art andthe internet

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186 / Attilia Fattori Franchini 190 / LuckyPDF 194 / Eva and Franco Mattes 196 / Marisa Olson

in conversation with...

RePrinted Essays and Manifestos

201 / The Hacker Manifesto (1986) +++The Mentor+++ 202 / A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996) John Perry Barlow 203 / DESKTOP IS (1998) Alexei Shulgin 203 / Introduction to Net.Art (MArchApril, 1999) Natalie Bookchin, Alexei Shulgin 204 / A Few Things I Know About Neen (20002006) Miltos Manetas 205 / Dispersion (2002) Seth Price 210 / Flat against the wall (2007) Olia Lialina 212 / MEDIA ART 2.0 (MANIFESTO) (2009) Aristarkh Chernyshev, Roman Minaev, Alexei Shulgin 212 / postinternet: art after the internet (2011) Marisa Olson 216 / We, the Web Kids (2012) Piotr Czerski, translated by Marta Szreder 218 / chronology 220 / SELECTED Bibliography 222 / contributor biographies 223 / acknowledgements

ART AND THE INTERNET

in conversation with... Attilia Fattori Franchini

/ Attilia Fattori Franchini

Nick Warner/ I think the reason youre a valuable addition

to the interviewees, or rather, the focus of your practice that I am interested in, is the notion of postinternet and its relationship to net art through the transformative medium of exhibition (because it is through the exhibition of physical art online, and the exhibition of net art in the gallery, that the postinternet binary can become manifest).

and understand the possibilities given by the context of the internet has been a journey running parallel in both my work with bubblebyte.org and my work independentlyon different levels but leading towards similar directions. Now after almost three years these paths have become clearer, and have converged. As a curator you often ask yourself what are you adding to what has already been said? My personal work, which doesnt always focus on, but definitely flirts with, post-digital practices, often matches the starting point of bubblebyte.org: showcasing artists that we liked, playfully and with the possibilities we had. bubblebyte.org created an online context for the promotion and expansion of art existing in its primary form on the internet following a structure and timelines adopted by physical galleries and by the art system in general. Approaching the internet progressively, whilst applying to it the limits and constraints present in a physical space, gave us the possibility of using those limits as advantages and experimenting with the idea of exhibition making in a very playful way. Looking at practices informed by and aware of the internet from an insiders point of view, we visualised the platform as an empty container, an open space where artists could experiment and engage.

Attilia Fattori Franchini/ I do see exhibitions as

transformative and, often triggers of change in the way we absorb art discourses. Postinternet and net art are practices born from a different relationship towards the digital medium. Whilst net art practitioners mastered a strong technical knowledge, using this knowledge for creative and often political purposes, postinternet has emerged from the massification of the internet and the transition of the idea of digital artist from specialist to newcomer. The proliferation of the internet and the diffusion of personal computers and social networks allowed more and more artists to start documenting their works showcased in physical spaces and publish this documentation online. Documentation, online self-branding and independent net collectives all changed the dynamics of how we experience art as well as connecting and empowering artists. For the first time the web becomes a context where one can showcase art. The great work by Oliver Laric, An Incomplete Timeline of Online Exhibitions and Biennials, 2013, furnishes an almost historical account of exhibitions and projects online between 1991 and today. The creation of a new spacethe onlinewhere art can be showcased, and its absorption within other institutional and commercial artistic contexts was fundamental to todays duality. The exhibition therefore comes in as a medium to reduce these binary positions and overlap elements, confusing the viewer and the system.

interests essentially making up half of bubblebyte.org, and bubblebyte.org then feeding into your own practice. Im interested in bubblebyte.org, and the idea of website takeovers. How did you go about executing these? Were they mainly artist commissions? Or were you and Rhys doing them yourselves? Im interested in the notion of a website takeover because it strikes a chord with the anarchistic kind of punk attitude that was important to early, 90s net artists, but also with more recent iterations of protest language, with Occupy, etc..

NW/ So each equally informs the other I suppose, your individual

Chimera QTE installation view 2013, Cell Projects, London Courtesy Attilia Fattori Franchini

hacking culture, taking down the website of the institution with chaotic and clashing artworkspretty exciting to be a part of.

NW/ Continuing with this omnipresence of dualities that recurs

when discussing internet and postinternet, I suppose there are two branches of your practice, if we were to be really basic about it. Firstly, the work youve done with Rhys Coren in founding bubblebyte.org, and, secondly, your practice as a freelance curator, which has, particularly in the last few years, been equally, or even more prolific.

AFF/ The idea of appropriating and commandeering other websites is something that grew organically within bubblebyte.org projects. On the occasion of the exhibition Primo Anniversario at The Sunday Painter, we commissioned artist Nicolas Sassoon to create an artwork for the holding page of the gallery website.
Website takeovers as we pursue them today happen pretty casually and grow organically, with bubblebyte.orgs implanting itself into websites and catalysing a total transformation, temporarily. The first independent takeover started as a conversation with Trade Gallery, Nottingham. Energia Della Danza was presented as an online collaboration of artists working together to disrupt the online presence of Trade and its usual way of working. This transformation of the usually clean, white Trade website consisted of a revised web-page coding (html+css) by Paul Flannery, dancing backgrounds by Rhys Coren, looped sound files by Oliver Sutherland and a special spinning globe navigation bar image (.ico) by Laurel Schwulst.

AFF/ Yes, I definitely see a sort of duality in my work. My practice

as freelance curator has been extremely informed and inspired by the collaborative work within bubblebyte.org. Working with Rhys is great, he has a very solid artistic practice, and I can see how our conversations have challenged and developed a lot of my curatorial thinking. Also having the chance to work both online and offline, as well as looking at works and contexts from different viewpoints, often leads you towards interesting approaches and diminishing the clashes between one space and the other. I often look retrospectively at my work as an independent curator and how the issues explored through bubblebyte.org have influenced it. The capacity to engage with digital artworks

AFF/ Yes, the result and the engagement was so exciting that we kept wanting to experiment with the format. For the Liverpool Biennial 2012, we increased the idea of disruption in a project called IL CAVALIERE. For IL CAVALIERE, bubblebyte.org invited artists Paul Flannery, Hannah Perry, Jon Rafman and Travess Smalley to work together on four individual elements of the website, to collaborate and respond to the theme of Knight Rider, the famous TV series featuring a high-tech modern-day knight, fighting crime with the help of an advanced, artificially intelligent car. Each project engages differently with the identity of the hosting website whilst relating itself to specific physical events or exhibitions. Every takeover has a different focus and we increasingly invite artists to work under strict parameters. We find this exciting as it allows for new forms of experimentation within the online realm. NW/ Its really nice, it becomes a sort of group show, with each artist occupying one element of the websites fabrication; coding, background, sound and so forth. AFF/ Yes, each artist engages with different parts but we have also made works asking for specific forms of engagement. It often depends on the nature of the project and how we decide to interact with the present fabric of the website. SUCCESSONE, for example, is a takeover of the Create London website throughout

the duration of Hannah Perrys Have a Nice Day (HAND) project. In the lead up to Perrys performance at the Barbican as part of the project, bubblebyte.org generated a soundboard of audio works by participants and collaborators. This soundboard then formed the basis for artists invited by bubblebyte.org to generate a range of new artworks to be integrated within the existing fabric of the Create London website design, itself the host for a new film by Hannah Perry. Another example is the new Il Bardo di Timperley , a digital partnership for the Art Licks Weekend. We invited artists to respond to a fixed set of inputs. The 16 international artists selected produced a moving image artwork to be added every few days to the Art Licks Weekend website, slowly revealing a much larger, collaborative work in the form of a moving collage.

NW/ At first the website takeover seems like a reasonably limited format, but you keep reinventing it. I guess it always results in a sort of group show, but whereas the earlier takeovers were about a sort of structured deconstruction of an institutional site, these newer iterations seem more old school in a way, a sort of collaborative address to 90s browser art, especially the aesthetic. Il Bardo di Timperley all very glitch in terms of aesthetics. AFF/ Its a format with endless scope, and one that makes it
very easy and affordable to commission new works. Nuovo Nuovo, Vecchio invites eight artists showcasing in Bloomberg New

NW/ I suppose thats what I meant when I mentioned the takeovers putting me in the mind of that kind of rebellious ethos of artists operating online. It seems reminiscent of

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ART AND THE INTERNET RE-PRINTED ESSAYS AND MANIFESTOS

Contemporaries 2013, to select an artist from the Bloomberg archive and create a new digital artwork as a response. Dating back to 1989, the archive contains over 900 artists from the last 24 years, each selected by leading artworld figures via an open submission process so, again, the scope is massive. Nuovo Nuovo, Vecchio aims to celebrate Bloomberg New Contemporaries heritage. The artworks created as a response will then be integrated within the existing fabric of the Spike Island website, creating a dynamic, but still functioning rework of the original site design. So new works are commissioned as an address to the archival works, and the website takeover still happens.

patterning, repetition and cut and paste techniques that are becoming part of more fine art processes. The duality, which I was talking about before, is becoming less extreme. On one side the more white cube practices suddenly employ digital resemblant steps in the making, whilst on the other side, immaterial elements of the internet try to objectify themselves to inhabit the white cube. These forces pulling in different directions are what interest me.

NW/ I think it is this duality itself, and this translation from one

NW/ With your freelance curatorial practice, how do you think

the objects you exhibit in your physical exhibition spaces impact or expand your practice as a virtual-curator (e.g. Bubblebyte) and vice versa? Shows like Chimera seem to be so tightly curated as a glance toward the web-aesthetic (it could almost have been a solo show!) but there was very little art to do with the internet actually in there....

context to another, that comprises a large part of what people refer to as postinternet art, not so much concerned with the internet itself, or even with its proliferation, but with the way it is assimilated, or not, into art practices, exhibitionary practices, and the two-way bleed of influence from immaterial and material. If this gap is narrowing, and so perhaps the pull in two directions is becoming less and less strenuous, where do you think we will be post postinternet?

AFF/ My personal curatorial practice and the collaborative

work done with bubblebyte.org constantly inform each other. My awareness of the internet transpires in my approach to exhibition making and often looks at practices informed by the internet. At the moment I am reflecting a lot about the duality between physical and digital space and looking at how works can be translated from one place to another. I see this duality reducing itself whilst still being problematic.

NW/ Yes, its incredibly problematic. Putting artworks that focus heavily on web culture and the conceptual space of the internet into a physical gallery can seem hyper-contrived, and totally superfluous, but there is a critical value to producing physical shows about the internet, I suppose its antagonistic? AFF/ The work online has its own context to support it, its distribution modes and its reception. When works like this escape the desktop, it is often a strategic gesture, a sort of provocation. Suddenly the work itself, born on an artists hardrive, or drifting through the World Wide Web, modifies itself into an object so as to enter the white cube. I find this transformation exciting and often generative of unexpected results, it can add new layers to what is presented and transmitted. Sometimes the works transition from one context to another becomes part of an artistic practice and gives new points of reflection and evolution.
What I find surprising is how more and more digital aesthetics are present in more fine art practices. Chimera QTE, the show you mentioned as well as the latest exhibition, The Instability of the Image, one I curated at Paradise Row Gallery, both look at how our relationship with digital technology is changing the way we absorb information and represent reality. The works presented are not strictly looking at the internet as a subject or using the internet as a medium of expression but they are somehow influenced by it. It is a very subtle turn but there are certain characteristics of web editing such as velocity, cropping, merging, colour gradients,

AFF/ I think art practices will progressively employ immaterial and material elements on the same level, mixing up tools until a new technological change will introduce new forms of artistic engagements. When the first portable video cameras became affordable in the 60s, New York artists suddenly started employing video techniques within their production, adopting video recording as a process and as a point of view through the world. The internet and digital technology is a tool for artists to look, record and reflect on contemporaneity, and if contemporaneity is affected by the digital revolution then artists represent this change within their work.
In my vision of the future, we will be hyper-internet and metamaterialist, using technological tools, cables and devices as objects as well as primary sculptural elements to create hybrid compositions. We will be displaced and connected, playing animations to grow plants, learning how to give our first kiss from free users online tutorials, being political through life-style aspirational mockery. Or maybe we will just grow tomatoes in a sunny, southern country, surrounded by books.

NW/ Equally, where will bubblebyte.org be, and where will AFF be? AFF/ bubblebyte.org will hopefully takeover new and old
institutions websites worldwide and commission digital work that engages with our constantly expanding visual surrounding. I will retire in the Italian countryside to read all the books I havent read yet until I am able to fundraise enough to found an open contemporary digital Kunsthalle. The place would focus on artists reflecting broadly on digital technology and including it in their practices. Its mission would be the playful engagement with art, supporting on the same level artists and audiences through education and experience. A place for art and discourse, most probably it could end up being something like The New Theater in Berlin.

bubblebyte.org in collaboration with Paul Flannery, Hannah Perry, Jon Rafman and Travess Smalley IL CAVALIERE 2012 Courtesy Attilia Fattori Franchini

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in conversation with... Lucky pdf

/ Luckypdf

Lucky PDF are John Hill (JH), Yuri Pattison (YP), James Early (JE) and Ollie Hogan (OH) Nick warner/ In her 2012 essay for Artforum, The Digital
Divide, Clare Bishop posits the notion that tasks like blogging, iTunes maintenance and social media engagement have turned all web-users into de-facto archivists. Yet, observed simply, the internet and its contents sort of archives itself, doesnt it? Why do you think that this idea of the artist as archivist has proliferated in the digital age? Because archives are easy to exhibit? Or is Bishop right in proposing it simply has something to do with our increased interaction with archival technologies on a daily basis?

all of which are momentary, and exists only in documentation thereafter. Sometimes the documentation becomes the work for example Lucy Clouts workwhich is as much video art as performance art, then Tino Sehgals practice, where documentation is strictly prohibited. So the archive becomes proliferate as a means of presenting this work posthumously. I think this is true of a lot of digital art as well, which has some liveness to it. It becomes very hard to exhibit net art or browser art or online participatory works, unless they are shown as archived....

JH/ The auto-documentation of the technology turns everything

JH/ Perhaps its the other way round, technology does the

archiving for us; what artists are doing is researching those things that have been archived, the things that might have been missed first time round. Theres also the idea that artists are trying to sneak things into the archive, poetry disguised as status updates and performance disguised as timeline activity.

NW/ Yeah I guess its an open archive, isnt it, thats always being
updated and contributed to, in real time so we always have the opportunity to get some guerilla art in there, but I dont know what the meaning of the archive is, in this context. I mean, it seems unlikely that anyone would be putting material online as a sort of virtual time capsule, for web-users of the future.

into a performance, but that doesnt mean all performance is art. This is perhaps becoming the most important question in postinternet art (and Im using postinternet very literally here) about the boundaries between normal people taking Instagram selfies and artists taking Instagram selfies. The danger is that we just stick the word critical in front of stuff and hope no one notices that its not really any different to what everyone else is doing. Is it really so clever/critical to be able to successfully adopt the writing style of a 14 year-olds fan fiction? Weve often talked about creating things that are in some way tricky, hard to absorb, hard to digest. But we need to be really aware that Google can digest anything. Google doesnt give a shit about your post-post-structuralist self-reflexive use of YouTube; Google sees your 300 views and ignores you. Surveillance is a major contemporary political issue because there are ever more things to hide. Every time I download a film, to watch or to remix, Im committing a crime. Every time my girlfriend stays over or I go on holiday I commit benefit fraud. Every time I go to a protest, or talk about political violence, when I steal from Tesco or steal from work or take pictures in an exhibition, when I put on a film screening or play music in public, when I dont touch in, when I drink in the street, I do have something to hide. The politics shouldnt be in the surveillance, we shouldnt content ourselves with now I have my own drone too. The politics are in the things we are hiding, and we should hide them in artistic ways, but not in the hiding itself. Tino Sehgal still makes beautiful, powerful things, but the critical economics hes using isnt very interesting any more. No one is surprised that art is immaterialthat art is a service, artists have been being paid to provide service, rather than products, for years. Sehgal instead ends up positioning himself on the wrong side of the cultural divide, with the no photography signs and the DMCA takedown notices. Also: http://www.youtube.com/ results?search_query=tino+segal+venice (a link to a YouTube search for the words Tino Sehgal Venice which has, contrary to Sehgals desire for his work to remain unfilmed, unphotographed and unrecorded, returned over 300 videos that users have recorded and uploaded of his performance in the Giardini as part of the Venice Biennales international exhibition this year.)

YP/ I feel we live ever more in the present. Our obsessions,

concerns and plans seem to relate more and more to the immediate past, the immediate future and to the now. The archive itself has recently become a largely unconscious element of our daily digital communications, it exists in many of the same ways that our biological brain records memories. For this reason I feel that the presentation of the archive in art has changed. It is no longer fixed, and even in its most classical guise, it is presented with the constant possibility of connecting with the future again in the same way one might visit an old email account or log back into MySpace where there are many more possible actions than merely engaging with the past (one might finally reply to that unread message), and the past itself tends to look very different (new majority shareholders, revamped user interface designs). For this reason I feel many artists are participating in very live and ephemeral practices as the archival element is simply a given in their day-to-day, tapping into whats recorded in the network offers access to these memories, but equally in the creation of the work there is a concern for the archive. The concern is perhaps more about negotiating the network effectivelygenerating content that will get widely and effectively circulated organically (only the best memes survive, the best memes are created to be immediate and disposable). But this is all very broadly speaking.

School of Global Art 2012, promotional video Courtesy the artists

piece is in the same way that we can question the difference between certain works of abstraction and a childs scribble. I love your appraisal of Google though, the most discerning art critic of all time, who judges interventionist art works purely on their functioning merits. Is this not the role of satire? The artist has always been a satirist, and thats where the line is drawn between the Instagram selfie and the artists Instagram selfie. I mean whether you think theres any value to the satire is a different thing, but I think artists will always appropriate popular culture and social culture to highlight the things they think are mundane, or corrupt or whatever.

NW/ You mentioned previously, James, that this interest in the

archival probably comes from, to some extent, the increased investment in temporal work. Live art, performance and so forth,

has always been a question with artistic activity since craft or skill was no longer an artistic prerequisite, we can question how truly profound the post-post-structuralist self-reflexive YouTube

NW/ There are a lot of answers in there though. I suppose this

JE/ I prefer not to look at art like that; this implies a cynicism in artistic practice.Some artists use satire in their work and some satirists use art as the vehicle for their critique. I hope that art is determined by history based on the wider cultural importance of various aesthetic trends and philosophical, social discourses

and the icons and visual languages, platforms and communities within which they exist. To me the assumption of the artist and the artistic community as a hierarchy of authors according to the level of self-awareness within certain known parameters is pretentious and out of touch. I think there can be an implicit critique in using popular culture formats to communicate but generally I think that Id prefer artists to be participating in that wider culture and adopting its modes only because in doing so they are able to reach an audience that is familiar with its tropes. Also with mass-participation in creative social network tools, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., there is no artistic entry bar that needs an art education, and its naive of artists to not recognise the self-irony in all of these selfie journalists. We are all, artists or otherwise, just participating in the same modes of selfexpression as our peers so that we can garner their approval and communicate, be it with other artists/make-up bloggers/friends etc.. So I think that if we understand artists as just those with a counterpart gallery practice or artistic peer approval (context)

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then we shut ourselves off from the potential to communicate on a mass-scale; that is the gift of social media and the internet. Everyone really is an artist now!

to be shorter and shorterbut I still think there is room for a type of avant-garde without things becoming completely homogenised.

that in V22 the other day. Thats satirical to an extent, right? That seems to appropriate the imagery of fashion, and these online behind-the-scenes fashion shoots. It seems to me to present these multiple layers of artifice and reality, sincerity and irony....

NW/ What about your PDF S/S 2013 piece, I was looking at

NW/ I agree that, on the whole, there is a much less utopian perception of web cultures, and digital technologies, at the moment. It seems that between societal concerns about surveillance and social-network-dependency problems there is little room for utopia. YP/ Things are still in play; I think it will be interesting to see
down the line how our more filtered and algorithmic governed access to information will play outat the moment it feels like any digital aspirations to utopia are under constant attack.

fashion and certainly not lampoon it. Fashion is itself a highly selfaware and acutely managed brand, many people are employed in the furtherance of its importance and monitoring its social position specifically to support it, and understand and predict its markets desires. We take inspiration from many commercial sources and adopt many strategies popular in other industries to further our artistic desires, and fashion is one of them. We often create adverts for our pieces and parties to promote our content and extending the brand into fashion is just another sincere attempt to make LuckyPDF a ubiquitous brand and diverse cultural producer with multiple interests. Fashion, or at least clothing, is a great vehicle for a brand, as its completely universal, and of course we have tried to replicate those strategies that have worked in fashion such as photoshoots and fashion videos. One of the interesting things for us is the way that depending upon your vantage point you have a completely different understanding of what we do as a collective, for example if you saw some of our clothes on a fashion blog then you might think we were designers that also make art, first impressions are lasting and I like the idea that if you arent versed in arts lexicon you could still access our work. There is no right way to make art or fashion and no right context to see or understand it.

JE/ With the PDF S/S 2013 our intention was not to satirise

NW/ So weve established that there are multiple entry points, to your work specifically, but also to art generally. This, it seems, is one of the many symptoms of the digital sphere, and also one of the interesting elements of postinternet culture. As postinternet removed the esotericism from the internet, and with Web 2.0 and what have you, this kind of specialised field of communication became available and usable to the techno-layman, similarly, with the proliferation of this interconnectedness, cultures become more widely accessible, like contemporary art, for example. Like you say, you no longer need an art education or to be part of a certain social sphere to engage with a very fringe contemporary art activity. But as practitioners such as yourselves (Im being careful with my choice of words here) open out their practices to reflect these changes, and to create this multiplicity of access points for cultural agents of all levels, is something being lost? Perhaps the danger is that fashion, music, contemporary art, theatreall of these different elementsbecome completely homogenised?
visual movements that we are perhaps still too close to in time to appreciate. Its true that mining this growing archive has shifted the goal poststhe cultural feedback loops at the moment seem

YP/ I think that the web has actually fostered a number of unique

PDF S/S 2013 Stylist: Hannah R Hopkins, Make-up artist: Lucy Joan Pearson Photo: Oskar Proctor Courtesy the artists

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/ Eva and Franco Mattes

Nick Warner/ What I find interesting about your practice, is that there seems little regard for the platform, medium or technology binaries that quashed a lot of the earlier web-based artistic activity. It seems, instead, that the goal of your works varies between a sort of deconstruction of web-capitalism, and comedic and astute observations about the increasingly thin line between physicality and virtuality. With that in mind, there are two critiques of web-based arts practice that Id like to get your thoughts on.
The first is this notion that web-based art practices are a sort of threat to the art market, in that they sort of defy commodification in their multiplicity, often universal availability and ethereality. Do you think this makes a sort of capitalist critique inherent to all art affiliated with the internet in subject or materiality?

for example, never broke any record, despite him being arguably the most influential artist of the century.

NW/ Absolutely, I agree that an artworks cultural value is of much

greater importance than its market value, but I suppose what Im leading to here, is the question of whether these sorts of artworks are less desirable to museums and galleries, because they are perhaps less desirable to collectors and commercial galleries?

E&FM/ Museums acquire what they dont already have in their collection, what was previously considered uncollectable.... NW/ Going back to the common critiques of web-based art
practices, the second that I wanted your thoughts on, is about this increasingly thin line between physicality and virtuality, which in art criticism seems most commonly manifest in the discussion of how, or whether to exhibit web-based art practices. Do you think there is merit in transposing works conceived online to galleries?

Eva and Franco Mattes/ On the contrary, popularity and availability are good things for artworks and also for their market value: a painting thats exhibited in a museum with lots of visitors and reproduced in thousands of catalogues and postcards is likely to be more expensive than one painting hidden in my grandmothers attic.
exists not as an object, but as an ethereal piece of code, or something that is there to be experienced in a temporal way, is very difficult to buy or sell, and very difficult to put into a collection. I understand what you mean about the circulation of imagery, and yes I agree that famous artworks are without a doubt infinitely more famous now that their image is shared around the internet, but works to which there is no original, but remain only present through their documentation, how, as a rapidly proliferating format for works of art, are these acquisitioned or experienced by the market? Take for example your piece, Freedom, 2010. That is available to watch now, online, but the piece is definitively a performance piece. How could someone go about purchasing a piece of work like that? I dont deny that these are the same issues that were discussed at length when video art and new media became more popular, but the net art discussion has the added spice of unending virtual dissemination.

E&FM/ Showing a work in a museum is definitely different than

NW/ I mean that I think web-based art, browser art, or art that

showing it online, neither better or worse, just different, and we try to get the best out of both spaces: online you may get lots of viewers, on the other hand in a museum people spend more time with the work, they are more focussed, they may even get to see a 15 minute-long video altogether, instead of skipping right away to the fun part....

NW/ Sure, there is something unsupervised and convenient

about looking at art online, and that can mean that works are not viewed as intended or in their fullness. Like you say, people will skip to the best bits on YouTube or Vimeo, but that is the habit of online videosbrowsing has always been about that sort of interactivity, moving content around and engaging only with the best bits. Isnt it a more severe misrepresentation of a work, though, if a work such as your Hybrids, or your spoof website Vaticano.org were to be shown in a gallery space, as part of a group show or something similar?

Eva and Franco Mattes Freedom 2010, online Performance Courtesy the artists

E&FM/ I agree, some works are meant to stay out there, either
because theyre ephemeral or immaterial or live or all these things combined. Whats important is that you dont change the nature of the work to fit somebodys expectations, be it a museum, a gallery or even an online community.

E&FM/ Of course this kind of art is not going to be sold and bought
to decorate houses, at least not for now, but this is true for every art that I find interesting. When its created it is only interesting for a small group of people, especially other artists, then, with the passing of time, other people get involved, like institutions and collectors. You dont create this kind of art with the market in mind, which doesnt mean you reject it, its just not your priority.

NW/ Its refreshing that you dont seem to buy into this dichotomy

NW/ So its about your choice of audience, and whether you

choose to make work which fits with whatever the current model of salability is, or whether you choose to make work which doesnt have this sort of value ascribed to it?

between the two spaces of the physical and the virtual. However, it is a binary that I see present in a lot of your work, Colorless, odorless and tasteless is a prime example, where the work seems to act as a sort of allegory for the increasingly fine line between the two. The allegory seems appropriate because there is some comedic merit in the presentation of the arcade machine with a real engine in it, but is there a kind of stance or critique in this allegory? Do you think we should invest less in our virtual personas/lives?

see the difference between our virtual and real selves. Each person is a complex mix of different, sometimes contradictory personalities, and each personality is to a certain extent constructed: I can be an anonymous colleague at work, a caring mother at home, and a high-on-cocaine sado-maso lover at night. None of these personalities is virtual, or fake, or maybe all of them are. The point is you are not yourself, you are many. Social networks are perfect places for this game of simulation, but in this sense not different than banks, schools, golf clubs or churches.

songis a piece of code written on a device somewhere in the Virginia suburbs, its there as much as a book is stored in a library. The fact that youve never been in that library, or that you dont even know where the library is, doesnt make it a virtual book. So rather than virtual reality, Id talk about the reality of the virtual.

NW/ I think I read it as more postmodern; perhaps the point is that it is foolish to maintain the discrepancy between the two at all? E&FM/ Exactly. The internet is a medium, like the written word,
photography, cinema or radio before it. A filetext, video, image,

E&FM/ I think that an artworks real value is not always reflected

in its price. Masterpieces can be cheap, Marcel Duchamps works,

E&FM/ There is this great sentence by philosopher Heinz Von Foerster: Where is reality? Can you show it to me?. I cant really

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/ Marisa Olson

nick warner/ The term postinternet can be useful in talking

broadly about the new significance that the internet has come to have in our lives as cultural practitioners over the last, I dont know, ten years, referring to the notion that, at some point, the internet stopped being a specialised technology, and became instead a sort of cultural site. Somewhere where we enact not only socially empowering acts of technological engagement (social networking, blogging, uploading videos of ourselves, etc.) but also a place where we manage our life admin (pay bills, check our bank accounts, do our weekly shop, etc.).

each day shows us more and more that our private content belongs to them. But that just, very sadly, becomes a part of our media subjectivity when we agree to participate in using these tools. The symptoms of connectedness.

nw/ With specific reference to the discussion and criticism of

Marisa Olson/ I think we can walk this back a bit and look

contemporary artistic practices, however, it becomes slightly more contentious. How would you define, as the founder of this term, postinternet art? Is it simply any art made since this Web 2.0 era was inaugurated? Or is it art that somehow borrows an aesthetic that is some part of the internet?

at this discourse surrounding Networked Art. This was definitely an influence on what I first started calling art after the internet and then started calling postinternet art, to smoothen the mouthful. There was a turn, in this discourse and in the work it surrounded, from work that was strictly networked and/or strictly online to work that bore the signature of life in network culture. The symptoms of connectedness. I would liken the network to what psychoanalysts Laplanche and Pontalis called the phantasmatic, in this case, and the artwork produced as coming forth out of something like what Victor Burgin called the popular preconscious. That is, on some level, the audience for this work is always already familiar with the conditions of its production and receptionits (network-based) culture. In fact, in the 90s and early 2000s, there were a lot of critics and theorists who began to write about what Im calling the symptoms of connectedness, and in particular how it impacted political action and art practice. But that writing often uses the phrase network culture and its one Im a little wary of. Admittedly I use it at times to describe my specific mainstream online American culture, but otherwise network culture implies a global homogeny that I think is inappropriate. Nonetheless, I do think its time for people with an interest in the concept of postinternet to dig more deeply into the network-oriented roots and implications of the internet.

MO/ I have always preferred to use the un-hyphenated term, postinternet, just as I write postmodern, rather than postmodern. I dont see the post- as a kind of flag-pole jammed into the ground, with some angle to it; I see it as a gloss on the terrain thats already there. It goes back to the phrase I used to use, art after the internet, which I meant to refer to art that (a) couldnt/wouldnt exist before the internet (technologically, phenomenologically, existentially) and (b) was in the style of or under the influence of the internet in some way. So the answer is sort of both. Its art that embodies the conditions of life in network culture, art after the internet.
With early internet art, there was originally a (cyber)punk spirit or aesthetic to much of it, with many of the artists alienated from the (Western commercial) artworld and many having a DIY/hacker/cracker anti-materialist attitude. When people/ places started to collect there was a big debate over whether to take sites offline and whether they would still be internet art, if they went offline, if they sat on a pedestal, if they were burned to a CD, etc.. The nature of network conditions, artists individual attitudes towards them, everyday peoples attitudes towards them in different parts of the world, etc., keep changing, even after work is made. And of course works reflect these conditions differently to people with different experiences of network conditions across different times and spaces. Perhaps thats Relational Aesthetics 101. But I say that as a segue to saying that I brought up art after the internet at a moment when Web 2.0 was pretty nascent, in hindsight. And now that the Facebook Like icon is plastered all over food products and restaurant doors Id dare say its viability as a platform for public art is well-tested but experimentally tepid. Postinternet art is not specific to Web 2.0. I think the heyday of Web 2.0 has passed and postinternet art persists, but there are some notable shifts worth considering. The term Web 2.0 is an economic one, and frankly Ive never been able to say it without feeling dirty. I cut my teeth working to connect the dots between art and technology in the San Francisco Bay area during the dot-com era, yet Ive always felt a cringe of defensiveness when people ask me to talk about the economics of new media. But lets get real. During that time, the dot-com gold rush funnelled an infusion into arts funding in San Francisco and New York, and it dried up in the bust, along with the start-ups and several other speculative enterprises. In the golden years, a handful
Marisa Olson Time Capsules 2007ongoing, cassette tapes, gold spray paint, hair, asphalt, nail polish, latex, dimensions variable Courtesy the artist

examples in art history where artists have been similarly empowered by networks of correspondence, or networks of production. The mail art networks of the late 1960s and early 1970s is an interesting example. What I find most interesting about the comparison though is that mail artists were engaging with a technology that was already almost vintage, which seems kind of true of postinternet artists as well. Whereas, in the 90s, artists using the internet were kind of pioneering, postinternet artists are making art out of the internet no longer being a new technology, but becoming a standardised life-tool.

nw/ I agree, to an extent. There are some really interesting

of artists had a good run of it, despite cries of cliques and nepotism. (Those are always there, everywhere.) There were some key shows, catalogues, and biennials.... Ironically, if sadly, there were artists who, were they painters or sculptors with the same accolades on their CVs, would be raking in the dough, but Artforum profiles and Whitney Biennial inclusion parlayed into dust in the wind, post-boomtime. The hype picked-up again with Web 2.0 excitement and the phantom promise of the content that might pour forth from the fingers of the Superusers of User Generated Culture. Given the memetic nature of media, this became a too big to fail selffulfilling prophecy in some ways. The explosion of social media epitomised by Time magazine naming You person of the year in 2006, complete with a mirrorised computer monitor on their magazine cover also gave the artworld and those who critique, curate, and theorise its production a moment to reflect on the

tools and content behind the curtain, if not to grease the wheels. But I think that a natural cynicism has sunk in just as the novelty phenomenon has reached maximum inflation. We no longer need a moniker for this era, it just is. Think how superfluous and dorky it would sound to say Post-Web 2.0!

nw/ I am also very interested by what you say about the debates

MO/ As the internet has popularised, certainly in the

northern hemisphere, the semantics and aesthetic vocabularies may have shifted, but we are looking at the same idea. If the psychoanalytic model above doesnt suit you, recall Marshall McCluhans: All media are an extension of ourselves, down to our very bodies, and the content of every medium is more media. Dont get me wrong, from day one of the internet it belonged to the government and

surrounding whether or not websites and net art projects should come offline, and be put on a monitor, or on a pedestal or plinth. This was an area I was researching/thinking about a lot recently, and I fluctuate between being totally unconvinced that it (putting net art into galleries) has any merit at all, and thinking it is an interesting critical experiment to conduct. I saw Jon Rafmans new show at Seventeen gallery the other day, and he had some of the images from his 9-Eyes project, the photographs taken from sessions spent trawling Google Earth. Hed printed them on acetate, like negatives, and they were on display on these massive retro

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slide-viewers. The audience could sit down, like a detective in a retro film, in some library looking at archive images, and by moving the plate around and twiddling the knobs you could get a grainy, but in focus, black and white image on the screen in front of you. Knowing Rafmans practice, I am sure there is a level of introspection in the work, and that it is intended to reflect upon this issue, but I am just not sure how well these images function when taken out of context like that. If you were pinned down, what do you think about making net art, or works produced online, physical? Perhaps this is a large part of the remit of postinternet art? This is what a lot of the work I see as postinternet basically entails.

promoted by galleries and feels more familiar and approachable by traditional critics?), but I believe that postinternet art (work after the internet) happens online and offline. In either case, as media evolves, our desire to push their boundaries often evolve with them. Some of this is the result of a produced need on the part of manufacturers (cars go fast now, I need to be able to drive faster!), some of it is ennui or wanderlust, and some of it is a realisation that theres more to say and that it can be said in different ways. Colour me jaded, I can be skeptical of any kind of empowerment discourse, but I maintain that it is always a positive exercise to present the world around us in a new light. T ake your example of Rafman; I dont think that changing the context of an image is a bad thing because I dont see images as having a fixed before-and-after or one specific, righteous, untouchable place in time or space. Turning something on its head can never be a bad thing, and the world will always need artists to do it in whatever media is necessaryor in as many media as possible. As a professor, I believe that teaching art students to do this no matter what their future vocation may beteaches them empathy by teaching them open-mindedness for different perspectives. In fact, for this reason, it breaks my heart when students sometimes confess to me that they fear they are being selfish in learning or choosing to make art instead of doing something more productive. I think that the term postinternet art is admittedly markedin fact doubly markedby temporal terms. The post may make it sound as if it is on borrowed time, ticking into the eleventh hour of some experimental phase; and that phase itself, the precedent to which the post is wed is internet art, a form of practice that most of the mainstream artworld really hadnt had time to wrap its head around before being hit with another wave. (And I say another, because postinternet art is not a sign of the death of net art; net art is not dead.) I would hate for postinternet art to be taken as a gimmick by anyone within any station simply because, like so many technological developments of our period, its self-reflexive era was more rapid and less transparent.

MO/ I think this is the work that a lot of art, in various media across various epochs and stylistic genres or periods does. And I think that can be a very good aimpresenting the real world through a different lens, different eyes, a slightly different angle, however you want to put it. This has been done in painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, music, literature, poetics, philosophy, theatre, dance, cinema you name it. I do think that a line often gets drawn between the more mimetic and the less mimetic and that we often expect certain media to be more or less one or the other; particularly in certain social contextsi.e. when the work is a commissioned likeness or intended to be educational or journalistic, or escapist entertainment, or blue chip fine art, and of course we often impose those readings retroactively as well. (Which can be influenced by the absence of the objects historical subject for later comparison, or by times imposed decay.)
Time also seems to impose differing sets of audience expectations of mediawhich, again, we can only ever understand from our position as readers looking back. It seems to me that so many media, in their nascency as considered-media, were used selfreflexively. Artists and their audiences wanted them to be used in ways that underscored their specific properties and, in whatever self-congratulatory a sense, pointed back to the medium. I find this very evident in the trajectory of film and lens-based media that pushed toward the screen and up to computer animation and early net art. There we saw so much self-reflexivity as to code, protocol, applications, hacks. I would almost think of it like work happening inside the machine and inside the network. It would be a complete lie to say that there were not works at this time that were manifested in physical space, or that didnt think outside of this box, but the prevailing ethos was to stay plugged-in and to reflect on the network via some form of network connection.

nw/ Yes, so it becomes inherent that net artists and web practitioners produce networks, and their artworks are implicitly interconnected, almost in a performative waythis is what I mean. Given this performative, temporal element to lots of net art, gallerising it, or placing it in a white-cube freezes it, kills it.
Marisa Olson Noise Pollution, curated by Gene McHugh, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, installation view 2009 Courtesy the artist

MO/ I think that is the perspective of some people, but it is not my perspective. And in fact, most of the postinternet work that has gained popular attention is work that has been manifest physically offline (perhaps because it is more saleable and thus more heavily

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