"Chernobyl", from the "Computer Viruses" series, byStepan Ryabchenko (2011).
Post-Internet is a 21st-centuryart movement[1] involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society.[2]
Post-Internet is a loosely defined term[1] that was coined by artist/curatorMarisa Olson in an attempt to describe her practice.[3] It emerged from mid-2000s discussions aboutInternet art by Gene McHugh (author of a blog titled "Post-Internet"), andArtie Vierkant (artist, and creator ofImage Object sculpture series).[4] The movement itself grew out ofInternet Art (or Net Art).[4] According to theUCCA Center for Contemporary Art inBeijing, rather than referring "to a time “after” theinternet", the term refers to "an internet state of mind".[5] Eva Folks of AQNB wrote that it "references one so deeply embedded in and propelled by the internet that the notion of a world or culture without or outside it becomes increasingly unimaginable, impossible."[6]
The term is controversial and the subject of much criticism in the art community.[1]Art in America's Brian Droitcour in 2014 opined that the term fails to describe the form of the works, instead "alluding only to a hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the context of digital technology."[7] According to a 2015 article inThe New Yorker, the term describes "the practices of artists [whose] artworks move fluidly between spaces, appearing sometimes on a screen, other times in a gallery."[8]Fast Company's Carey Dunne summarizes they are "artists who are inspired by the visual cacophony of the web" and notes that "mediums fromSecond Life portraits to digital paintings on silk to 3-D-printed sculpture" are used.[3]
There is theoretical overlap with writer and artistJames Bridle's termNew Aesthetic.[9][2] Ian Wallace ofArtspace writes that "the influential blog The New Aesthetic, run since May 2011 by Bridle, is a pioneering institution in the post-Internet movement" and concludes that "much of the energy around the New Aesthetic seems, now, to have filtered over into the "post-Internet" conversation."[2] Post-Internet art is also discussed byKatja Novitskova as being a part of 'New Materialism'.[10][11]
Wallace considers the Post-Internet term to stand for "anew aesthetic era," moving "beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects". He notes that the post-Internet generation "frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world."[2] Or as Louis Doulas writes inWithin Post-Internet, Part One (2011): "There is a difference then, in an art that chooses to exist outside of a browser window and an art that chooses to stay within it."[12]
Early post-internet music often embraced ironic, nostalgic, self-referentialinternet aesthetics, defined bymicrogenres andsubcultures such asseapunk andvaporwave,[1][22] other influences included thePC Music label founded byA. G. Cook, which gave way tobubblegum bass andhyperpop. These styles incorporated 1990s and early 2000s internet nostalgia, kitsch, online memes, and consumer culture into a new context. They emerged primarily online and were more prevalent there than in traditional performance venues.[23]
By the late 2010s, post-internet music began to incorporate themes regarding the rise ofsocial media and the increasing dominance of the internet in wider society.[24][25]
James Ferraro is an experimental artist, and has been described as "the godfather of post-internet electronic music"[26]
In the early 2010s, "post-Internet music" was originally associated with the musicianGrimes, who used the term to describe her work at a time when post-Internet concepts were not typically discussed in mainstream music spaces.[27][28]
Some post-internet musicians have also collaborated with post-internet visual artists, such asJon Rafman's work withOneohtrix Point Never on a two-part music video for "Sticky Drama", from Lopatin's 2015 albumGarden of Delete.[35][36]James Ferraro had also experimented with post-internet related visual art, releasing the film "9/11 Simulation in Roblox Environment" in 2017.[37]
Soundcloud rap has been credited with emerging primarily on theinternet.[41][42][43] Amarco referred to internetcloud rap artistYung Lean, who visually drew influence fromseapunk andvaporwave aesthetics,[44][45] as "by and large a product of the internet and a leading example of a generation of youths who garner fame through social media."[1] Additionally, rapperSematary's sound has been described as "distinctly post-internet".[46]
There have been a number of significant group art shows explicitly exploring Post-Internet themes. There was a 2014 exhibition calledArt Post-Internet at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, whichARTnews named one of the "most art exhibitions of the 2010s"[54] which "set out to encapsulate the budding movement."[2]MoMA curatedOcean of Images in 2015, a show "probing the effects of an image-based post-Internet reality."[55] The 2016 9thBerlin Biennale, titledThe Present in Drag, curated by the art collectiveDIS, is described as a Post-Internet exhibition.[56][57][58] Other examples include:
Raster Raster, Aran Cravey Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014[59]
Katja Novitskova[72] whose work focuses on issues of technology, evolutionary processes, digital imagery and corporate aesthetics and was included in the 9th Berlin Biennale
^Dunham, Ian (2022). "SoundCloud Rap: An investigation of community and consumption models of internet practices".Critical Studies in Media Communication.39 (1):1–20.doi:10.1080/15295036.2021.2015537.
^McLean-Ferris, Laura (21 July 2014)."Aleksandra Domanović".ArtReview.Domanović has ... created paper-stack sculptures (made by printing to the edge of blank A4 paper, at full bleed) that commemorate the day in 2010 that the .yu domain was taken off the Internet.... The memorialising of this moment makes sense for an artist so committed to the Internet as a form...
^Sánchez Gómez, Laura (2023-01-02). "Futuros postdigitales en español: tensiones postidentitarias en la creación electrónica" [Post-digital futures in Spanish: post-identity tensions in electronic creation].Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (in Spanish).24 (1):121–133.doi:10.1080/14636204.2023.2177024.ISSN1463-6204.
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