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts during his lecture, Networks and Objects: On Postinternet, Speculative Realism, Media- or Network Theory and related artistic practises, that the strength of the postinternet term comes from it being undefinable or at least very difficult to define.