Cover Image: Kate Geck, rlx:tech – digital spa, 2020. Source: http://www.rlxtech.co/.

Introduction

This is part two of a two-part series about the net art network. The first part covered its beginnings and ideological basis. This post will look at how net art has evolved and the present landscape, drawing on new media theories and current artists’ exhibitions.

The Old Model: Connections to Photography

There was a time before the internet when physical images—photographs—revolutionized the conditions of our global social network. The aim of net artists—to challenge and reimagine the conditions of the internet—shares practical and theoretical questions with the discussion of photography, as far back as Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written by Walter Benjamin in 1936. A seminal work to understanding this framework of new media evolution, from photography to digital networks, is “In Defense of the Poor Image” written by Hito Stereyl in 2009. In attempt to provide some basis for understanding net art as a reflection and contribution to critical studies of photography and media more broadly, this article will look at the philosophical foundations of the net art movement.

In 2009, Stereyl wrote about how the mass circulation of low-resolution images across the web shaped the reality of human networked existence. In 2020, the University of Buffalo’s art gallery published a pamphlet, “Thinking Through Photographs: a resource binder of questions and thinking tools.” “In Defense of the Poor Image” is the first essay featured in the text, setting the stage for the way images can be understood in the current age.

Hito Stereyl is well-grounded in the net art movement, a participant in the exhibition I Was Raised on the Internet as well as Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI. The connection to photography, which this post makes, is one tangential to the large network of thought that Stereyl belongs to. In a 2017 interview, Stereyl touched on the subject of the poor image, referencing that it’s no longer a topic that interests her—expressing that the way the internet has developed as a system of surveillance and controls debilitates the hope that Stereyl once saw in the concept of the poor image. She communicated this in a 2017 interview with The Brooklyn Rail:

Rail: I often think about aesthetics of failures, such as glitches or low-res images. You’re also interested in glitches, spams, bad images or disconnection. They’re disruptive in their own way for crashing our desire to have everything run smoothly. We are upset when the images are low-resolution or the internet is all of a sudden disconnected. What do you think about these moments of helplessness, especially as someone who makes art using these flawed mediums?

Stereyl: 12 or 15 years ago, I thought there would be some kind of redemption or at least pleasure in dealing with these materials. But, I think the overall situation with the internet has changed to a point where basically everything can be weaponized immediately, so I think that the innocence of the glitch and the imperfect image is very much lost at this point. I am no longer working with this material.

“In Defense of the Poor Image” remains relevant to photographic discourse due to the implicit connections it makes to earlier theorists of photography, particularly Susan Sontag. The reason that the poor image is relevant to photographers and no longer relevant to net artists is simply that the discipline of net art is a holistic cultural critique; the internet is indelibly an acute part of human cultural experience. Though this was at one point true in reference to images, images today are simply a single node in the larger network of the internet.

In other words, the “poor image” can be understood as symptom of the age of networks. When beginning this research, I was focused a particular type of node that this ecosystem has produced. Further exploration of new media artists has illuminated that the poor image is a product of the digital age and that the real discussion lies in what network the poor image belongs to—that network being the internet.

The Present

With that context in mind, who are the net artists of today? Museums internationally have recently displayed exhibitions centered on the topic of net art, some in the form of surveys featuring work from the last twenty years, others focused on specific areas of the internet and the new technologies on the internet that inform our experiences. These exhibitions take form in both web-based and in-person content, often combining the two. This post will examine the work of artists featured in four major exhibitions that have all taken place within the last two years.

Exhibition essays, online portions of the exhibitions, and documentation of work that is no longer up can all be found on the web. If you are interested in the work discussed below, I highly recommend examining the exhibition content followed in these links. The first exhibit, I Was Raised on the Internet, took place in 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. A portion of the exhibit still remains online, and you can explore it for yourself here. The second exhibit, The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, took place in 2019 at the New Museum in New York, presented by Rhizome. The third exhibit, Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, is currently on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The fourth and final exhibit, Conflict in My Outlook, is currently exclusively online and can be viewed here. An in-person portion of Conflict in My Outlook will open in summer 2021 at the University of Queensland Art Museum in Australia. Both I Was Raised on the Internet and The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics attempt to provide some survey of net art through ages. On the other hand, Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI focuses specifically on the discussion of artificial intelligence by net artists, while Conflict in My Outlook focuses on the social and cultural effects of the internet, partially in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

1. I Was Raised On The Internet (2018)

In 2018, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago exhibited a survey of net art, called I Was Raised On The Internet. The collection included almost 100 works, spanning from 1998 to present day. In this exhibition, ways in which our culture has developed and morphed in the lifetime of the internet is illustrated by artists from a wide range of ages and nationalities.

2. The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics (2019)

“The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics” features sixteen works from throughout net art history, showcasing a wide range of forms—websites, software, sculpture, graphics, books, and merchandise—while offering a space for considering the internet as a social process, material infrastructure, and lived experience. The works on view have been selected from Net Art Anthology, Rhizome’s major online exhibition featuring one hundred works that sketch a possible canon for net art. Presented online at anthology.rhizome.org, Net Art Anthology represents a major archival effort, leveraging Rhizome’s unique expertise in the history of network culture and the display and preservation of born-digital artworks. Open-ended, performative, and ephemeral, artworks that circulate on and respond to the internet often survive only as fragments and traces, offering glimpses of a larger networked context that can never be fully grasped.

3. Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI (2020)

The Uncanny Valley exhibitions focuses specifically on the human-machine relationship, which is being deepened with the expansion of AI. The name of the exhibition—uncanny valley—comes from a metaphor introduced by a Japanese robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, in 1970 to reference the “comfort-discomfort” spectrum that humans have with robots based on their human resemblance.

Hito Steyerl and Martine Syms both have works in the exhibition:

Hito Steyerl’s video installation addresses applications of AI that reinforce social and economic inequality and the potential counterforce offered by communal and artistic acts of resistance. Martine Syms’s interactive, video-based work presents an avatar of the artist named Teeny, which viewers can communicate with via text message. Teeny’s assertiveness and self-absorption position her as an “anti-Siri,” says Syms, and upend the expectation of gendered obedience perpetuated by AI-based assistants.

4. Conflict in my Outlook (2020-2022)

Relevant to the theme of net art culture, Conflict in My Outlook gets its name from a “retro” computer technology, referencing an error message of the software Microsoft Outlook.

The University of Queensland Art Museum describes the exhibition in the following way:

Conflict in My Outlook investigates the way the Internet mediates and shapes social relations and ideas. It highlights the erosion of boundaries between online and offline, public and private. It foregrounds the Internet as a source of both human connection and societal division, illuminating the precarious nature of reality in an era of fake news, post-truth politics, and echo chambers of disinformation.

Departing from the utopian ideals of early Internet culture to its current dystopian realities, Conflict in My Outlook examines the power dynamics embedded into the networked technologies we use every day. It asks: what will become of our privacy in the context of data mining, Artificial Intelligence and weapons-grade surveillance capitalism? Are data rights human rights? Is there an alternative network?

According to Zach Blas:

The exhibition title refers to the sense of cognitive dissonance that underpins our relationships with new, networked technologies, and the deeply polarizing realities they reproduce in our heavily mediated lives between online and offline, public and private, social connection and division, information and misinformation, privacy and surveillance, human and machine, and so on.

Current Artist: Zach Blas

Zach Blas, Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism)

For the online exhibit Conflict in my Outlook, in the piece Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism), Zach Blas simply illustrates how net art can be understood as a direct translation of anti-capitalist theory. The art piece is a four-minute screen recording of a computer desktop. Blas, invisible to viewer, animates the scene—opening PDFs, copying and pasting content into a text editor document that he uses later to replace key terms with new ones. This act of documenting a human-computer interaction is a performance in which the performer remains obscured from the viewer. The text document created, in the end titled, “Utopian Plagiarism,” begins as a miscellanea of excerpts. Some of the texts gathered include: Manifesto Contrasexual by Beatriz Preciado; “Our Weapon” by Mexican insurgent Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, published under the name Subcomandante Marco; and The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 by Fredric Jameson. Across this spectrum of radical leftist theory is a rejection of the capitalist economy from queer, Indigenous, and feminist perspectives. Using the “find and replace” function on the text editor, Blas begins to use the language of these theorists to critique the internet, instead of capitalism. “Capitalism” is replaced with “internet,” “economy” and “world” are replaced with “network.” “Anti” and “non” are replaced with “contra,” thus producing the recurring use of the piece’s title, “contra-internet.” At the moment in which the piece achieves in giving the viewer some understanding of the term “contra-internet,” it simultaneously completes a degradation of the net art. This degradation points to a state of absurdity, hypocrisy, and absence of authenticity in the age of the internet. Recursively addressing this politic of the web, Blas both demonstrates and defines this idea.

In the 2017 article, “Simulated Subjects: Glass Bead in Conversation with Ian Cheng and Hito Steyerl,” a central question is raised, one relevant to the new age performance piece by Blas: “Where does the political subject reside today and how can it be apprehended through the very technologies from which it is produced?” This question and the discussion following are directly applicable to the piece Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1: Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism) by Zach Blas. Glass Bead makes the claim that “Cinema can be said to have been one of the dominant artifactual vectors in the construction of the political subjects of the last century.” Following some elaboration on this concept, a question is posed to Stereyl and Cheng in regard to the state of the political subject in within cinema, as cinema (in the work of Stereyl and Cheng) has mutated to engage with artificial intelligence systems. Though Blas’ work is focused on computer intelligence systems, the insight Stereyl provides regarding the political subject of self in the age of virtual realities (VR) is germane to Blas. According to Stereyl, rhetoric of technological advancement in the ‘90s claimed that the internet would serve as a great social and political equalizer, abolishing racial and gender inequality. To quote Stereyl directly, “One could just exchange the term VR with internet, and one would have a perfect carbon copy of ‘90s tech rhetoric.” The point Stereyl makes here is the same point which Blas illustrates by taking radical leftist critiques theory and replacing the term “capitalism” with the word “internet.” Blas also similarly alludes to ‘90s era thought with the song “Get Off the Internet” by Riot Grrl band Le Tigre playing in the work’s background. Of course, Blas is referencing ideas of ‘90s counterculture; Stereyl is referencing ideas of the mainstream cult of the technology.

The relevance of Stereyl’s comments goes beyond these rhetorical similarities. In discussion of the political subject as singular, in isolation, and “at the center, yet inexistent” mirror the relationship shared by the performer and viewer in Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1. In the passage below, Stereyl outlines this theory of the political subject in the age of VR:

The subject that VR technology in its present state creates is a singular one in many ways. Firstly, it moves within a personalized sphere/horizon defined by panoramic immersive technologies. The subject is centered, and it cannot share this specific point of view. This affects any concept of a shared public sphere, just like the idea of sharing as such (sharing now means expropriation by capture platforms) and definitely of public as such. This kind of public is at least right now staunchly proprietary. Secondly, the subject in VR is at the center, yet inexistent, which creates intractable anxieties about identity. These are not new—remember Descartes’ panic looking out the window not knowing whether the passersby downstairs might be robots hiding under hats—but updated. Thirdly, the sphere around the subject is personalized and customized by continued data mining including location, position, and gaze analysis. This is not to exaggerate the surveillance performed by VR, which is very average and more or less the same as with other digital capture platforms—just to say that this personalization might create an aesthetics of isolation in the medium term, a visual filter bubble, so to speak. In some ways, this visual format radicalizes the dispersion of public and audience that already occurred in the shift from cinema to gallery, but still, the gallery was at least physically a shared space. Now it is more like everyone has their own corporate proprietary gallery around their heads.

As discussed above, Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #1, despite its purposely haphazard nature, does an excellent job communicating the perspectives of net artists today. Once a place of utopian possibility, artists like Blas see the internet as a root cause of today’s social, political, and economic inequalities. The cultural critique of the internet, the use of a computer desktop as the scene, and the obfuscation of the subject are all relevant aspects of understanding net art in current context.

Unlinked Resources

Stereyl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” E-flux, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

Stereyl, Hito. “Hito Stereyl with Osman Can Yerebakan.” Interview by Osman Can Yerebakan. Art: In Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, July 2019.

Stereyl, Hito and Ian Cheng. “Simulated Subjects: Glass Bead in conversation with Ian Cheng and Hito Stereyl.” Glass Bead, 2017. http://www.glass-bead.org/article/simulated-subjects/?lang=enview.

Park, Liz. Thinking through photographs. University at Buffalo Art Galleries, 2020. http://ubartgalleries.buffalo.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/53/2020/06/200605_TTP_DD_Online_Final41.pdf.