Post-Internet Art After the Internet
Post-internet art, once defined by its engagement with the aesthetics and infrastructures of digital culture, has entered a moment of reflection and transformation. The term itself, coined in the late 2000s, suggested a period in which artists were no longer operating in opposition to the internet but were acutely aware that the network had become inescapable, omnipresent, and constitutive of experience. What, then, does it mean to create post-internet art after the internet, in a world where digital connectivity is both ubiquitous and deeply entangled with surveillance, commerce, and social mediation?
Artists working in this space no longer treat the screen as a frontier or the web as a laboratory. Instead, the network is acknowledged as infrastructure, as ecology, and as archive. Amalia Ulman’s Instagram project Excellences & Perfections (2014) exemplifies this dual consciousness. Ulman’s carefully staged persona, circulated through the very platform she interrogates, collapses the boundaries between performance, labour, and networked visibility. Every post, like a brushstroke in a digital canvas, negotiates the pressures of attention economies, follower metrics, and algorithmic circulation. Ulman’s work demonstrates that post-internet art cannot exist outside the systems it critiques; critique is embedded in the medium and its social logics.
Cao Fei extends this inquiry into three-dimensional, immersive environments. Her RMB City (2007–2011) exists simultaneously as a digital construct and a social experiment. Buildings, avatars, and urban interactions are digitally simulated yet grounded in the material realities of rapid urbanisation and neoliberal development in China. The work’s post-internet dimension lies in its hybridity: it is neither purely virtual nor strictly material. The digital image becomes part of the ecological and sociopolitical fabric, a means of navigating globalization, capital flows, and cultural imagination simultaneously.
In a parallel register, artists such as Hito Steyerl and Jon Rafman interrogate circulation, archival logic, and the epistemology of images in a post-internet world. Steyerl’s essays and video installations, including How Not to Be Seen(2013), expose the processes by which images are harvested, monetised, and weaponised. Her critique is systemic: the network is not merely a conduit for distribution, but an apparatus shaping perception, power, and subjectivity. Rafman, by contrast, mines found imagery from online platforms, social media, and virtual worlds, constructing narratives that blur documentary and fiction, intimacy and mediation. Both demonstrate that post-internet practice is inseparable from attention economies, platform governance, and the politics of visibility.
Materiality remains central, even when the network is the subject. Cory Arcangel translates code and digital logic into physical forms, from modified game consoles to laser-cut installations. Arcangel’s work highlights the afterlife of the internet in material culture, suggesting that digital systems leave traces in the objects, spaces, and practices they condition. Similarly, Petra Cortright translates digital glitch, compression artifacts, and webcam aesthetics into painterly video installations and prints, rendering the ephemeral permanence, and vice versa. Post-internet art after the internet is thus attentive to material resonance, as much as it is to visual circulation.
The social dimensions of post-internet art are equally significant. DIS, the New York-based collective, uses the web, print, and exhibition spaces to probe cultural economies, consumerism, and the commodification of identity. Their work oscillates between critique and participation, highlighting the porous boundaries between media, market, and society. Like much post-internet art, DIS operates in an interstitial space, using platforms, galleries, and digital interfaces as equally valid sites of production and reception.
What unites these practices is the recognition that the internet is no longer a frontier or a tool; it is a condition. Post-internet art after the internet acknowledges that images, objects, and experiences circulate through intertwined social, economic, and technological networks. Criticality is enacted not by isolation from the network, but by strategic engagement with it. These artists operate within complex systems while maintaining reflexivity, exposing the mechanisms by which attention, data, and perception are commodified, monetised, and regulated.
Post-internet art after the internet is not nostalgic, nor is it simply reactive. It is investigative, ethical, and infrastructural. Its critique arises from participation, material translation, and circulation, revealing that artistic practice today cannot disentangle itself from the networks it inhabits. Visibility, mediation, and social engagement become as central as composition, colour, or form. Contemporary art in this vein persists in asking difficult questions: How do systems shape subjectivity? How do images carry power? How do artists negotiate ethics in a world of perpetual circulation?
In the aftermath of ubiquitous connectivity, post-internet art demonstrates that critique is not only possible but necessary, emerging from careful observation, intervention, and reflection within the networks that structure contemporary life. It insists that art remains a site of ethical negotiation, attentive to infrastructure, labour, and material consequence, even when those structures are themselves immaterial, invisible, and algorithmic.
Daily Dose of Educational Content for students created and curated by NEWEARTHWAVE
Comments
Post a Comment