Getting Over the Internet

getting over the internet

by Astrid Elander

In April 2015, the e-flux Journal published The Internet Does Not Exist, a comprehensive issue that revolved around the internet and its unequivocal expansion but that, following the post-Internet Art movement, considered the concept of the internet no longer to serve its purpose: to highlight, like all concepts, the phenomenon it refers to. As the editors explained in the introduction, the internet cannot be accessed from a position ”outside”. The internet is, to quote Bruno Latour, ”all edges”. A more effective way to highlight this phenomenon is, so the editors argued, to talk about it in a negative sense, as something that does not exist at all.

A paradoxical move, of course: ”Never before have more people been dependent on, embedded into, surveilled by, and exploited by the web”, Hito Steyerl noted in her contribution. The negativity is inherent in the internet itself. The internet is not a thing that can be seen or touched, nor is it a relationship whose conditions can be easily determined. Defining the internet, for example as “a globally connected network system that facilitates communication and data services through a vast collection of private, public, business, academic, and government networks” (Technopedia), only seems to undermine its fundamental reach and obscure the ways in which it actually operates, at least that’s what the editors of The Internet Does Not Exist believed. Because the internet, its processes and operations, are not limited to the screens in our hands, but leaks, as it were, into us and out into our physical environment, changing how we perceive and relate to the world, how we communicate with each other, exchange goods and services, look at art, etc. At the same time, it forces us to renegotiate what it means to be, in a place and in general.

Concerning the ontological aspect, the question of what we “really” are has long since been lost. When Marshall McLuhan in the 60’s claimed that “the medium is the message”, he wanted to highlight how technological innovations fundamentally change us. With its involvement in nearly every aspect of our lives, the internet proves that at least, we cannot separate ourselves from our tools. For most of us, an existence beyond the internet is only a theoretical abstraction, as our bodies start to itch after only a few minutes apart from it. We are what we evolve into in our interactions with the world, through and together with the means we use to interact.

Concerning the spatial aspect, to be in a place is not what it used to be. Increasingly often, our (scattered) attention emerges as some kind of primary location, where the sounds from our physical surroundings are woven into the voices in our headphones; where we can be on the bus in one city and at a meeting in another… Technology gives new life to Berkeley’s subjective idealism, although people rather talk about “attention economy”.

Then there is the spatiality of the internet itself. Paradoxical, of course: a place but still not really a place, an area where we can and cannot meet. Maybe we actually do get closer to each other here than in life “outside”. Brushing against those bulging bodies on the subway – is that “real” contact? Is real contact to look a stranger in the eye? With its capacity to cross distances, materialities, walls, the internet offers opportunities to connect. And we – uploading photos and thoughts from our everyday lives, as if we also wanted to show the internet what we’ve been up to lately – are quick to respond. Someone else might be at the other end, looking at our pictures and reading our thoughts, but this someone is often strikingly vague, an acquaintance or even a “target group”. When what we interact with is not a set of algorithms but a real person and this person appears in front of us, there is still no risk of eye contact, since our devices force us to look at the screen instead of into the camera to see the other one. The anonymity leads to proximity: bent over our phones like over faintly bluish pits, we write about private concerns, post pictures of our naked bodies and spew out hatred that we otherwise filter.

The paradox is present in the name of the art movement addressed by the e-flux issue: post-Internet Art, a term coined in 2008 by the German-American artist and curator Marisa Olson that refers to an art movement or social milieu and that seeked to highlight this exact fact: that the internet has left the internet and, so to speak, moved offline. Spanning from the years of 2006-2014 and often produced by “digital natives”, that is, people born in or after the 80’s, post-Internet art dealt with the internet as an integrated part of experience. It moved the internet offline, into the art gallery, projecting internet phenomena onto the walls or displaying physical objects created after online models. An example is Faig Ahmed’s persian carpets, woven according to digitally developed patterns and, in the words of Ahmed, exploring the structure of a carpet as a code. Above all, these artworks show how fundamentally different the material conditions of the computer are from those of the physical world, how easily millennia of craftsmanship can be unraveled with a simple movement of the hand over the keyboard. Another example is Jon Rafman’s New Age Demanded (2012), a set of 3D-printed busts where that which usually constitutes the face has become an anonymous materiality, a frozen mobility that seems to melt and float at the very same time. Other artists often associated with the movement include Guan Xiao, Timur Si-Quin, Yngve Holen, and the aforementioned e-flux contributor Hito Steyerl. Or Katja Kovitskova, who simultaneously points to and takes advantage of the reflexive process that exists between the online and the offline spheres by photographing the physical items she made out of online models and (re-)post them online.

How are we to understand this movement? As Jurg Heiser noted in an article in deutschlandfunk back in 2015, Post-Internet Art takes Duchamp’s “Readymade” and Warhols “copy”, to their extreme. Not, I believe, out of inspiration from these artists, but since these ideas – just like McLuhan’s view of the medium as a message – are integrated into the internet itself, constantly operating, as if the internet once wished to put these exact ideas into practice.

According to the editors of The Internet Does Not Exist, declaring the Internet dead could not only contribute to a more accurate perception of the Internet, but also offer a critical potential. And perhaps the post-Internet movement actually contributed to a certain critique, by illustrating how the mechanisms established online also make their way into physical reality, how the boundaries of the Internet are constantly being crossed. In 2014, the year when the post-Internet concept first really got traction, Byung-Chul published Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, where his critique of neoliberalism was joined by a more comprehensive analysis of technological governance. In the same year, Bernhard Stiegler introduced his general organology, an interdisciplinary research method that studies how psychosomatic, technological and social organisms interact. If before, people were mostly interested in how smart a machine could be, the impact of the machine now attracts attention – as does the internet, the global interconnection between computer machines, which became clear with the e-flux issue in 2015.

A more depressing way of reading the prefix emerges in the light of the previous internet art movement “Net.Art.”, that, driven by a belief in the decentralizing potential of the internet, left the gallery system in the 90’s to produce art online. But if the internet once seemed to transcend social hierarchies and class stratifications as effectively as it penetrated walls, that was no longer the case in the early twenty-first-century. The big agents had established themselves online and freedom had turned into control, as Han puts it in in the aforementioned book: “Today, unbounded freedom and communication are switching over into total control and surveillance. More and more, social media resemble digital panoptica… “. The Net.Art. artists learned that you cannot live on air and were forced back into the gallery system. Adoption instead of criticism. Read that way, the prefix refers to a lost utopia.

More than a decade since the peak of the post-Internet movement and after a global pandemic that expanded the reach of the internet, more or less forcing us to adapt to its possibilities, the internet is more omnipresent than ever. Yet the term post-Internet is rarely used today. People rather talk about “post post-Internet” to name art utilizing the internet as a source of creativity. This probably has to do with how quickly trends pass in a world where attention is subject to constant stimulation, which might also be why the post-Internet artists never really embraced the term in the first place. In difference to the Net.Art. artists, they never had a manifesto or a common set of values.

However, many of them are still very active. Jon Rafman and Parker Ito are currently exhibited at Lubov Gallery in New York. Last year in Berlin, Yngve Holen’s work was shown at Galerie Neu, as was Timur Si-Quin’s at Société and Hito Steyerl’s art Galerie Esther Shipper. And in 2022, Rafman was exhibited at the Schinkel Pavillon. Also, with new generations of digital natives, it becomes harder to distinguish which art is inspired by the internet and which is not. Post-Internet is reality. Or as Grant Tyler argues in the presentation of the Rafman/Ito exhibition: instead of referring to some external objects, post-Internet primarily refers to a condition of experience that, since the invention of the Internet, recontextualizes everything. Every artwork ever made is now post-Internet. As a true digital native, Tyler lets the viewer’s perception take precedence over an external, historical reality. ”Esse est percipi”.

Ultimately, Steyerl argues in her e-flux article, the post-Internet condition should widen our concept of open access by generating expectations that it also should apply in the physical world: it should seem weird that only some people are allowed into the club, and the border between for example Germany and Denmark should feel more arbitrary than ever. Almost a decade since the release of the issue, nations guard their borders more than ever, and although a 3D printer can transfer objects from the internet to the physical world, the reverse path is still impossible; we cannot escape into the internet with our bodies, which probably becomes strikingly clear for people living in places exposed to extreme weather or continuous air strikes. Places where the connection might even fail.

References

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/internet

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/post-internet-art-die-kunst-der-digitalen-eingeborenen-100.html

Han, Byung-Chul, Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken (Essayband). S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2014.

Stiegler, Bernhard, Organologie des savoirs et technologies de la connaissande, Paris: FYP, 2014.

https://lubov.nyc/jon-rafman-parker-ito

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