How the internet shape art is less of an answer to the problem of how the internet shaped humanity. The evolution of internet art is itself a history of technological innovation and a reflection of our changing relationship with the internet. In the early ages, since the invention of the internet, artists explored the medium's potential to virtually communicate with each other, signified with online discussion forums such as the mailing list nettime (1995) and the BBS service THE THING (1991). Another defining feature of internet art is its ability to construct a nonlinear narrative through a "collaged" combination of image, video, text, audio, and other mediums, which can be exemplified by artist Oila Lialina's web-based work My boyfriend come back from the war. 

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While early internet artists actively experimented this medium and make use of its various functionalities, now that internet has become the basic infrastructure of the digital world we inhabit, its "networked logic" has in turn, become internalized in artists' creative practice. Echoing Lev Manovich's Software Takes Command, in which he examines software's effect on culture, I believe the internet, similarly, is no longer a neutral tool but an artificial environment in which artistic ideas are conceptualized. Like Yves Klein's work Le Vide, created out of a consciousness of the "White Cube" that contextualizes the artwork, internet artists now create artworks that are "native" to the internet or that even refer to the medium itself. The exhibition Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving at MoMA presents artist Kahlil Robert Irving's work in collaged wallpaper composed of screenshots from his phone and computer, memes, Emojis, Facebook posts, and QR codes that redirect clickers to the playlist of Bound 2 by Kanye West and the website of past exhibition Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft. Although this work lives in the physical space, Irving intentionally created the connection between reality and the internet with internet-originated visual language and assumed audience behavior (take out their phones and scan the QR code). 

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Although many theorists reject the binary understanding of content and structure, we see artists' shifting focus from the former to the latter. Like what David Joselit terms "formatting" and "Epistemology of search," artists started to excavate the protocol that forms the basis of the internet, and the most frequently visited subject is Google, whose search algorithm became a new semiotic system. Artist Taryn Simon and computer programmer Aaron Swartz's work Image Atlas juxtaposes the search result of images on google from different countries under the same research keyword, presenting sheer differences in how meaning is inculcated in each country. 

On top of that, I also see a more personal and communal approach to the networked nature of internet art: its relational imagination. Nicholas Bourriad, in his book Relational Aesthetics, touched on the power of art to tighten the space of relations through dialogues and "produce a specific sociability." Although he didn't elaborate on internet art, the theoretical framework could be well applied to internet art that focused on audience participation and communal activities. Such example can be seen at Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson's collaborative art project, Moon, is a globally accessible website on which visitors can doodle on the surface of 3D rendered moon. Bourriad also stresses that "relational arts" are confrontational yet complementary towards the present social structure. On other words, relational arts reimagine a societal order beyond the everyday life (which is structured around some recurring situations like workplace, family, classroom, etc.) The poetic Moon project ephemerally created such order, far away from the earth and the anthropocentric space. 

 

Internet, however, does not always cast a utopian vision. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Expulsion of the Other, points out how digital media erases the existence of the other through eliminating the nuance of impersonal communication (eye contact, voice…), resulting in a narcissistic self perception. It'd be interesting to see how artists address this complicated relationship between users and internet. It's time to move away from the celebratory or exotic view of internet as a medium or epistemological subject in artmaking. Curators now should address how the internet has shaped the humanity with a sense of mutual impact, and present the various ways in which artists observe and intervene in this issue.