art and the internet interviews pgs 184-199

8/12/2019 Art And The Internet Interviews Pgs 184-199

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in conversation with. ..

186 / Attla Fatto Fa190 / LPDF194 / Ea ad Fao Matte196 / Maa Olo

RePrinted Essays and Manifestos

201 / ThE hAckEr MAniFEsTO (1986)+++Te Meto+++

202 / A DEcLArATiOn OF ThE inDEPEnDEncE OF cybEr Jo Pe balo203 / DEskTOP is (1998) Alexe sl203 / inTrODucTiOn TO nET.ArT (MArchAPriL, 1999 natale boo, Alexe sl

204 / A FEw Things i knOw AbOuT nEEn (20002006) Mlto Maeta205 / DisPErsiOn (2002) set Pe210 / FLAT AgAinsT ThE wALL (2007) Ola Lala212 / MEDiA ArT 2.0 (MAniFEsTO) (2009) Ata cee, roma Mae, Alexe sl212 / POsTinTErnET: ArT AFTEr ThE inTErnET (2011 Maa Olo216 / wE, ThE wEb kiDs (2012) Pot cze, talated Mata szede

218/ chronology220/ SELECTED Bibliography222/ contributor biographies223/ acknowledgements


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hacking culture, taking down the website of the institution with

chaotic and clashing artworkspretty exciting to be a part of.

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

calledIL 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, ghting crime with the help of an advanced, articially

intelligent car. Each project engages dierently with the identity

of the hosting website whilst relating itself to specic physical

events or exhibitions. Every takeover has a dierent focus and

we increasingly invite artists to work under strict parameters.

We nd 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 dierent parts but we havealso made works asking for specic 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 Ha

In the lead up to Perrys perform

of the project, bubblebyte.org audio works by participants and

then formed the basis for artists

generate a range of new artwor

existing fabric of the Create Lon

host for a new lm by Hannah Per

Another example is the new Il

partnership for the Art Licks We

respond to a fixed set of inputs

selected produced a moving ima

few days to the Art Licks Weeken

much larger, collaborative work in

NW/At first the website takeov

limited format, but you keep rei

results in a sort of group show

takeovers were about a sort of s

an institutional site, these newe

school in a way, a sort of collabo

art, especially the aesthetic. Il

glitch in terms of aesthetics.

AFF/Its a format with endless

very easy and aordable to comm

Vecchio invites eight artists sh

ArT AnD ThE inTErnET

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).

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 froma dierent 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 massication of the internet and the

transition of the idea of digital artist from specialist to newcomer.

The proliferation of the internet and the diusion 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 rst 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 toreduce these binary positions and overlap elements, confusing

the viewer and the system.

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 prolic.

AFF/Yes, I denitely 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 dierent 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 inuenced it. The capacity to engage with digital artworks

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 dierent 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 denitely irts 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.

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

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 wasimportant to early, 90s net artists, but also with more recent

iterations of protest language, with Occupy, etc.. 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

Danzawas 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 c oding

(html+css) by Paul Flannery, dancing backgrounds by Rhys

Coren, looped sound les by Oliver Sutherland and a special

spinning globe navigation bar image (.ico) by Laurel Schwulst.

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

/ ATTiLiA FATTOri FrAnchini

cmea QtE saa ew

2013, ce Pjes, ld

cesy Aa Fa Fa


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188


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 gures 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.

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....

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 reecting 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 totallysuperuous, 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, modies

itself into an object so as to enter the white cube. I nd 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 reection and evolution.

What I nd surprising is how more and more digital aesthetics are

present in more ne 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 notstrictly looking at the internet as a subject or using the internet as

a medium of expression but they are somehow inuenced by it.

It is a very subtle turn but there are certain characteristics of web

editing such as velocity, cropping, merging, colour gradients,

patterning, repetition and cut and paste techniques that are

becoming part of more ne 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 dierent directions are what interest me.

NW/I think it is this duality itself, and this translation from onecontext to another, that comprises a large part of what people

refer to as postinternet art, not so much concerned with theinternet 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 inuence 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/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 rst portable video cameras became

aordable 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

reect on contemporaneity, and if contemporaneity is aected by

the digital revolution then artists represent this change within

their work.

In my vision of the future, we will be hyper-internet and meta-

materialist, using technological tools, cables and devices asobjects 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 rst 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 reecting 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.

Ji

2

c


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190

piece is in the same way that we can question the dierence

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 sele

and the artists Instagram sele. I mean whether you think theres

any value to the satire is a dierent 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.

JE/I prefer not to look at art like that; this implies a cynicism inartistic 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 language

within which they exist. To me the

the artistic community as a hiera

the level of self-awareness withi

is pretentious and out of touch. I

critique in using popular culture

generally I think that Id prefer art

wider culture and adopting its mo

they are able to reach an audience

Also with mass-participation in c

Instagram, Snapchat, etc., there

needs an art education, and its n

the self-irony in all of these sele

or otherwise, just participating expression as our peers so that we

communicate, be it with other ar

etc.. So I think that if we understa

counterpart gallery practice or ar

S f Gba A

2012, pma de

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Lucky PDF are John Hill (JH), Yuri Pattison (YP),

James Early (JE) and Ollie Hogan (OH)

Nick warner/In her 2012 essay forArtforum, 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 ourincreased interaction with archival technologies on a daily basis?

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 rst 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.

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 waysthat our biological brain records memories. For this reason I feel

that the presentation of the archive in art has changed. It is no

longer xed, 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 nally reply to that

unread message), and the past itself tends to look very dierent

(new majority shareholders, revamped user interface designs).

For this reason I feel many artists are participating in very live

and ephemeralpractices as the archival element is simply

a given in their day-to-day, tapping into whats recorded in

the network oers access to these memories, but equally in

the creation of the work there is a concern for the archive.

The concern is perhaps more a bout negotiating the ne twork

effectivelygenerating content that will get widely and

eectively circulated organically (only the best memes survive,

the best memes are created to be immediate and disposable).

But this is all very broadly speaking.

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,

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 everythinginto 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

seles and artists taking Instagram seles. The danger is that

we just stick the word critical in front of stu and hope no one

notices that its not really any dierent 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 ction? 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-reexive 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 lm,

to watch or to remix, Im committing a crime. Every time my

girlfriend stays over or I go on holiday I commit benet 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 inan exhibition, when I put on a lm 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 unlmed, 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.)

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

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-reexive YouTube

/ LuckyPDF


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PDF S/S 2013

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then we shut ourselves o 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!

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

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 artice and reality, sincerity

and irony....

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

fashion and certainly not lampoon it. Fashion is itself a highly self-

aware and acutely managed brand, many people are employed in

the furtherance of its importance and monitoring its social position

specically 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 c ompletely 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 dierent 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, rst impressions are lasting and I like the idea

that if you arent versed in arts lexicon you could still access ourwork. There is no right way to make art or fashion and no right

context to see or understand it.

NW/So weve established that there are multiple entry points, to

your work specically, 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 postinternetculture. As postinternetremoved the esotericism from the internet, and with Web 2.0 and

what have you, this kind of specialised eld 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 reect

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 dierent elementsbecome completely homogenised?

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

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

to be shorter and shorterbut I still think there is room for a type

of avant-garde without things becoming c ompletely homogenised.

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 ltered and algorithmic governed

access to information will play outat the moment it feels like

any digital aspirations to utopia are under constant attack.


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194

see the dierence between our virtual and real selves. Each

person is a complex mix of dierent, 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 dierent than banks, schools, golf clubs or churches.

NW/I think I read it as more postmodern; perhaps the point isthat 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 letext, video, image,

songis a piece of code written o

Virginia suburbs, its there as m

library. The fact that youve neve

you dont even know where the

virtual book. So rather than virt

reality of the virtual.

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Nick Warner/What I nd 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 rst is this notion that web-based art practices are a sort of

threat to the art market,in that they sort of defy commodicationin their multiplicity, often universal availability and ethereality.

Do you think this makes a sort of capitalist critique inherent to all

art aliated with the internet in subject or materiality?

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.

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

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 dicult to buy or sell, and very dicult 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 innitely 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 denitively 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/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 nd 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/So its about your choice of audience, and whether you

choose to make work which ts with whatever the current

model of salability is, or whether you choose to make workwhich doesnt have this sort of value ascribed to it?

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

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

for example, never broke any record, despite him being arguably

the most inuential 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?

E&FM/Showing a work in a museum is denitely dierent than

showing it online, neither better or worse, just dierent, 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 thatsort of interactivity, moving content around and engaging only

with the best bits. I snt it a more severe misrepresentation of

a work, though, if a work such as your Hybrids,or your spoofwebsite Vaticano.org were to be shown in a gallery space, as

part of a group show or something similar?

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 t somebodys expectations, be it a

museum, a gallery or even an online community.

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

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 ne 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 virtualpersonas/lives?

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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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, butArtforumproles

and Whitney Biennial inclusion parlayed into dust in the wind,

post-boomtime.

The hype pic ked-up again w ith Web 2.0 excite ment and the

phantom promise of the content that might pour forth from the

ngers of the Superusers of User Generated Culture. Given the

memetic nature of media, this became a too big to fail self-

fullling prophecy in some ways. The explosion of social mediaepitomised by Timemagazine 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 reect on the

tools and content behind the curta

But I think that a natural cynicism

phenomenon has reached maxi

need a moniker for this era, it jus

dorky it would sound to say Post

nw/ I am also very interested by

surrounding whether or not websit

come oine, and be put on a mo

This was an area I was researchin

and I uctuate between being tota

net art into galleries) has any me

interesting critical experiment to cshow at Seventeen gallery the oth

images from his 9-Eyesproject, the

spent trawling Google Earth. Hed

negatives, and they were on dis

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nick warner/The term postinternet can be useful in talking

broadly about the new signicance 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.).

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

at this discourse surrounding Networked Art. This was denitely

an inuence on what I rst 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 specic 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.

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

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 nd 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.

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 suityou, 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

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 specic reference to the discussion and criticism of

contemporary artistic practices, however, it becomes slightly

more contentious. How would you dene, 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?

MO/ I have always preferred to use the un-hyphenated term,

postinternet, just as I write postmodern, rather than post-

modern. I dont see the post- as a kind of ag-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 inuence 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 oine and whether they would still be internet

art, if they went oine, 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

dierent parts of the world, etc., keep changing, even after work

is made. And of course works reect these conditions dierently

to people with dierent experiences of network conditions across

dierent 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 specic 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. Butlets 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


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slide-viewers. The audience could sit down, like a detective in

a retro lm, 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

reect 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.

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 dierent lens, dierent eyes, a slightly dierent 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 ne art, and of course we often impose those readings

retroactively as well. (Which can be inuenced by the absence

of the objects historical subject for later comparison, or by

times imposed decay.)

Time also seems to impose diering sets of audience expectations

of mediawhich, again, we can only ever understand from ourposition as readers looking back. It seems to me that so many

media, in their nascency as considered-media, were used self-

reexively. Artists and their audiences wanted them to be used in

ways that underscored their specic properties and, in whatever

self-congratulatory a sense, pointed back to the medium. I nd

this very evident in the trajectory of lm and lens-based media

that pushed toward the screen and up to computer animation and

early net art. There we saw so much self-reexivity 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

reect on the network via some form of network connection.

nw/ Yes, so it becomes inherent tha t net artists and we b

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.

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

oine (perhaps because it is more saleable and thus more heavily

promoted by galleries and feels mo

by traditional critics?), but I believ

after the internet) happens online

In either case, as media evolves

boundaries often evolve with them

of a produced need on the part

fast now, I need to be able to drive

or wanderlust, and some of it is

more to say and that it can be sa

me jaded, I can be skeptical of a

discourse, but I maintain that it

to present the world around us in a

of Rafman; I dont think that chan

is a bad thing because I dont se

before-and-after or one specic, r

in time or space. Turning somethi

a bad thing, and the world will a

whatever media is necessaryor i

As a professor, I believe that teac

no matter what their future voca

empathy by teaching them ope

perspectives. In fact, for this reas

students sometimes confess to m

selsh in learning or choosing t

something more productive.

I think that the term postinternet

fact doubly markedby tempora

it sound as if it is on borrowed ti

hour of some experimental phaprecedent to which the post is

of practice that most of the m

hadnt had time to wrap its head

another wave. (And I say another

not a sign of the death of net art

hate for postinternet art to be ta

within any station simply becaus

developments of our period, its sel

and less transparent.


Maa Olonse P, aed by Gee Mhg, Bad cee

f caa Sdes, saa ew

2009

cesy e as

art and the internet interviews pgs 184-199

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