We all know that one of the main characteristics of digital technology is that it changes at a breakneck speed. Remember floppy disks, God forbid? Remember CD-ROM, DVDs and all other things that were the essence of the digital world at one moment, and then, at another, they have become completely obsolete. This also could be applied, at least partially, to the so-called net.art.

Net Art - The Movement and The Impact

One winter evening in early 2014, I was at dinner in the East Village with the owner of a blue-chip London gallery, some museum curators, and a well-known video artist. The subject of conversation eventually came around to the ever- loved communal activity of the therapeutic post-Internet art bashing. “Who coined that word, anyway?” a curator asked. “Who knows,” the dealer said, “but whoever did should be shot.” I then announced the title of my upcoming exhibition, “Art Post-Internet,” and was awarded apologetic looks. It was an awkward dinner.

Art Post-Internet: End Note

It was the year that Post-Internet Art ‘finally cracked the market’. In 2014, a conversation that had been bubbling away for years between a small circle of international artists and critics became the latest trending aesthetic to flood into the mainstream. What ‘Post-Internet’ actually means is anyone’s guess (and everyone’s tried), but from the Zabludowicz in London to the Ullens in Beijing, it was here, there and everywhere. To paraphrase Hito Steyerl: the Post-Internet walked off-screen and straight into the white cube.

Post-Internet Art: You’ll Know It
When You See It

Is the internet dead? This is not a metaphorical question. It does not suggest that the internet is dysfunctional, useless or out of fashion. It asks what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility. The question is very literally whether it is dead, how it died and whether anyone killed it.

Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?

Proliferations of discourses that are decidedly ‘post-’ inundate artistic and intellectual life today: a post-Fordist mode of production gives way to post-politics and post-capitalism, which is accompanied by a post-media, post-digital, post-internet landscape populated by post-identitarian post- humans that are post-feminist, post-race, and post-queer. It is an era that, easily enough, has been summed up as post-contemporary, and not so long ago, postmodern. Such a postal deluge encourages the question: what is this prefix that stretches across the world to account for myriad global conditions? If ‘post-’ is commonly used to signal an ‘after’, then what does its excessive use convey about the historical present? Are we ‘after’ everything, supplanted in endless, elusive passings, a never-ending fractal vortex, where post-isms spin past all horizons to infinity?

Contra-Internet Aesthetics