Hi all,
I am teaching my internet art studio course this semester ( http://lab404.com/330 ). I have taught this course on and off since 2002. Every semester I delete some old examples and add some new examples and categories. It is not really like a canon, because it's not an art history course. It's a studio course, so all of the examples are just meant to goad students toward making their own internet art, art that I would want to spend my time grading. Which is a curious criteria that leads me into a strange taxonomy that causes me to think about things I might not otherwise be thinking about.
A year or two ago, I (grudgingly) added a "post-internet" section, and this semester I am (speculatively) adding an "alternate reality (online/offline) narrative" section. In trying to decide which examples to put in which categories, it occurred to me that they are both fairly similar, with an important distinction. The post-internet stuff almost always winds up in a gallery as a sculpture (installation, or whatever) or an image (print, video, or whatever). Whereas internet art (pre-post-internet) was always already doing much more than sculpture or image alone could ever do. In this sense, "post-internet" art is a bit like putting a bunch of fish in an aquarium and calling it "post-ocean." Sure, the porting of the art is somewhat tricky and kind of interesting curatorially and as an archivist or gallerist. Just as it's probably a somewhat interesting challenge to a marine biologist figuring out how to set up a salt water fish tank. But much more radical (always already) would be figuring out how to build Atlantis out in the ocean (cf: http://worldofawe.net [or heck, even http://superbad.com , or better yet, http://panthermodern.org ] ); and even more radical (and present-tense relevant) would be figuring out how to turn Brooklyn into the Great Barrier Reef (something heretofore unseen). How to get network-styled/inflected/flavored relations + becomings IRL (in ways that don't immediately get shunted straight into corporate-social-media capitalist recapture apparatuses)?
Alternate Reality Narratives are more like turning Brooklyn into the great barrier reef. Because a lot of the most interesting things happening in (pre-post-internet-art) internet art were more akin to experimental literature, concrete poetry, amorphous-identity communal selfing -- all things more related to literature and performance than sculpture and painting. Noteworthy examples I added to the alternate reality section of my curriculum start with something as simple/minimal (and brilliant) as Nikola Tosic's "meet in a nice restaurant" ( http://www.meet-in-a-nice-restaurant.org ) -- basically all the post-panel fun and relating that happens in the evenings at a new media conference, but without the conference. Then into something more evolved like Agelo Plessas's "The Eternal Internet Brotherhood/Sisterhood" ( http://eternalinternetbrotherhood.com/ ). I even included the unapolagetically seapunkish fashion collections of nixi killick ( http://nixikillick.com/k--w--%C3%A3---z--%C3%A4--r--aw14.php || http://nixikillick.com/meta-flora-ss14.php ), because they suggest a fashion-mythological means of porting fluid net-identity into an offline club persona (or at least they suggest that in their online branding instantiations!). Even some of the "closing night" performance events and/or artist-curated mini-shows at Kelani Nichole's wonderful TRANSFER gallery come closer to building-the-great-barrier-reef-in-brooklyn than do the actual objects/images (aka post-ocean-aquariums) which comprise the month-long gallery exhibitions that these closing night events are meant to augment/supplement.
Things I've written elsewhere that seem related:
1. http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol5_No2_sxsw_cloninger.htm (2005)
2. http://bit.ly/18fGarR (2012)
3. http://www.terminalapsu.org/2013/03/30/on-lying/ (2013)
I welcome your thoughts.
Best,
Curt
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