Post–Like & Share by christinakwang

Postâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Like & Share

This publication accompanies the hypothetical exhibition Post– Like & Share at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on view from May 19 through June 21, 2016. This project was conceived and designed in the Typography 4: Print Editorial class at the Art Center College of Design. Authors: Artie Vierkant, Domenico Quaranta Catalog design & edited by: Christina Kwang Instructor: Stephen Serrato Printer: Typecraft Wood & Jones Typefaces: Replica, Apercu Pro © 2016 by Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA 91103 All rights reserved. All images are © the artists, reproduced with the kind permission of the artists and/or their representatives. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to ensure that all the information presented is correct. Some of the facts in this volume may be subject to debate or dispute. If proper copyright acknowledgment has not been made, or for clarifications and corrections, please contact the publishers and we will correct the information in future reprintings, if any. ISBN 978-0-9802055-1-0

table of contents /* INTRODUCTION 10

What is Postâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Internet?

In Between

/* ARTISTS 35

Jon Rafman

Clement Valla

Artie Vierkant

Oliver Laric

Katja Novitskova

Aram Bartholl

/* SEE MORE 98

An Interview with Clement Valla

107

An Interview with Katja Novitskova

114

Artist Biography

126

List of Works

129

Selected Bibliography

what is post– internet? ARTIE VIERKANT “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by Marisa Olson and developed further by Gene McHugh in the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh’s definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as ‘Post Internet’—when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as ‘Internet Aware’—or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001. Specifically within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials. Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it is most often

associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism.

New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction. Post-Internet art instead exists somewhere between these two poles. Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination. It is important to also note that “being Post-Internet” is a distinction which carries ramifications beyond the art context as a societal condition at large, and that it would be antithetical to attempt to pinpoint any discrete moment at which the Post-Internet period begins. Any cultural production which has been influenced by a network ideology falls under the rubric of Post-Internet. The term is not discretely tied to a certain event, though it could be argued that the bulk of the cultural shifts described herein come with the introduction of privately-run commercial Internet ser-

/* ART IS A SOCIAL OBJECT From the rise of a liberal market economy through the build-up and ubiquity of the “middle class,” art has matched and excused

WHAT IS POST-INTERNET?

vice providers and the availability of personal computers.

itself with the social conditions of its production. The rise of the “industrialized arts” gave way to lofty notions of art-after-object as late capitalism approached, all the while explaining itself as obligated to echo existing cultural conditions rather than move to shape them. Where are we left now? Art and arts pedagogy has become so inextricably linked with a variety of interpretations on the Conceptual art doxa that it would be impossible to argue against any artistic gesture being automatically tied to its reception and the language surrounding it. At least from a historical perspective, Conceptual art assured its own legacy by the overwhelming volume of language produced within and around it at a time when summary–through–language was the easiest means of disseminating an object (profoundly simpler, even, than reproducing a photograph). We find ourselves in radically different times. Increasingly the majority of both our cultural reception and production is mediated through some descendant of a Turing machine—taken now both technically and culturally for Turing’s “universal machine,” a “single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.”1 In cultural terms, assuming a certain level of access which does not yet exist in all cases,2 the ubiquity of these devices and their massively interconnected nature signifies two realities

which are crucial to an understanding of art after the Internet. Nothing is in a fixed state: i.e., everything is anything else, whether because any object is capable of becoming another type of object or because an object already exists in flux between multiple instantiations. The latter is a schema already intuitively arrived at by artists in recent history, prompting writers as diverse as Rosalind Krauss and Lev Manovich to proclaim a “Post-Medium Condition”3 and the rise of “Post-Media Aesthetics”4 (Krauss using it as a vessel to decry art marooned in medium specificity, what she calls “technical support;” Manovich uses it to offer a sketch of how one might categorize different types of art in an environment without traditional notions of “medium”). The former, an art object’s lack of fixity in representational strategy, is less often explored. This is not to say that artists are not involved in exploring the relationship of many copies and variations of a single object to one another. Artists like Oliver Laric and Seth Price routinely present multiple variations of the same object—Laric’s Versions exists as “a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a song, a novel, a recipe, a play, a dance routine, a feature film and merchandise,”5 Price’s Dispersion “[taking] the form of a widely reproduced essay, an artists’ book, a freely available online PDF, as well as [a] sculpture.”6 These works are emblematic as Post-Internet gestures and have surely been influential in different ways, but step only lightly away from the tautological rationale of Conceptual art (typified in POST-LIKE & SHARE

Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 One and Three Chairs, an arrangement of three versions of the same object, each signifying “chair,” and language surrounding the piece to assert that nothing is being missed and the art is in the idea—Kosuth’s “Art as Idea as Idea”). In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author. The less developed stratagem for pointing to a lack of representational fixity is that of taking an object to be represented (to be more direct, presented) as another type of object entirely, without reference to the “original.”

“For objects after the Internet there can be no original copy.” Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both its materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies. When I take a moving image and represent it through an object (video rendered sculpturally in styrofoam for example), I am positing an alternative method of representation without ever supplying a way to view the source. A source video exists. The idea of a source video exists. But the way the object is instantiated denies both the necessity of an original and adherence to the representational norms that follow the creation of “video” as both technical device

and terminology.

The possibilities for these transformations, alternative methods of viewing “media” which essentially amounts to an arbitrary assemblage of data, has thus far been most thoroughly examined in the field of “information aesthetics,” a field as distanced from Post-Internet art as it is close to design, cartography, and indexing. Its fault is in its attempt to encapsulate large amounts of data—practical information, experience—into an aesthetic and understandable shorthand. In other words, information aesthetics provides in one object both a representation and the components which make up its source in an attempt to illustrate or arrive at knowledge. While Conceptualism as outlined by Kosuth may be limiting in its reliance on art propositions as enclosed tautological systems, its foundations—delineating progressive art with the same zeal Greenberg applied to ascribing modernism its “purity”7—hold true: “art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience.”8 For us to receive a piece of art and determine from it some piece of empirical information about the world at large would seem almost a bewildering proposition, even in a cultural climate where we have accepted that the singular qualification for the moniker “art” is

NOTES 1 Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2 Volume 42(1937) 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_ digital_divide 3 Rosalind Krauss, Reinventing the Medium from Critical Inquiry Volume 25, No. 2 (1999) 4 Lev Manovich, Post-Media Aesthetics (2001)

5 The Real Thing, interview with Oliver Laric by Domenico Quaranta, Art Pulse Magazine (2010), http:// artpulsemagazine.com/the-real-thing- interview-with-oliver-laric 6 Lauren Cornell, Seth Price artist page in The New Museum’s Free catalogue (2010), http://www. newmuseum.org/ free/#sethprice 7 Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting (1960)

WHAT IS POST-INTERNET?

the intention of any one individual to label it as such.

8 Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy (1969)

POST-LIKE & SHARE

between DOMENICO QUARANTA When, in the mid-1990s, net.art was first named and theorised, it was mostly intended as an art form using the internet as its medium. This was the obvious consequence of the overlap between the notion of the internet as a communication tool, and the phrasal structure used to define art made for the internet, (ironically) inspired by medium-based definitions like "video art". Yet, if we go back to those early, and now somehow canonical, definitions, we can see that the best ones say something slightly different. In 1996, artist Joachim Blank wrote: "netart functions only on the net and picks out the net or the 'netmyth' as a theme. It often deals with structural concepts: a group or an individual designs a system that can be used by other people."1 A couple of years later, curator Steve Dietz wrote in the curatorial text of one POST-LIKE & SHARE

of the first online exhibitions: "For the purposes of this exhibition, 'net.art' is the more generic term we use to identify work for

MTAA Simple Net Art Diagram 1997, GIF animation

which the network is a necessary and sufficient condition.''2 Neither Blank nor Dietz even pronounce the w·medium". Blank focuses on the internet as the "homeplace" and the main theme of net.art, and on collaboration as its signature practice. Dietz describes the network as the condition for net.art—a definition that, whatever it means, goes beyond the idea of experimenting with a medium, and points again to the internet as the environment where the art takes place. The same idea is addressed by Simple Net Art Diagram, an animated gif released by the artist's collective MTAA in 1997.3 The gif displays two home computers connected by a cable. A speech bubble points to the cable, saying, “The art happens here”. If the verb ‘happen’ describes net.art as an intrinsically performative

art form, the adverb ‘here’ makes clear that net. art is not just

something that you can code on a computer and then simply upload online; net.art only happens ‘on the internet’, in the ethereal space connecting humans and computers. For net artists, as Miltos Manetas wrote on a website,

“outside of the internet there is no glory.4” What we should focus on, in order to understand the relationship of net.art with the exhibition space, is what it exactly means, for a net artist, to be ‘on the internet’. In March 2013, American artist Parker Ito posted a video trailer on YouTube for his solo show at IMO, Copenhagen.5 The trailer, as the show, is called Parker Cheeto: The Net Artist (America Online Made Me Hardcore). The video starts with a short sequence ironically grabbed from the movie Excalibur, by John Boorman, 1981, and goes on showing Ito, in his inimitable outfit, skating in the gallery’s space during the setup, while other entities (a big plotter, some assistants) do the works for him. At some point, Ito stops skating and adds his signature to a print on the floor. The print displays the digital drawing of a flower bowl, and a text reading: “I heard that Picasso made around 250,000 works in his lifetime. I could make that many jpgs in five years. And when I say five years, I mean five minutes.” The soundtrack of the video is “The Dope Show”, by Marilyn Manson. This trailer says a lot about Ito’s practice and, more broadly, about himself as a “net artist”, but he doesn’t reject the gallery space and the production of offline artifacts—quite the opposite. The gallery’s walls are almost entirely covered with images, produced—as the video shows—mixing digital printing and painting.

IN BETWEEN

what net.art became over the last 20 years. Ito proudly describes

The original digital images are collages of found images, internet memes, drawings made by others, and black and white pictures of Ito as a young boy. The prints are made on special fabric that reflects light, and are completed with a layer of clear vinyl over the top, that makes them glossy and even more reflective. This use of reflective materials does not only make proper documentation impossible; it actually turns anybody who takes a picture of the work to circulate it on line into a collaborator of some sort (that’s what Ito means when he talks, in an interview, about “democratising the documentation process of my work”)6 Although shown in an art gallery, these images are made out of the internet and for the internet. In the same interview, Ito explains: “net.art was real before Y2K where it was actually very much about hacking and being techy/nerdy. Then Web 2.0 wiped that out and after that it’s not really relative to say ‘this is internet’ and ‘this is not internet’-because everything is.”7 If this allows him to act in the gallery space and produce marketable items, at the same time the ‘net artist’ Parker Ito treats the gallery space in a subversive way. He outsources production at any level of the creative process. He embraces plagiarism as his main creative strategy. He uses the exhibition space as a means to generate online relationships, in a way that turns it from the end point into the starting point of the creative process. He works at the pace of the internet (“and when I say five years I mean five minutes”). Finally, he playfully employs subversive affirmation—a strategy many net artists are familiar with—to bring to its extremes

the romantic idea of the artist genius that puts creativity in everything he does and turns matter and bits into gold by just touching them. In fact he still believes in what MTAA, and most early net artists with them, believed in the late-1990s—that the internet is a space, that net.art is what happens in between people and computers and that it has the subversive potential to turn the artworld and its values upside down. What changed, since then, is our understanding of this space: which turned out to be not a virtual, abstract ‘cyberspace’, but an augmented version of the old, real world. So, you can now make paintings for the White Cube and be, nevertheless, a net artist. This turn didn’t happen in a minute, but it didn’t take much time either. This is one of the reasons why it was often interpreted as a compromise with the artworld, and with the market (which, in most of the cases, isn’t). But, in order to understand how it happened, we have to go through the whole process, starting from the very beginning.

/* BETWEEN INTEGRATION AND AUTONOMY POST-LIKE & SHARE

“A radical art needs to do more than make politics its subject-matter; it must change the way it is made, distributed and seen.8” – Julian Stallabrass In the mid-1990s, when artists started making art online, this move was usually perceived as a radical, somehow heroic move out of whatever established art system you may experience in the real world. Net artists were, literally, “leaving reality behind”, as a famous etoy slogan read: not in the sense that they were escaping reality to live in a world of fantasy, but in the sense that they were approaching reality from a completely different perspective, and from a place working in a completely different way. On the internet, you could be everywhere and everybody at the same time, surfing on a space without physical boundaries, playing out different identities, writing and subverting your own rules. Art became dematerialised and could travel everywhere in the time of an eye blink. Being digital, it could be copied and manipulated. You didn’t need institutions. because you could be the institution, or the gallery, the curator, the art critic, all together. And, if you got bored of the traditional personas of the artworld, you could be everything else: a boy band; a terrorist cell; a corporation; a publisher; a spammer; a bot. Furthermore, you had a direct, intimate relationship with your audience, which was often very generous in terms of feedback. As Jodi said in a famous interview:

“When a viewer looks at our work, we are inside his computer. There is this hacker slogan: ‘We love your computer’. We also get inside people’s computers.

And we are honoured to be in somebody’s computer. You are very close to a person when you are on his desktop. I think the computer is a device to get into someone’s mind.9” Art was made, distributed and seen in a completely new way, and artists were very happy with it. At the same time, however, they were aware that this level of freedom couldn’t last forever. They were doing something new, radical and fresh, and sooner or later, the artworld would have noticed them. They were playing their game at the end of a century in which any kind of revolutionary statement either became part of the establishment or disappeared in the underground, and they were doing it on a techno-social platform that was rapidly becoming the centre of attention of Western society, recently re-branded “Information Society”. net.art was, and somehow still is, a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), fully aware ,of its own impermanence.10 This awareness, together with the control over the means of its own storytelling, is at the origin of net.art’s collective masterpiece, the one that will never become obsolete, consisting mainly of words and stories: its own myth. The myth that makes us, years later, still BETWEEN INTEGRATION AND AUTONOMY

talk about Vuk Casie, Netti me, the Toywar and Netochka Nezvanova. The myth that shapes Alexei Shulgin’s and Natalie Bookchin’s Introduction to net.art, 1994–1999, a wonderful manifesto and, incidentally, one of the first ‘material’ works of net.art, having been carved in marble by artists Blank & Jeron.11 The myth that still makes so many art students fall in love with net.art, and that reverberates in Parker Ito’s trailer.

Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin Introduction to net.art March-April 1999 Courtesy the artists

A consistent part of that myth is to be able to exist, as Shulgin and Bookchin put it, outside of “institutional bureaucracies”. At the very beginning, this meant to exist only outside of institutional bureaucracies. But as early as in 1999, it was already clear that: net.art is undertaking major transformations as a result of its newfound status and institutional recognition. Thus net.art is metamorphosising into an autonomous discipline with all its accoutrements: theorists, curators, museum departments, specialists, and boards of directors.12

Even if this process sanctioned the end of the first, ‘heroic’ period, it wasn’t the end of net.art, but the start of a new phase, in which the practice exists between integration and autonomy, between free online distribution and the art market, between peer-to-peer exchange and authority structures, between the underground and the mainstream artworld. Instead of disappearing, the Temporary Autonomous Zone adapted to reality, and became more nuanced but permanent.

/* BRINGING NET.ART OFFLINE With these premises, it is no surprise that the first attempts to bring net.art in to the exhibition place were curatorial, and not artist-driven, except in a few cases; and that they were highly controversial and debated. A good example was provided, in 1997, by documenta X, that introduced a net.art selection curated by Simon Lamuniere, who was also the curator of the website. The interest for online art practices at one of the main contemporary art events in the world was very topical, and the projects worked well in a show focussed on the return of activist and political art. Some online projects which also featured an installation compoPOST-LIKE & SHARE

nent, such as Metronet by Martin Kippenberger, were well represented in the exhibition, while the projects that existed only online were accessible from the exhibition’s website and presented in a dedicated space designed as an office; there, they were available offline. As Jodi wrote in the forum, the office is:

“An unnecessary confusing symbolical construct, built without consultation of the artists. Net.projects don’t need such metaphors when presented in real-space exhibits, as tv-monitors don’t need a home-decor around them for viewing video. The office cliché also sucks because it gives a false group-label to artists whose only thing in common is their use of the net.13” What’s interesting in this debate about the presentation of web projects at documenta X is not just what’s said, but also what’s not said: the fact that a web project has to be presented on an online computer is taken for granted; what’s at stake is how you contextualise computers in an exhibition space. This is far from easy. At the time, computers in museums were often perceived as information desks; with their cables, their ugly screens, their peripherals, they looked like aliens in the clean design of the white cube; and the internet connection was often seen as an open invitation to the user to leave the work, go and check her email, or, even worse, to freely surf the internet. Computers were hidden, or presented in a way that tried to hide towers and cables; sometimes attention was hijacked from them showing the web-

sites on huge screens or projections. Other times, new interfaces

were developed in order to show websites. For the colossal net_ condition exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, 1999, the web projects were shown in an interactive installation display designed by artist Jeffrey Shaw, the net.art Browser. The installation—a flat screen attached to the wall on runners and controlled by the viewer using a wireless keyboard—denatured the browsing experience, and was so alien to the works it provided access to that art critic Josephine Berry wrote on Telepolis that “one can only hope that the Net.Art Browser... is meant as some kind of a joke”.14 Although the black, monolithic ‘portal’ designed for the exhibition Art Entertainment Network, 2000, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Antenna Design was better welcomed, the experience conditions it provided were almost the same: all the works were accessed through a single interface, simply by rotating the portal on its axis, resulting in turning online navigation into a physical movement. In the meantime, artists and curators were starting to realise that providing access to the websites from the exhibition space might not be the best way to show web-based art in the physical environment, and that some level of ‘translation’ was required. For the exhibition Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum, 2001. curator Christiane Paul worked with artists Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg to turn the web-based work Apartment into an inter-

Inspired by memory palaces, Apartment is a data visualisation project that provides a spatial visualisation of the words submitted by the user, using them to build apartments and to arrange them into buildings. For the presentation of their work—a computer virus called Biennale.py—at the 49th Venice Biennale the same year, 0100101110101101.org and [epidemiC] chose a very different approach: the code of the virus—which was also a readable

BRINGING NET.ART OFFLINE

active installation.

code poem—was printed on a big banner, displayed on two computers which were infecting each other, recorded on framed golden CDs and printed on t-shirts that were given for free to the visitors of the show. This move toward ‘materialisation’ by various means (prints, performance, installation, videos, ephemera or derivative objects) proved to be very effective, and in the following years it became one of the modes of presentation of netbased works in the physical space preferred by artists. While allowing the net.art project a presence in the exhibition space comparable to the one usually given to other media, it avoided the misunderstanding still implicit in Apartment: that the presentation of net-based art had to be somehow ‘technological’.

/* SHOWING NET.ART AS AN AVANT-GARDE This shift, however, took some time, and was pursued more by individual artists than by curators; furthermore, it mainly concerned new projects and artworks. and not the early online artworks made in the late-1990s. So, when some curators, in the early 2000s, had to confront the attempt to put net.art in a historical perspective, they had to face a problem: to deal with an art movement whose main products couldn’t be brought to the exhibition space, and that didn’t produce material artifacts, but events, relationships, documentary material and other ephemera. In other words, they had to deal with a movement that behaved as an avant-garde, and that should be curatorially treated as such, in order to fully display its potential. As the most radical avant-gardes such as Dada and Fluxus, and other underground movements such as Situationism and Neoism, early net.art can’t be really understood looking at artifacts only; and if the artworks themselves can’t be effectively put on show in the exhibition space, in order to tell this story you have to adopt a completely different narrative model. One of the first attempts to make a show about net.art without POST-LIKE & SHARE

computers was net.ephemera, curated by Mark Tribe, artist and founder of the online platform Rhizome, in 2002 at the Moving Image Gallery, New York. As Tribe himself explains on his website:

“Most net.art is meant to be experienced as a solitary encounter. And many net artists saw their practice as oppositional to artworld institutions. Putting net.art in the gallery involves a recontextualisation that can radically alter the experience and significance of the work. net.ephemera was an attempt to work around this problem by exhibiting ephemera—drawings, diagrams, notes, receipts and other physical artifacts—related to the making of net-based projects.15” The attempt to apply this model to an exhibition that really put net.art in a historical perspective was made, one year later, by curator Per Platou with Written in Stone: A net.art Archeology, at the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art. The subtitle itself is telling: net.art is a thing of the past. that should be treated with the tools of an archaeologist more than those of a contemporary art curator. As artist Olia Lialina wrote in a beautiful review of the show: Written in Stone makes no attempt to exhibit internet works right in the museum. No connected and decorated computers with partitioned plastic walls in between. No attempt to create a proper environment; to hide the internet and electrical cables or to make ikebanas of them. Those exhibitions never, ever

worked. No matter how much money was spent. In Oslo the com-

puters are finally removed.... Per Platou fills the space with three types of objects: the private stuff of artists, web project reproductions and mythical representations.16 The first were curious objects donated by the artists: catalogues, objects related to specific stories or events. The second were hi-res prints of website screenshots and videos documenting some online works while somebody else is interacting with them. The latter were tongue-in-cheek curatorial interventions, such as the six small plaster busts in a vitrine representing the ‘heroes’ of net.art and the dot in the ‘net.art’ label displayed as a shiny metal

Alexei Shulgin 3868dx 1998-ongoing, performance Courtesy the artist

Organised by artist and [epidemic] co-founder Luca Lampo in Milan in 2005, Connessioni leggendarie: Net.art 1995–2005 was another attempt to deal with the legend of net.art. The show also

SHOWING NET.ART AS AN AVANT-GARDE

ball on a velvet pillow, again in a vitrine.

included software art and media hacktivism projects from the early 2000s. Computers were not completely removed, but only used to show software artworks that couldn’t be displayed otherwise. Besides this section, the only computer featured in the show was Alexei Shulgin’s 386dx, the installation version of his infamous cyberpunk rock band, an old computer that sang with its electronic voice, played music and made visuals autonomously. Other projects were either reproduced, documented in visuals or reconstructed with a mix of documentation, original ephemera and storytelling. For example, experiments of ‘code poetry’ (mostly poems written mixing code and human language) were printed out to draw a connection with visual poetry from the 1970s; while a massive event such as the Toywar, 1999–2000, in which the internet community gathered to defend artist collective etoy, attacked by a giant online toys seller who wanted to kick them out of the internet (and steal their URL) was presented projecting a documentary about it and collecting on a single big print (not authored by the artists) hundreds of small images circulated online during the event, representing ‘toy.soldiers’ in the form of photoshopped Lego puppets.

/* FROM OUTER SPACE TO THE WHITE CUBE Besides these curatorial efforts, in the early 2000s net-based art started to be shown in the white cube thanks to the individual efforts of artists, and to their dialogue with curators and gallery managers. Translating a project from one context to the other was far from easy, and converting an online project into a series of marketable items that could be distributed in the art market was even harder. For a generation that was more used to the online environment than to the physical space, this was a process of trials and errors, and some contexts—such as the And/Or Gallery, an artist-run space founded in Dallas in 2006 by Paul Slocum and active until 2009—played an invaluable role in offering artists room for experimenting with modes of translation. Different strategies were tested, that followed the nature of the original work. If what we said at the beginning—that net.art is not the result of the artistic use of a specific medium, but art that takes place in a specific environment—we may agree that net.art is not a uniform, cohesive set of practices, but it displays as many behaviours, approaches and languages as art usually does in the physical space. If, when we are online, everything comes to us from the screen, in the exhibition space these differences are POST-LIKE & SHARE

amplified and brought to extremes. Online performances may be exhibited through documentation and derivative objects. Other works may be translated into prints, video or interactive installations. Some works may require a computer in order to keep their original meaning. To show his ASCII movies—popular films converted into text code and played by a Java machine that reads the text file—Slovenian artist Vuk Casie used a computer specially developed for artists, where all the hardware is hidden in a black box behind the screen—all you see is a screen hanging on the wall and playing a video—no tower, no cables, no keyboard. But what the computer is playing is not the original work translated into a heavy, hi-res video file: it’s, again, an extremely light text file executed by a software, and that could ideally be streamed online on a slow modem connection, making the moving image accessible to everybody. The original work is adapted to the white cube requirements, but the message is intact. In the same years, however, another process was taking place. Our relationship with the internet was changing fast. After the dotcom crash, some said that the internet was dead. It wasn’t, but this dramatic aftermath had at least two consequences. On the one hand, those who were working on it moved their interest from contents to structures, and started working on what later was labelled “Web 2.0”. On the other, what was first perceived as extraordinary and new became part of our daily routine. With broadband, the internet isn’t something you have to connect to (and rapidly disconnect from) anymore: it’s always there. When you are always online, at home, at work and while walking the dog, it becomes more and more difficult to perceive the internet as

“somewhere else”. More and more people became familiar with

internet cultures and languages. Your father may not understand you when you talk about memes, but he has a smile of recognition when you mention the dramatic chipmunk or the keyboard cat. As Olia Lialina wrote in 2007:

“Yesterday for me as an artist it made sense only to talk to people in front of their computers, today I can easily imagine to apply to visitors in the gallery because in their majority they will just have gotten up from their computers. They have the necessary experience and understanding of the medium to get the ideas, jokes, enjoy the works and buy them.17” For a younger generation of artists, there is not even a ‘yesterday’. They grew up with the internet, and read about net.art in books or studied it at art school. They are not ‘coming back’ to a context— the gallery, the institution—they escaped in the first place: they started working on both platforms simultaneously, and very natuunderstanding of internet and desktop languages and technologies, they often decide to use them in a very simple way, playing with ‘defaults’ and common settings, and contributing content to or rearranging content from the internet as any average user does, filling up YouTube with videos and Tumblr with images. This makes the issue of ‘translating’ works from the internet to the white cube much easier: images are turned into prints, videos are projected, etc.. But often, translation is not even an issue, because works are not first conceived for the internet and later translated for the exhibition space. Artists got used to making specific works for a specific context. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s With Elements of Web 2.0, 2006, is a series of prints

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rally. Online, even if they usually have a good knowledge and

combining functional elements, colours and styles familiar to everybody who uses tools like Google Maps or YouTube. The work talks to a gallery audience about the standardisation of online interfaces and the death of the ‘vernacular web’, but it doesn’t translate any on line artwork. Dutch artist Constant Dullaart, who developed a rigorous and prolific online practice, is reported to have said “don’t use the internet as a fucking condiment”. Dullaart is also active in the exhibition space in various ways, including performances in which he dumbly and repetitively executes tropes and icons we are familiar with on screen, such as the DVD bounce or the YouTube video loading animation.18 Some Artists develop complex bodies of work revolving around the same concepts, and dealing with different media. Versions, 2009, by Oliver Laric, is a video discussing the circulation of images in the internet age, and drawing links with the way humanity circulated, used and abused images in previous ages. The video is a collage of found material on both a textual and a visual level, and was placed online with the explicit intention to allow other artists and people to make versions of it. The video had two follow-ups, Versions, 2010, and Versions, 2012. At the same time, the imagery collected in the videos and the issues addressed by them produced further physical variations. Medieval sculptures defaced

or re-adapted during the Reformation were scanned, turned into three-dimensional models and then into painted sculptures; user variations upon a photoshopped image of Iraqi missiles were turned into pencil drawings; an old and expensive book about Roman sculpture was scanned and turned into a bootleg of itself, printed with an on-demand service and exhibited in stacks; painted replicas of Roman statues (derived from an ancient Greek prototype) were put on show in a plaster casts gallery; more recently, Laric started scanning an entire collectionÂwith the plan of creating a bootleg copy of every item in it and making models freely available online for free download and manipulation.

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While some artists decide to leave what’s made for the internet on line, some others developed different forms of translation. Rafaël Rozendaal’s signature works are simple, colourful, poetic animations placed on a dedicated URL. In the exhibition space, Rozendaal doesn’t simply project them on a wall, but he explores the very medium of projection and its potential to turn the online artwork into something different. Sometimes, he fills up the space with mirrors, smashed and scattered on the floor or laying along the wall; the same work may be projected many times, on a row or on different surfaces, as a perfectly keystoned projection or in

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different configurations.

Rafaël Rozendaal colorflip.com 2008, dimensions variable, duration infinite Courtesy the artist Collection Sébastien de Ganay

Canadian artist Jon Rafman explored different translation possibilities for his project Brand New Paint Job, 2010–ongoing, a series of images—originally featured on a tumblelog—in which he uses masterpieces of modern and contemporary art as textures mapped onto three-dimensional models downloaded from Google 3D Warehouse: rooms, furniture, sculptures and any kind of object. The project expanded in different directions both online and offiine: in 2010, in collaboration with Tabor Robak, Rafman made BNPJ.exe, a three-dimensional navigable environment. Later on, some of these environments were released as video commercials of an unlikely interior design company (Interiors, 2013). Many images of the series have been exhibited as digital prints, some of them have been translated into sculptures and installations. In 2012, for a show at American Medium. New York, Rafman created the Umberto Boccioni Living Room Suite, where the painting La città che sale became a sofa, a carpet. a vacuum cleaner and a set of curtains. In 2013, for the project Palazzo Peckam in Venice—a meeting place for people visiting the Biennale—Rafman used a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe to design the entrance room of the exhibition space.

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If, in recent years, net-based art usually manifested itself in the physical space in ways that exclude the simple presentation of the online work via a computer. on a curatorial level different experiments have been made—mostly by artists—to bring the online context offline. On 20 July 2010 Rafaël Rozendaal organised the first Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB) in Berlin, a one night exhibition “hosting artists and their projectors”. The curator of a BYOB— released as an open exhibition format —basically has to find a space and invite as many artists as he wants to show their work using their own projector. In absence of a predetermined setup, exhibitors are free to experiment and improvise, working in the available space and projecting on different surfaces.19 A few weeks before the first BYOB, German artist Aram Bartholl I curated the first Speed Show, a net.art exhibition organised in an internet cafe. According to BartholI. a Speed Show—another open format—can be organised by simply renting all the computers in an internet cafe for a couple of hours, and setting the browser on each computer in order to show a specific work available online. Invited visitors and usual customers are free to sit and use the computers, but having a work of art instead of the usual Google homepage as the starting point of their navigation.20 Both BYOBs and Speed Shows spread like memes, with dozens of events organised all around the world. Both the formats display similar features: they are cheap, fast and easy to organise; they are anarchistic and ‘joyful’—like a rave party; they are meant to gather communities born online and to facilitate dialogue and exchange between their members; they leave the art where it is— online, or on the artist’s desktop—but at the same time manifest

themselves in the physical space. They bring out of the internet

some of the things that still make the online environment so exciting for artists—the sense of community, the DIY approach, the

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Rafaël Rozendaal BYOB 2010–ongoing, New York and Tokyo Courtesy the artist

idea of operating out of existing social and institutional structures, and in a public space. Aram Bartholl is a tireless test driver of alternative ways of bringing the digital into the physical world. In 2011, he revived dumped CRT screens from the streets of Berlin to show net.art until they were finally brought to the landfill. In October 2010 he installed the first Dead Drop, a USB flash drive embedded into a public wall and accessible to everybody. Over 1,000 Dead Drops are installed across the globe, allowing people to drop and take electronic files as they wish. An anonymous, offline, peer-to- peer file sharing network. Dead Drops are not primarily for art purposes, although they have been used in the organisation of a number of events and exhibitions. This is, instead, the main purpose of the DVD Dead Drop installed by BartholI in 2012 outside the Museum of Moving Image in New York. Located outside the museum, close to the entrance door. and so available to passers-by 24 hours a day, the work is a DVD burner that. when you insert a blank DVD, gives you back an exhibition of digital artworks. Finally, in February 2013 he organised at the XPO Gallery in Paris the show Offline Art: New2, in which every artwork on show was only accessible locally through a dedicated wireless network. on the visitor’s personal device. According to the project description: Browser-based digital artworks are broadcast locally from wifi routers, which are not connected to the internet. Each artwork is

assigned a single wifi router. which is accessible through any device, like smartphones, tablets or laptops. To access the different artworks, the visitor has to connect to each network individually. The name of the network reflects the name of the artist. No matter what URL is opened, only the specific artwork appears in the browser. A small web server holding the art piece is installed on a USB flash drive, which is connected to the router. Like frames holding the art, the routers are hung in the exhibition space, which is otherwise empty.

“The art itself becomes visible only on the visitor’s private screen. The pieces are widely accessible locally but disconnected from the internet.21” This solution may seem absurd and provocative, and it is, to a certain extent. At the same time, however, it reminds us that the relationships between the online space and the physical space are not fixed, and are strictly connected to the social use of both spaces. This changed dramatically over the last 20 years, since the advent of the World Wide Web; and there is nothing at the moment that would allow us to think that in the next 20 years the pace of this change will slow down. Native to online space, net.art is not bound to the rules and POST-LIKE & SHARE

requirements of the white cube. It can fit in to it and do so very well, but many other possibilities of circulation and distribution are already available, and more will probably make their appearance in the near future. In five years, this book will look pretty old. In 20, it will look like archeology, and so will this text. But don’t underrate it for that. Archaeology is important: it shows us where we belong.

NOTES

1 Blank, Joachim, “What is netart ;-)?”, 1996, www.irational.org/cern/netart. txt (accessed April 2013). 2 Dietz, Steve, “Beyond Interface: Net Art and Art on the Net II” in Museum and the Web, 1998, www.walkerart. org/archive/7/B5739D78AF125E8B6173.htm (accessed April 2013). 3 See www.mteww.com/nad.html (accessed 2013). 4 See http://www.manetas.com outsideoftheinternetthereisnoglory/ (accessed 2013). 5 See http://youtu.be/K0NFKM9suBc (accessed April 2013). 6 Bordorff, Maria, “America online made

single/article/america-online-made-me- hardcore/ (accessed April 2013). 7 Bordorff, “America online made me hardcore. Interview”. 8 Stallabrass, Julian, Art Incorporated, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004, p. 191. 9 Baumgärtel, Tilman, “Interview with Jodi” in Telepolis, 6 October 1997, http://www.heise.de/tp/ artikel/6/6187/1.html (accessed April 2013). 10 See Hakim Bey, TAZ. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Autonomedia, 1985, 1991, http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_

me hardcore. Interview” in Kopenhagen Magasin, 25 March 2013, http:// kopenhagen.dk/magasin/magazine-

cont.html (accessed April 2013). 11 Shulgin, Alexei and Natalie Bookchin, Introduction to net.art (1994–1999),

12 13

15 16

1999, www.easylife.org/netart/ (accessed April 2013). Shulgin and Bookchin, “Introduction to net.art (1994-1999)”. Jodi, “dx webprojects”, 9 July 1997, www.documenta12.de/archiv/dx/lists/ debate/0010.html (accessed April 2013). Josephine Berry, “The Unbearable Connectedness of Everything” in Telepolis, 29 September 1999, www.heise.de/tp/artikel/3/3433/1.html (accessed April 2013). See www.marktribe.net/curating/net- ephemera/ (accessed April 2013). Lialina, Olia, “Little Heroes and the Big Dot” in Teleportacia, [2003] http://art.teleportacia.org/ observation/oslo/oslo.htm

(accessed April 2013). 17 Lialina, Olia, “Flat Against the Wall”, 2007, http://art.teleportacia. org/observation/flat_against_the_ wall/ (accessed June 2013). 18 Esposito, Alana Chloe, “‘Don’t use the internet as a fucking condiment’: Net Art at Art Dubai” in Art Fag City, 30 March 2012, http://artfcity. com/2012/03/30/don%E2%80%99t-use-the- internet-as-a-fucking-condiment-netart-at-art-dubai/ (accessed June 2013). 19 See http://www.byobworldwide.com/ (accessed June 2013). 20 See http://speedshow.net/ (accessed June 2013). 21 See http://datenform.de/offline-art- new2.html (accessed June 2013).

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jon rafman

Sycamore Drive: Willowgreen, Kilrush, Co. Clare, Ireland – Google View Jon Rafman • 2010