Photography marks the emergence of digital art. The process of capturing the environment light, mixing the chemical solution, and developing images on light sensitive sheets escapes the execution of the artist's hand and adopts a mechanical vision that unbiasedly records the subject. From this point on, artists no longer need to "create" the subject from scratch but rather have the freedom to "select" the subject. The lack of artistic intention and craftsmanship (early negative development is regarded more as a technology than artistic skill) once denied photography access to the canon of art history in the 1990s.
In response to the debate of photography's status, Walter Benjamin, in his renowned article The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, reminds us that "earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question—whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art—was not raised." The way photography has changed art remains profound today. As it liberated artists from the precise representation of the subject, we see painters explore other forms of depiction, like abstract expressionism. Therefore, the development of painting and photography shall not be seen as an evolution but a parallel eclecticism, with each medium inspiring the other.
As image recording technology turns digital, the physicality of the "object" is diminished, replaced by a series of binary codes that are then translated and mediated by hardware configuration. Since the essential nature of the "object" is not more than a series of coded information, its representation transcends its presentation. In other words, we
care more about "what it can show" than "what it can be" in digital art. A digital image is also characterized by its reproducibility and circulation. I can't remember how many times I downloaded an image from the artist's website for an impulse to add it to my collection. Who can say that the file stored in my hard drive is less of an artistic work than the original one created by the artist?
The concept of art today is inherited from Duchamp's legacy and shaped by new technologies that revolutionized humanity. Even before the invention of the internet in 1989, the essence of art has been challenged with the absence of objecthood, authorship and originality. Now, anything can be art, and art can be anything, and the internet has enlarged that notion by expanding the reach of art and providing a new information milieu or a medium itself. Hence, art in the age of the internet has become a broad subject area to investigate. An encyclopedic survey could certainly include every artwork produced after 1989, by definition of "the age of the internet," but that will not help us get a deeper understanding of how the internet has influenced art making — not all artworks made after 1989 exemplify the special quality of art influenced by the internet. What characterizes art in the age of internet must associate itself with the question of whether the very invention of the internet has transformed the entire nature of art.
The answer to this question touches on the ontological definition of art, and any straightforward response might flatten the nuance of it. What is for sure here is that internet art is the direct product of this 20th-century scientific development. The existence of internet art, self-evidently, relies on the internet. In her book Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu, Ceci Moss thoroughly discusses the diverse definition of internet art. Despite the instability of the internet as a defining feature, there are roughly two interpretations of internet art. The first definition, formulated by Rachel Greene and Julian Stllabrass, signals artworks made online, including websites, email, online software, code, etc. The second definition champions a broader, more conceptual, and loosely defined understanding of internet art, proposed by theorists Josephine Bosma, Florian Cramer, and Sjoukje van der Meulen. They reject a strict binary between the medium and content. Internet art can be online or offline, or artwork that is based on the internet culture.
Then what about art in traditional mediums? (Although the concept of medium is increasingly challenged today, we rely on this literal convention to distinguish different kinds of artworks) The exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, attempts to answer the question of “how the internet has radically changed the field of art, especially in its production, distribution, and reception.” The show, divided into five themes of “Networks of Circulation”,“Hybrid Bodies”,“Virtual Worlds”,“States of Surveillance” and “Performing the Self”, implies that the internet has equally influenced all mediums by including a variety of mediums like painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects.
The first section Networks and Circulation presents a variable mixture of digital and not so-digital works. Nam June Paik's monumental Internet Dream presents his utopian vision of the Internet in 1994. The stacked televisions, each displaying a fractured video montage, are programmed together to achieve a complete view of the video with dreamlike and dazzling effects. Opposite to the Internet Dream is HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN's project thewayblackmachine.net, an online archive of activism around black embodiment. The artist collective uses an algorithm to draw images from the Internet of protests, arrests, memes, and social media posts, showing them in grids opposite / across from Internet Dream. Albeit the visual similarity in both works' grid structure, the two pieces signal a striking contrast in their perception of the Internet - While Internet Dream envisions uncanny and imaginative cyberspace at the birth of the Internet, 20 years later, thewayblackmachine.net has already disregarded this utopian vision and excavates the troubling reality on the Internet. Critic Brian Droitcour counters this curation logic for "the adjacency drained nuance from both while obscuring the specificity of the processes and the materials of each work. It reduced them to their form." While it is true that the visual cohesion most immediately connects the two works, we also see artists' shifting focus from the formal quality to the epistemological structure during the 40 years of development of the Internet.
Both Thomas Ruff's Nudes Lox22 and Seth Price's Still, Five Hooded Man with Seated Man call attention to the circulation of the image on the Internet. Ruff's black-and-white image is sourced from pornographic "thumbnail galleries" on the Internet, which he then enlarged and blurred, complicating the original pornographic quality. The poor image seems to echo Hito Steyerl's article In Defense of the Poor Image: "Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production." However, what distracts me is his choice of horizontal strokes in the blurring effect, which evokes Gerhard Richter. While Richter utilizes the blurring effect to convey the ambiguity between his memory and reality, Ruff's blurring procedure aestheticizes and recontextualizes the image from its pornographic interpretation. He does not address the issue of circulation. Why not exhibit Ruff's Jpegs series instead? The widely circulated pictures of September 11th terrorist attacks better exemplify Hito Steyerl's idea of how poor images operate against the fetish value of high resolution and gain value outside of the capitalist market. The pixelated effect also better visualizes the concept of circulation.
Seth Price's Still, Five Hooded Man with Seated Man appropriates a still from an online execution video, printed on mylar, which is compiled and pinned to the wall. The monochromic and pixelated silhouette and the wrinkle on the mylar make the image unreadable. The curator Eva Respini writes, "Price emphasizes the idea that distribution is never neutral, but rather destructive, blurred, disorderly, and slow." But how has this image been distributed across the network? Instead of tracing its online circulation, Price concocted a way of distribution with an online image as the raw material. Any other image could replace this without altering its expression, proving its faint relevance with the Internet.
In comparison, Image Atlas by Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz is a more exciting example of how artists excavate the protocol that forms the basis of the Internet. Through juxtaposing the image search results from different countries on google, whose search algorithm became a new semiotic system, Simon and Swartz presented sheer differences in how meaning is inculcated in each country. In contrast to Image Atlas' philosophy of revealing distinctiveness, 5,377,183 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr by Penelope Umbrico aims to show the universality of the vision through a typographic arrangement. Her poetic juxtaposition recalls Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs of the tranquil sea — their resemblance reminds us: aren't they essentially the same sea? Both artists testify to art historian David Joselit's idea of "formatting" and "epistemology of search." Interested in art's ability to produce new knowledge, Joselit stresses that the power of art lies in what it can do when it enters networked circulation. In his essay "Painting beside Itself," Joselit writes, "knowledge is produced by discovering and/or constructing meaningful patterns—formats—from vast reserves of raw data, though, for instance, the algorithms of search engines like Google or Yahoo." These artists unveil the intertwined relationship between the internet algorithms and contemporary visual language by presenting how the Internet configures data in multiple ways.
States of Surveillance narrates a contemporary lifestyle both benefited and troubled by technology. While the internet has expanded our reach to a broader world, it also imposes an undesirable burden on individualism. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Surface Tension is an interactive video displaying an eye that follows the audience. The eye
opens when the sensor detects the viewer entering the area in front of the screen and starts its surveillance, invoking the poster printed with the big brother in George Orwell's novel 1984: "It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move." Lozano-Hemmer draws inspiration from Georges Bataille's text The Solar Anus during the first Gulf War, in which camera-guided "intelligent bombs" are deployed. Aaajiao's Gfwlist visualizes the substantive length of the Great Fire Wall with a printed scroll, the metaphorical name of a list of banned websites in China. The disorganized print paper, with one end still hanging on the printer, forebodes the continuing growth of the list. Although the artist did not clearly state it, the work, created in 2010, can be interpreted as a comment on Google exiting China due to a dispute over government censorship. Artist collective Jodi's website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org consists of glitched webpages with no straightforward user interface and instruction. Audiences click on random patterns and are redirected to another webpage, wandering from one esoteric cyber maze to another. One of the programs, Goodtimes.exe, is a prankish webpage that contains disclaimer texts that warn visitors before they keep exploring the website unless they click ACCEPT. One disclaimer reads, "WARNING: USE OF THIS SYSTEM CONSTITUTES A CONSENT TO MONITORING AT ALL TIMES." While the website is a virus-free art site, it implies a precarious attitude for users wandering in the mysterious cyberspace where terrorists, criminals, and secret organizations lurk. Lozano-Hemmer, Aaajiao and Jodi present the internet not as a transcendence of reality, but a virtual space that is subject to the power structure based on reality.
The exhibition goes on to complicate the surveillance issue by expanding the surveillance actors. Rabih Mroué's The Fall of a Hair: Blow Ups implies that citizens can also become witnesses in the age of the smartphone and social media. Lynn Hershman Leeson's telerobotic dolls encourage audiences to control the webcam, albeit themselves under the gaze of public prying. Trevor Pagan's Autonomy Cube, is a part of a computer component that creates an open Wi-Fi hotspot and allows audiences to connect to the internet. The sculpture is operated on the Tor network, a volunteer-run global network that is designed to help anonymize data. In this way, Autonomy Cube creates a safe space where visitors temporarily eschew surveillance. While Lozano-Hemmer's big eye is the gun sight aimed at the foreign military from interventionist politicians in the U.S., Aaajiao's printed list acts as an elegy to the once accessible territory, now banned by Chinese state authority. In response, works by Mroué, Leeson, and Pagan suggest makeshifts to circumvent surveillance, which is a long-debated subject in modern society. Regarding the panopticon as the metaphor for society, Paul-Michel Foucault discussed how surveillance is deployed to exert power and control in his book Discipline and Punish, way before the internet was adopted as a tool of surveillance. To talk about how the internet enacted surveillance inevitably goes back to the question of how the internet reinforced or changed the existing power structure and how the internet interplays with it, which, unfortunately, is not discussed in-depth in this exhibition.
The paragraph The Virtual Worlds section aims to present how “artists explore the aesthetic possibilities of computer-generated spaces as sites of production and inquiry, even as they mark the increasing elision between the virtual and the real in everyday life.” However, the computer-generated aesthetic here is over-emphasized, and how the Internet informs their practice is downplayed. Artists Albert Oehlen and Avery Singer’s works present an interesting fusion of painting software aesthetics and autographic arrangements, but their connection with the Internet is farfetched. Jon Kessler’s Blade Runner-inspired installation Noriko could probably be created without the invention of the Internet. Harun Farocki’s work, Serious Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow is a thought-provoking piece that documents the game system that stimulates war scenes for soldiers who are preparing for the war and those who experience post-war trauma. While it highlights the increasing emergence between reality and digitally generated images, it questions the ironic fact that the therapeutic system does not generate shadows, offering less veracity than the training system. It also critiques how technologies neutralize the war and flattens the war experience as a series of user instructions on computers. However, once again, the curator mistakenly substitutes the concept of the Internet with the game or any digital technology that can generate an illusional space. In comparison, Hybrid Bodies did a better job in presenting the complex sociopolitical context of the work about corporeality. Kate Cooper’s Rigged and Judith Barry’s Imagination, dead image is equally unsettling on their representation of the human body and how they are disciplined under capitalism and modernity.
While the Internet is a technical configuration and protocol, it is also understood in a structural sense. Hito Steyerl considers the Internet as a pervasive networked logic. In her 2013 essay for the e-flux journal, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”, Steyerl writes, “The all-out internet condition is not an interface but an environment ... Computation and connectivity permeate matter and render it as raw material for algorithmic prediction, or potentially also as building blocks for alternate networks.” Artists Guthrie Lonergan and Marisa Olson also assert that internet art can stay offline as long as it addresses its transmission or the impacts of the Internet on culture at large. In his book The Radicant, critic Nicolas Bourriaud stresses that art today should create work attentive to the circulation and capture of information. These views do not consider internet art as something dependent on its technological nature but more on its ability to circulate on a networked system. Another defining feature of internet art, or art in the age of the Internet is its ability to generate interactivity with others. The user-generated content anthology digital folklore, created by Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied, and Manuel Buerger, exemplifies this idea of shared authorship. When enemies can be generated and manipulated to cater to the needs of soldiers, the war simulation becomes a closed system that eliminates the presence of others. The site-specific VR simulation View of Harbor by Jon Rafman follows the same logic — their aesthetics or verisimilitude are celebrated, but their circulation and connection with the Internet are negligible. Their interactivity is confined to the limit of human-machine relationships, like generative art or code art with a closed system, while internet art is about the interactivity of human-human relationships.
The disproportionately high number of female artists shown in Performing the Self recalls the female artists’ early exploration of video and internet art in forms of performance. Chris Meigh-Andrews, in his book History of Video Art, elaborated on how female artists experimented with the medium to challenge female representation in mass media and reclaim their narrative through performance. Their collective effort sought to probe into issues of representation, an essential plan in feminist theory during the 1970s, shifting video’s application from a medium-specific, modernist analysis to a post-modernist one that examines the dominant representation practices. Early development of net art follows a similar pattern, where “cyberfeminists of the nineties sought to achieve equal technological footing to their male programming counterparts by ideologically infiltrating communication networks with sexually charged dissent.” (Chan, 2011). Martine Neddam is one of cyberfeminist artists that performed as a thirteen-year-old girl on an interactive website mouchette.org to titillate the curiosities of pedophiles. There is a historical root of the interconnectivity between feminism and performance, which is sadly not elaborated in this section.
In the show, only artist collective DIS’s Watermarked does not address feminism explicitly. The work cringes and amuses audiences with scenes of three models shaking hands and embracing in a ridiculously formal manner, pinpointing the prevalence of corporate culture in mass media. Other works raise the question of female representation or experience in cyberspace. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #463, following her consistent consciousness of identity and performance, depicts four identical socialites gathering and seemingly taking a photo for social media. Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections counterfeits a stereotypical female influencer with a fantasy lifestyle. Performing on Instagram, she proves that social media veils more than it reveal. Frances Stark’s My Best Thing recapitulates her conversation with two Italian
men she met while trolling video sex sites with a code-free animation web tool Xtranormal. Celia Hempton’s genitals close-ups are painted based on scenes she encounters while browsing public online webcams. Juliana Huxtable’s untitled in the rage(Nibiru Cataclysm) manifests her body as a fluid medium of gender and ethnicity. Juxtaposed with Frank Benson’s life-size bronze sculpture (also available in a digital file) 3D-modeled base on her body, Juliana, untitled in the rage(Nibiru Cataclysm), further questions the materiality of identity.
In conclusion, Art In The Age Of The Internet, 1989 to today has included an expansive range of artworks that were created with the internet as a tool or medium, and those that respond to the internet culture. It succeeded in casting aside a rigid definition of “internet art” as a medium-specific universality and focusing more on the interchange between contingent objects and persistent themes. However, the curation team did not touch on the defining issue of how the internet changed the world in which artists live in, but rather skewed towards a digitally rendered aesthetic and a similarity of visual appearance and subject matter between different artworks. Indeed, the question of how the internet shapes art can essentially be answered with how the internet shapes humanity, and the evolution of internet art is itself a history of technological innovation and a reflection of our transforming / evolving relationship with the internet. The discussion of internet art should always orient itself on the ground of reality and associate itself with current day politics, otherwise it risks relevance.