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Hendrike Nagel

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On the Challenges of Contemporary Art as a Meta-Physical Hyprid of Physicality and Virtuality

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I n d e x . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 7 S o u r c e L i s t. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 I m a g e C r e d i t s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 4 C o l o p h o n. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 6

T h e C o n t r a d i c t i o n o f To d a y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3

T h e S t a t u s - Q u o o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1 A n A r t H i s t o r i c a l E m b e d d i n g . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6 A r t P o s t - I n t e r n e t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 9 T h e A r t O b j e c t. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4 T h e C u r a t o r i a l. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6 T h e A r t i s t. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7 T h e S p e c t a t o r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4

T h e N e w D e f i n i t i o n o f R e a l i t y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 7 T h e D u a l P r e s e n c e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 T h e E v o l u t i o n o f t h e I n t e r n e t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7 T h e S y m p t o m s o f V i r t u a l i t y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 T h e E n c o u n t e r o f V i r t u a l a n d P h y s i c a l S p a c e. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 5

Introduction...................................................................................................... 9

Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t

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Introduction

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The whole time, though, we think we‘re heading towards utopia and, in fact, we‘re heading towards The E n d . [1] As we all experience, our life today is not only taking place in the familiar physical environment, it likewise has been transferred to virtuality. The evolution of the Internet has opened up a huge parallel existing internationally connected and never pausing virtual network. Social networking sites, wikis and blogs obtain a lot of our attention and administration, not less than ‘traditional’ relationships and activities based in our physical environment. The smartphone has almost become the overall theme in today’s culture. Significantly, this development hasn‘t reached its end yet. Current attempts, like Google’s Loon Project, constantly work on the expansion of this network.

Img.1 [1]

Gene McHugh, Post Internet, p.17, 2011

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Looking at our cultural habits, there are a lot of correlations between these two spaces. If you want to describe our today’s reality, you equally have to speak about virtual and physical space and their importance. Because the virtual world is so different in its consistency and mechanisms, we need new vocabulary to do so. Even if we have programmed it ourselves, the disparity has transformed a lot of our social relations and values in ways we haven‘t even imagined before.

Online, mediated experiences and relationships replace primary, physical ones. Long established structures like nations, laws, and religions are less determining. The relationship towards, for example, the body, language and images are differently constituted. The collective has gained a new importance and dissemination. In what magnitude this has changed our culture is not even clear yet. This shift has happened with such a pace, that we are hardly able to grasp it.

These spatial distinctions ask for medium-adequate appropriations and adapted reactions. At the moment it seems, that we transform physical structures into virtual and vice versa. What has been traditionally established in the physical space is expected to equally function in the virtual spheres. Almost unreflectingly we follow the pull of virtuality transforming into an army of Cyborgs. This missing understanding and aware-

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ness naturally ends in a lot of contradictions.

In 2013 Kenneth Goldsmith, an American poet, orchestrated a conceptual art project titled Printing Out the Internet at LABOR art gallery in Mexico City. Through an Open Call on social platforms like Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter he invited his readers to participate in the project by printing out anything they found online and mailing it to the art gallery. Goldsmith’s goal was to print out the whole Internet, giving the virtual knowledge a physical form. By the end of the project more than 20.000 people had sent printed files, but of course this didn‘t even come close to the extent of online content.[2] This project serves as a great example to exemplify the controversial nature of our two-sided world, where the two spaces, on one hand, constantly interfere with each other however, on the other hand, underlie totally different mechanisms.

Img.2 [ 2 ]

P r i n t i n g O u t t h e I n t e r n e t , Yo u K n o w Yo u r Meme, 2013

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This, of course, is affecting every part of culture, but the fine arts seem to be distinctively reluctant to these challenges. As it is based on a very traditional and prestigious institutional system with quite settled regulations, it incarnates a very good example for this upheaval. Talking about the contemporary art you are confronted with a variety of terms, which all try to define contemporary ramifications. Some of them are: Digital Media Art, Electronic Art, Computer Art, Multimedia Art, Interactive Art, Virtual Art, Cyber Art, Generative Art, Digital Art, Post-Digital Art, Internet Art, Net Art and Postmedia Art. Because of this blurriness, the contemporary art world is designated by heated discussions, which circulate around this question how digitisation and visualisation influence the established system, almost turmoiling it.

With the appearance of the so called Post-Internet Art movement, it kind of reached its climax.

Post-Internet Art assembles a group of contemporary artists, whose work directly reacts on the cultural ramifications of this development. They take (digital) contemporary everyday material as their origin of artistic investigation and introduce a lot of new impulses to this world.

In my opinion this development opens up a lot of interesting possibilities to reflect on established constellations and to reformat traditional

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habits. More severe, it makes them unavoidable.

With this text, I will make the attempt to give a condensed overview of what have changed in the field of contemporary art; particularly focusing on established role allocation. For this, as a basis, I will investigate the distinctions of virtual and physical space, to then, afterwards, be able to adapt these onto the art world’s system. Being aware of the contemporaneous status-quo seems as a essential foundation for any further investigations. Asking questions like: How can we define the virtual and the physical space? How do they work? In what way do they have to be differentiated? What has been renewed? How does contemporary art look like being positioned in this framework? Which challenges are evoking?

To what extent does traditional allocation have to be adapted? – Just like a few of them. This in mind, the text might even push further a speculative dialog of what can happen in the future.

To do so, I will include contemporary discussions and theories around this field – such as Hito Steyerls theory on The Poor Image, Marisa Olsen’s coined term of Post-Internt and the development of the Web 2.0. As well as new thoughts on authorship, viewership and curatorship by art world’s academics like Boris Groys, Claire Bishop, Gene McHugh and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Likewise, I will consider more ‘traditional’ based/estab-

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lished ones, reviewing them for their contemporary value. Next to Benjamin’s theory on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, another examples is Brian O’Doherty’s Book Inside the White Cube, which focuses on the gallery as exhibition space. Besides theoretical investigations, I will also incorporate artistic ideas of contemporary artists like Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, Artie Vierkant, Seth Price, Jonas Lund and Brad Troemel, introducing innovative and speculative views on modern society. As well as curatorial attempts like Hans-Ulrich Obrists Do-It exhibition series, Rafaël Rozendaal’s BYOB – Bring Your Own Beamer – series and emerging online gallery spaces like The Thing, as one of the firsts, and Gallery404 by the artist group Art404.

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The New Definition of Reality

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As an American survey found out, American adults spent 11 hours a day on electronic devices.

[3] Next to watching television this time is spent online on social networking services, image sharing platforms, instant messaging networks, micro-blogging sites and Internet forums such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram – naming just a few of them. Due to the pace with which digitisation has infiltrated our daily lives it becomes difficult to pause and be able to grasp the structure of the moment we are living in. Already to label them becomes problematic.

Terms like the On- and Offline or the Digital and the Analog or the Virtual Reality and the Physical Reality or the Virtual Space and the Physical Space and many more, are circulating and – at least for me – they lack specification.

Img.3 [3] Mashable, U.S. Adults Spend 11 Hours

PeDay With Digital Media, 2014

Asking Wikipedia – which has developed to be our main research tool – it confirms that these

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definitions and distinctions are still very blurry.

Searching for ‘Virtual Space’ you automatically get redirected to the article about virtual reality, which is mainly circulating around simulated empirical experiences mediated through digital gadgets. ‘Physical Space’ redirects you to the general article about ‘space’, following up with a philosophical and mathematical derivation defining the term. The words ‘Online’ and ‘Offline’ even direct you to the same article. ‘Analog’ and ‘Digital’ evoke a long list of suggested articles circulating around the manifoldness of the topic.

Img.4

This Wikipedia search already gives evidence to the fact that we still miss the appropriate understanding and vocabulary to talk about the 21st century environment setup we are living in. These definitions are widely insufficient and neglect the way in which cultural life and social relations have changed. Virtual reality is much more than simulated empirical experiences.

On- and offline describe a state of human’s exist-

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ence. It is a world with its own rules. Due to this missing understanding, the virtual space very often still gets experienced as an obstacle, which we like to separate from our understanding of reality. W e ’ r e s u r r o u n d e d b y s y s t e m s , devices and machineries generating h e a p s o f r a w g r a p h i c n o v e l t y. W e b u i l t them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and prov o c a t i v e t h i n g s . [4] As human operating systems –which we don‘t really understand better than the OS X version running our MacBook – we are placed in front of an interconnected never pausing networking system. There we are dared to manage meaningful parts of our lives, which has a great affect on us in any level. [ 4 ] B r u c e S t e r l i n g , A n E s s a y o n t h e N e w Aesthetic, WIRED Magazine, 2012

To to be able to find appropriate solutions for the coming together of these two spaces, we have to be aware of this status quo. To clarify this, the following chapter will investigate the specific qualities of these two spaces, their relation to each other and the challenges introduced by them. A short definition and the evolution of the Internet with its new symptoms will build the foundation for this investigation. Since we are

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used to our physical environment, I will focus my examination on the workings of virtual space. In contemporary discussions you are faced with an abundance multiplicity of constantly recurring new concepts like the Death of the Author[5], collectivity, viral distribution, endless reproduction, network, remix and prosumer culture and collaborative experiences, which I will underline.

It will become obvious, that the attempt to define them separately, will quickly appear superficial.

Img.5 [ 5 ]  

R o l a n d B a r t h e s , T h e D e a t h o f t h e A u t h o r, 1967

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The physical space is what we are traditionally and historically used to. It is what we rely on and what our whole culture and system of values is based on.The physical world is coined by sensorial and immediate, primary experiences. There we can touch, smell, taste and have inter-human relationships. We can love and hate. It is finity, subjected by corporal restrictions. It is coined by physical architecture, analog objects and machineries like books, cameras and posters, established political systems, concepts like borders, nations, united associations and a highly organised (capitalistic) economy. It describes all structures happening offline all digital media in our concrete ‘physical’ environment.

The Dual Presence

The virtual space, in comparison, functions as an attachment, added on to physical space.

It builds up some form of virtual extension.

It is internationally connected – overcoming concepts like national borders – and it is accessible. It is way faster, more fluent, diffuse and infinity. The virtual space got introduced with the rise of technology leading to the Internet with its highly complex architecture. The experience of virtual space is always dependent on technology and a multiplicity of digital devices, like the iPhone and computer screens. These gadgets function

Img.6

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[6] Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post Internet, 2010

Img.7

as architectural gates into this new environment. Here the sub-architecture is built up by an almost endless amount of interactive interfaces, which are again formed by a sub-sub-architecture consisting of images, sound and language.[6] The virtual space is a space of mediation and representation instead of immediate experience. It commits the viewer’s gaze to a screen and opens up a community of avatars.

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partners, go to the bathroom, etc.

[7] In the beginning of the 21st century a new development on the Internet was noticeable suggesting an even newer version of the web: the idea of the ‘Web 2.0’[8].

This dual presence is the outcome of a huge development. While the Internet emerged as a US commissioned military communication network within the cold war in the 1960s, it exponentially grew over the last decades until it reached today’s enormous scale.

The development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks during the 1980s at that time opened up a worldwide participation, expanding its usability for Img.8 academic personnel. By the 1990s the web [ 7 ] G e n e M c H u g h , P o s t I n t e r n e t , p . 5 , 2 0 1 1 spread world wide and became internation[ 8 ] c o i n e d b y D a r c y D i N u c c i a n d p o p u l a r i z e d ally commercialised and popularised incor b y Ti m O ’ R e i l l y a t t h e O ’ R e i l l y M e d i a

Web 2.0 conference in late 2004 porating every aspect of human life into virtuality. This expansion caused t h e s h i f t o f t h e I n t e r n e t t o a m a i n s t r e a m w o r l d This concept of the Web 2.0 doesn’t refer to i n w h i c h A L O T o f p e o p l e r e a d t h e another technical revolution, but instead n e w s p a p e r, p l a y g a m e s , m e e t s e x u a l describes a socio-technical transformation

The Evolution of the Internet

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On some general level, the rise of social networking and the professionalisation of web design reduced the technical nature of network computing, shifting the Internet from a specialised world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologicallyminded, and grandmas and sportfans and business people

of the World Wide Web from being a mostly static and passive platform engaging to a participatory, collaborative and democratic ‘playground’ open for every kind of user.

Gene McHugh, an American based writer and curator and the founder of the art criticism blog Post-Internet characterises this democratisation as follows: Today’s interfaces like social networking sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, web applications, hosted service and video sharing sites don’t speak a highly encoded language anymore, instead they speak the language of their public audience. It h a s q u i c k l y g r o w n f r o m a niche ‘hipster’ phenomenon to a mainstream position – one which is likely to have a serious impact on all cultural and business practices based on networked electronic d e v i c e s a n d I n t e r n e t s e r v i c e s . [10] This transformation caused an economic shift from a self-run alternative and experimental platform to a corporate, capitalised mainstream service. Marisa Olsen, new media artist, and Gene McHugh, even pushed the idea of this communal integration fur-

and painters and everyone else.

H e r e c o m e s e v e r y b o d y. [9]

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The term ‘post-digital’ can be used to describe either a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has b e c o m e h i s t o r i c a l . [12]

ther when they coined, related to art, the term of a ‘Post-Internet’ status around 2008.

This term might sound controversial in the sense that we are far away from being ‘after’ the Internet, from being offline again. But instead of intending to describe a total aversion, it points to a state in time w h e n t h e Internet is less a novelty and more a b a n a l i t y. [11] Florian Cramer is describing the same development in his essay referring to it as p o s t - d i g i t a l : Img.9

[ 9 ] [ 1 0 ]

[ 1 1 ] [ 1 2 ]

Gene McHugh, Post Internet, p.5 , 2011 F l o r i a n C r a m e r, W h a t i s P o s t - d i g i t a l , APRJA Journal, 2014 Gene McHugh, Post Internet, p.16, 2011 F l o r i a n C r a m e r, W h a t i s P o s t - d i g i t a l , APRJA Journal, 2014

This stage of the Internet ultimately stopped being a possibility, constitutes the foundation for every cultural behaviour nowadays. But how does it do so? What is determining the virtual space?

The Symptoms of Virtuality Examining the different mechanisms of this participatory Internet world, I would like to start with the notion of the author. These interactive interfaces, like social networking sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, web applications, hosted services and video sharing sites, which I would like to consolidate under the term ‘templates’, evoke a multiplication of new online activities. Nowadays we are overly fond of blogging and re-blogging, twittering, copy- and pasting, liking, sharing and posting. Authorship becomes a ubiquitous activity instead of being an outstanding privilege which consequently revokes its importance. 1967 Roland Barthes, a French literary critic and theorist, already published an essay with the title The Death of the Author, where he introduced a meaningful reversal from the traditional and also capitalistic understanding of the author being the subject of a literary piece towards t h e r e a d e r i s t h e v e r y s p a c e [13]. His essay ends with an impulsive claim: t h e b i r t h o f t h e r e a d e r m u s t b e r a n s o m e d b y t h e d e a t h o f t h e a u t h o r [14]. Back then Barthes already emphasised that the meaning of literature doesn’t lie in the subjective view of the author but rather within the performance of language at its destination – the reader. The virtual world even enhances and encourages this reversal. The access to authorial tools is not limited to any restrictions anymore. All participatory templates like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter empower you to author. Taking Wikipedia as an example, authorship not only becomes ubiquitous but also collective. It transforms into a participatory process. Wikipedia as the most popular dictionary – even if its substance is questionable – allows the user not only to author an article but also to re-author and reedit these articles in favor of completion.

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The relevance of the author disappears behind an open source collective commodity. [ C ] u l t u r e P o s t - I n t e r n e t i s m a d e u p o f r e a d e r- a u t h o r s w h o b y necessity must regard all cultural output as an idea or work in progress able to be taken u p a n d c o n t i n u e d b y a n y o f i t s v i e w e r s .[15] This shift of course is not limited to Wikipedia but adaptable to many other infrastructures. Nowadays Barthes statement transforms to ‘the performance is the very space’?! [ 1 3 ] R o l a n d B a r t h e s , T h e D e a t h o f t h e A u t h o r , 1 9 6 7 [ 1 4 ] I b i d . [ 1 5 ] A r t i e V i e r k a n t , T h e I m a g e O b j e c t P o s t I n t e r n e t , 2 0 1 0

This collective authorship naturally leads to the affiliation of the distinction between consumer and producer towards the figure of a P r o s u m e r [16]. Alvin Toffler introduced the term in 1980s. He was referring to a highly saturated marketplace, which was based on mass production and standardisation and initiated a process of customisation through the consumer. In a comparable way, the virtual templates ask for an active interaction. Not only as a process of customisation but also as the foundation of the workings. They evoke the user to fill in and offer, within the frameworks of pre-programmed basic conditions, a space for individuality – even though it is mainly seductive. In this way the user not only consumes but also produces content. Google Maps for example offers a picture- next to its satellite-mapping-service. Members can use Google’s technology to locate and capture images of personal meaningful places. They are enabled to make their own memories openly accessible by adding them to the scientific content. The role from being a passive to an active actor is shifting almost naturally. As Dutch artist Constant Dullaart states:

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We live in a representation of a world which we can influence in ways never i m a g i n e d . L e t ’ s d o s o p e r f o r m a t i v e l y. [17] In this sense the user becomes an editor, a critic, a translator. This fusion is not only affecting us on a domestic level, it likewise dissolves the traditional hierarchy between the professional and the amateur. The virtual space is a DIY – Do It Yourself – structure. Every user has almost the same abilities. On self-publishing websites like lulu.com everybody can print and publish a book, while sitting in front of the screen. The mechanism of (re-)posting, (re-)blogging and linking provide a communal possibility of endless distribution, which has to be highlighted as another key factor of virtual space. Websites like cafepress.com enable you to design your own products. Airbnb.com commodifies private space and transforms everybody to a hotelier.

The ‘maker culture’ is fed by a numerous websites and tutorials teaching you how to do things on your own like a professional usually would do for you. Ask YouTube and it will tell you everything. On the Internet you can be everybody!

Img.10 [ 1 6 ] A l v i n To f f l e r, T h e T h i r d W a v e , 1 9 8 0 [ 1 7 ] C o n s t a n t D u l l a a r t , C o n s t a n t D u l l a a r t : 1 0 0 , 0 0 0

Followers for Everyone, DIS Magazine, 2014

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The popularisation of photography drastically increased the power of the image. Whereas in the past photography was a privileged stance for professionals, nowadays everybody is surrounded by high-end quality tools. Even the iPhone can take HD photos and record high quality film sequences. Susan Murray, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU, explains the shift with exactly this availability: [P]hotography has become less about the special or rarefied moments of domestic/ family living (for such things as holidays, gatherings, baby photos) and more about an immediate, rather fleeting display of o n e ’s d i s c o v e r y o f t h e s m a l l a n d m u n d a n e (such as bottles, cupcakes, trees, debris, a n d a r c h i t e c t u r a l e l e m e n t s ) . [18] Through that, the internet is over-populated with transient ‘everyday images’, which can be almost fully categorised in collective trends – ‘memes’ – following communal aesthetics: food, duck-faces, cats, legs etc.. Photo streams function as metaphorical representations of our identities, which can be consciously constructed and corrected.

(Re-)posted and (re-)shared images evoke a new form of communication and storytelling. In virtual space digital images replace our traditional word based language gaining a complete new power. They appear in various states, as a cartoon, a gif, an animation and create a p e r p e t u a l i c o n o c l a s m [19]. Hito Steyerl, Berlin based artist and writer, highly engaged in new media discourses, describes this as follows:

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They incarnate as riots or products, as lens flares, high-rises, or pixelated tanks. Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space. They invade cities, transforming spaces into sites, and reality into r e a l t y. T h e y m a t e r i a l i z e a s j u n k s p a c e , military invasion, and botched plastic s u r g e r y. T h e y s p r e a d t h r o u g h a n d b e y o n d networks, they contract and expand, they stall and stumble, they vie, they v i l e , t h e y w o w a n d w o o . [20]

I m g . 11

The digital image transforms to a p o o r i m a g e , just being a g h o s t o f a n i m a g e , a p r e v i e w, a t h u m b n a i l , a n e r r a n t i d e a .[21] Uploaded, s q u e e z e d t h r o u g h slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and p a s t e d i n t o o t h e r c h a n n e l s o f d i s t r i b u t i o n [22], it is downgraded to a fraction of its quality, but upgraded to an enormous social power. Accordingly, the value of the digital image doesn’t lie in its high-end resolution anymore, but in its velocity and accessibility. The poor quality states the number of people who cared enough to convert it over and over.[23] Following Hito Steyerl, this also evokes the aversion from the originary original:

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The poor image is no longer about the real thing – the originary original.

Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is a b o u t c o n f o r m i s m a n d e x p l o i t a t i o n . [24] [ 1 8 ] S u s a n M u r r a y, D i g i t a l I m a g e s , P h o t o - S h a r i n g ,

and our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics,

Journal of Visual Culture, 2008 [ 1 9 ] A r t i e V i e r k a n t , T h e I m a g e O b j e c t P o s t I n t e r n e t , 2 0 1 0 [ 2 0 ] H i t o S t e y e r l , To o M u c h W o r l d : I s t h e I n t e r n e t D e a d ? ,

e-flux Journal #49, 2013 [ 2 1 ] H i t o S t e y e r l , I n D e f e n s e o f t h e P o o r I m a g e ,

e-flux Journal #10, 2011 [22] Ibid. [ 2 3 ] I b i d . [ 2 4 ] I b i d .

Virtual space transforms imagery but also other forms of content to a communal commodity. Through its open source character the process of production and distribution drastically strengthens the relevance of contextualisation. D a t a , s o u n d s , a n d i m a g e s a r e n o w routinely transitioning beyond screens into a d i f f e r e n t s t a t e o f m a t t e r. [25] The same content can be endlessly reproduced, appropriated, repurposed and mutated overcoming the concept of copyright limitation; drag and drop, copy and paste. Content is no longer static instead it becomes a collaborative process towards viral dissemination. They can get ordered through a ‘human’ fetishism, collection, memory, flow, taste signification, as well as through mechanical algorithms and technical features like tags, groups and batches. [26] The same content can find itself remixed in various states of existence,

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assigned with different meaning. Digital hashtags are the embodiment of this remix culture. They are empowered to create different, sometimes even controversial, associations and to even form social communities. One example for this is the Tumblr Someone Ate This, which is a collection of bad food photography, here used as a negative example, but originally intended to be the very opposite.

Of course this is a very innoxious example, but this re-contextualisation can likewise be used for more controversial purposes. [ 2 5 ]  

[26]

H i t o S t e y e r l , To o M u c h W o r l d : I s t h e I n t e r n e t D e a d ? , e-flux Journal #49, 2013 S u s a n M u r r a y, D i g i t a l I m a g e s , P h o t o - S h a r i n g , and our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics, Journal of Visual Culture, 2008

This (re-)contextualisation always seeks for attention, which becomes another symptom of virtual space. The more a digital object is appropriated, reused and shared, the more people can access it, and the more valuable it is.

Attention, as the online currency, becomes the dominating and selecting factor. Agreeing with American artist Artie Vierkant, today’s attention seems to overshadow itself: [ A ] t t e n t i o n h a s a l w a y s b e e n a c u r r e n c y, but with the proliferation of networking methods and infinitely alterable and reproducible media, that attention has diverged and become split amongst anyone and everyone who wishes to seek i t . [27] Today fishing for fandom, fishing for likes determines everybody. People document and expose every little detail

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of their daily lives and their most profane activities to gain some courtesy – which works surprisingly well I have to say. The most stupid videos and jokes are going viral, seen by millions of people all over the world. The status of being a celebrity, of being a personal of communal interest and attention, is not limited to a certain circle anymore.

The virtual space is a stage for everybody providing the opportunity for – at least temporary – fame. This attention overload consequently brings a new form of equalization, ‘attention homogeneity’. When everybody is famous, nobody is famous anymore. [ T ] h e e x t r a o r d i n a r y i s n o w a l s o t h e o r d i n a r y – t h e m y t h i s a l s o t h e e v e r y d a y. [28] This cannot only be applied to people’s social statuses but also to other specifics. The accomplishment that we are able to virtually travel the whole world via Google Earth sitting in front of our computers for example became very fast quite quotidian as reading a book.

[27] Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post Internet, 2010 [28] Ibid.

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Looking at all these symptoms regarding authorship, copyright, ‘prosumership’, distribution and contextualisation it becomes more than obvious that all of them are related and dependent on each other. They do much more. Since the physical space builds the foundation for this enhancement and we, as human beings, are the executive power of all virtual happenings, the effect of these symptoms also overreaches virtual borders. Virtuality affects physicality and vice versa. This correlation becomes evident by just looking at some simple examples.

On the one hand, as it is an extension, the virtual space picks up on physical formations.

Starting very formal, digital devices and interfaces imitate physical structures. To make them understandable they are assigned with

The Encounter of Virtual And Physical Space analog references, a n t h r o p o m o r p h i s e d and described as having ‘thought’, ‘memory’, and nowadays ‘sight’ and ‘ h e a r i n g ’ . [29] Apple’s design, for example, relies on haptic, physical motions – you sweep between pages and you stretch to zoom in. The Instagram filters, you can use to individualise your pictures, imitate the effects of age-old analog cameras. Drop shadows are trying to simulate three-dimensionality.

More meaningful, it likewise takes over social factors. As a simulation of your existence as (physical) individual, you have different avatars representing yourself. Facebook connects people and is a place for social relationships. Being connected is called ‘friendship’ and if you wish for somebody’s attention you can ‘poke’ him or her. Through online banking you can manage your monetary belongings. Trading venues like Amazon enable you to purchase everything you wish for.

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[29] Bruce Sterling, An Essay on the New Aesthetic, WIRED Magazine, 2012

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On the other hand, analog mechanisms also respond to digital media structures. The identity you construct online, influence your appearance in the physical space. Employers for example look up Facebook profiles of their employees. Pictures you show on Flickr make your interests evaluate. Online dating ends in physical inter-human relationships. The illegal downloads of a movie, which is possible because of the open source culture, gets

Code as a written text, deep within a computer or presented o n s c r e e n o r p a p e r, e n c o m p a s s e s a potential activity that cannot be grasped from a literal reading or retinal observation alone.

Code is perceived through its products, as screen-based results of software, or through its effects within physical e n v i r o n m e n t , o r b o t h . [30]

rewarded with a monetary penalty. A navigation app based on augmented reality, guides us through the city pinpointing ‘places of interest’, mixing both layers. Most obviously, we shouldn‘t forget the most evident dependence. Any form of coded virtuality is always bound to a mediating – physical – device and peoples’ directed attention.

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Reality itself is post-produced and scripted, affect rendered a s a f t e r- e f f e c t . F a r f r o m being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image

Somehow virtuality always reincarnates as a physical product. This illustrates, that even if both spaces are ruled by partly controversial characteristics and valuations, they are more than bound to the other. O n e c a n n o t u n d e r s t a n d r e a l i t y w i t h o u t u n d e rstanding cinema, p h o t o g r a p h y, 3D modeling, animation or other forms of moving or still images.

[31] It becomes impossible to separate them.

Contemporaneous space has to be seen as the synopsis of physical and virtual space and, accordingly, reality as the assembly of all constellations and ramifications of them. I totally agree with Hito Steyerl when she writes: The encounter of these two different spaces evidently has introduced – and still does – a lot mutations and challenges for our cultural system. To understand this as a whole seems to be the first challenge in the present age.

I think it is the first step, which enables us to acknowledge necessary reconsiderations.

Until we do not really understand the nature of our contemporary reality, we cannot be aware of its problems and its distinctive need to make suitable adaptations and reformula-

and world [physical and virtual world] are in many cases just v e r s i o n s o f e a c h o t h e r. T h e y a r e n o t e q u i v a l e n t s h o w e v e r, b u t deficient, excessive, and uneven i n r e l a t i o n t o e a c h o t h e r.

And the gap between them gives way to speculation and intense a n x i e t y. [32]

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tions. Until then we will probably keep fighting against its benefits, like we do today, affecting every part of life like sciences, politics, social relations and the very individual. Looking at the way we use Facebook, it displays a huge discrepancy between our online identity and the person we are in physical space. We are constantly overwhelmed by the effects of this and that we have to ‘physically’ avow for what we do online. Another great example for this dissonance are regulations determining copyright, property and accessibility of online content. We restrict information and sources, which actually could float freely and be beneficial for everyone. This might be a very mundane example, but instead of finding a way to make movie streaming possible, we make it illegal. Of course this leads way further and gets very comprehensive. One just has to think of Wikileaks as a highly politicised outcome of this discrepancy totally questioning

our established system. This in mind, I do not state the end of a distinction between these two spaces. On the contrary, due to their different nature it is all the more important to be aware of their different requirements and benefits – it is existential! Our contemporary challenge exists in the dismissal of a spatial hierarchy and, simultaneously, the rise of a medium-specific awareness. Through this we can speculate on consequences and an appropriate handling and eliminate arisen gabs: How can we use both spaces according to their benefits? I f i m a g e s c a n b e shared and circulated, why can’t e v e r y t h i n g e l s e b e t o o ? [33] Might we have to think of a totally new system? From this point of view, we can also reconsider the status of contemporary art world. How does art have to adapt being an object of this transformation?

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[ 3 0 ] J o s e p h i n e B o s m a , P o s t - D i g i t a l i s P o s t S c r e e n – To w a r d s a N e w V i s u a l A r t , 2 0 1 3 [ 3 1 ] H i t o S t e y e r l , To o M u c h W o r l d : I s t h e

Internet Dead?, e-flux Journal #49, 2013 [32] Ibid. [ 3 3 ] I b i d .

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The Status-Quo of Contemporary Art

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After having talked about the symptoms of our two-faced, interlaced and twisted reality and the versatility of space, it is obvious that contemporary art takes place in a very miscellaneous and undefined environment. This encourages various heated discussions about the workings and determining values of the art scene nowadays.

These circulate around the question of how to relate art within this new sense of virtuality and media-confinement to traditional protagonists like (art) history, institutions, economy and technology. Art has always been a part of and a reflection on historical events and evolution; but at the moment, it not only needs to be ‘historically aware’ and ‘societally aware’ it also, adopting the term of Internet artist Guthrie Lonergan, needs to be I n t e r n e t A w a r e [34]. In his essay titled What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement Canadian Artist Ian Wallace explains this state by fittingly declaring a need for a focused engagement with the new here and now: Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully d i s e n ga ge fro m t h e o l d er g en erat i o n ’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their o w n c r e a t i v e t o o l s a n d p l a t f o r m s . [35]

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Accordingly, they have to understand the specific ramifications and new influences of this contemporary environment into the visual arts to live up to their contemporaneous zeitgeist. With this, Ian Wallace introduces the particular and highly discussed art movement labeled Post-Internet-Art. Consequently this label is based on Marisa Olsen’s idea of being in a state after the Internet – ‘Post Internet’ – and tries to delineate a range of contemporaneous artists from their contemporaries. It makes the attempt to assemble a range of artists whose work directly reacts on the switches in contemporary culture. They make art precisely addressing this part of everyday culture, which [ … ] i s n o t g o i n g t o b e p u r e s t r i c t I n t e r n e t a r t , i t ’s g o i n g t o b e a r t t h a t e x i s t s b e c a u s e o f t h e I n t e rnet or is influenced by the Internet or there was research on the Internet.

[36] Even if the term leads to plenty of discussion

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at the moment and might seem a little radical, it helps to clarify further investigation. It likewise distinguishes this new form of art from former formations of Internet Art coming up in the 90s.

To explain the position and the proceedings of this new art movement in his essay The Image Object Post Internet Post-Internet, which is broadly reviewed as the manifest of this development, Artie Vierkant relates it to two former developments: 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 practiced) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of

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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 a n d d i s s e m i n a t i o n . [37] Of course the relations to former art history are more fanned out, but to understand the nature of this new artistic movement Vierkant’s embedding works as a helpful distinguishing factor.

To sharpen this, it is necessary to have a closer look at the ideas of both conceptualism and new media art. [ 3 4 ] T h o m a s B e a r d , I n t e r v i e w w i t h G u t h r i e Lonergan, Rhizome, 2008 [ 3 5 ] I a n W a l l a c e , W h a t i s P o s t - I n t e r n e t A r t ?

Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement, Artspace, 2014 [ 3 6 ] G e n e M c H u g h , P o s t - I n t e r n e t , p . 1 3 , 2 0 1 1 [ 3 7 ] A r t i e V i e r k a n t , T h e I m a g e O b j e c t P o s t Internet, 2010

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In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions

Starting in the 1960s conceptualism highlights an artistic movement in which the idea and conception of an artwork – mostly in form of a text or an image – was involved to take over precedence traditional aesthetics and the physical substrate. This development includes artists like Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Joseph Kosuth, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Pioneering protagonist of this era Sol LeWitt defined this movement as following:

An Art Historical Embedding

Many of the works originated in this context abandon the mechanic, originary creation of an art object by the artist. Instead they are based on immaterial material of language and become constructed by the spectator.

A distinctive work of this movement, exemplifying it, is Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs from 1965. The work is composed through a chair, a picture of a chair and the encyclopedia definition of a chair. With this Kosuth investigates objectivity and its different forms of manifestation above physicality.

He questions the meaning of the immaterial, so that the artwork overreaches its physical substrate. It´s less about the chair than the idea of a chair. As a very characteristic ges-

are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory a f f a i r. T h e i d e a b e c o m e s a m a c h i n e t h a t m a k e s t h e a r t . [38]

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[ 3 8 ] S o l L e W i t t , P a r a g r a p h s o n C o n c e p t u a l Art, Artforum, 1967

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ture, a lot of Conceptual Art is even reduced to immaterial instructions – Scores – which are dependent on the spectator’s performance. In this sense conceptualism highly questions the traditional nature of art, also introducing the idea of ready-made-objects

by Marcel Duchamp. All of a sudden the artist was able to transform ordinary manufactured objects into an art work by the methodology of selection.

New Media Art, including the ‘Net Art’ movement, came about at the end of the 20th century. New Media Art is a genre that describes a wave of artistic projects, which are based on new media technologies including computer graphics, animations, computer roboticisms, biotechnology and video games. By using these tools as artistic material these works differentiated themselves from traditional artistic objects like oil paintings.

Net Art in particular is a form of technology based art that arose in 1994. Members of this movement are artists like Vuk Cosic, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting. As a circumvention of the traditional dominance of the institutional art system, Net Artists started making work on the Internet. Distributing their works via the Internet, they deliver channeled art experiences. For this, their work mostly takes over

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the form of Internet templates like websites, e-mail accounts, domains, video/audio/radio streaming, virtual worlds like Second Life, chat rooms and other networking environments. The Net artist Olia Lialina for example developed a net language by using the web as a broadcast channel. Entering her website you are overwhelmed by an eccentric, glittering assemblage of Internet aesthetics.

In her works like Agatha Appears and My Boyfriend Came Back From The War she uses the infrastructure of websites as a form of storytelling. As you navigate through web system, she more and more reveals a narrative. Net Art, as it took place at the upheaval of the Internet, probably can be described as particularly focused on the speciďŹ c workings and materiality of these evolving technologies.

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This question came up in an interview with the Internet artist Guthrie Lonergan in 2010 and perfectly leads to the question of the contemporaneous status-quo by totally exposing the question mark – or three of them – hovering over today’s art world. As well as, for example, postmodernists absorbed and adapted the strategies of modernism [40], many characteristics and influences of former movements, like New Media Art and Conceptualism in Post-Internet art, re-emerge today.

Of course, the contemporaneous art scene is

I n o n e r o w, f o r i n s t a n c e , w e h a v e ‘ N e t A r t 1 . 0 , ’ i n t h e o t h e r, ‘???’. Is it possible to articulate w h a t t h e ’ ? ? ? ’ i s n o w, o r d o e s i t r e m a i n , i n i t s o w n w a y, u n a n s w e r a b l e ? [39]

Art Post-Internet

This ‘new’ artists today, which are addressed with the label Post-Internet artist, come from a generation which has witnessed the incursion of virtuality. Growing up in this environment, this generation actively took part in its transformation of and experimentation with this process, They are the Digital Natives, who have played world of warcraft, had LANparties and encountered image-boards and surf clubs like 4Chan, Rotten and Nasty

[39] Thomas Beard, Interview with Guthrie Lonergan, Rhizome, 2008

very heterogeneous, and Post-Internet art is just one of many streams in there. What connects them all is that they are placed in the same environment, undermining the same influences. Post-Internet art, in this context, serves as the most distinctive one to investigate the power of virtuality, exposing a certain, very interesting attitude.

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Post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects.

And while earlier Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online, the post-

Nets. Since digitisation became such a self-evident factor, the twentieth-century modernism interest in pure technological experiments and t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n craft and the emergent technologies of manufacturing, mass media, a n d l e n s b a s e d i m a g e r y [41] decreased.

Instead Post-Internet artists are moved by greater societal and anthropological ramifications and challenges of this new two-sided world.  As Ian Wallace declares, this distinguishes them from Net Art: Post Internet artist stand on the shoulders of Net Art giants l i k e O l i a L i a l i n a , Vu k C o s i c , and JODI, not in order to lift themselves higher into the thin atmosphere of pure online presence but rather to crush the past and reassemble the

Following Wallace you can instantly read the impulse of Post-Internet artists to break with the past. Mark Tribe, artist and founder of the Rhizome platform, encourages this advancement in an Interview with ‘Art in America’:

Internet generation (many of whom have been plugged into the Web since they could walk) frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that e x i s t i n t h e r e a l w o r l d . [42]

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In a traditional sense – which sometimes is even perceived as a regression – Post-Internet art often reformats as paintings, sculptures, videos, performances and prints and reinterprets these in a contemporary way.

Their artworks float as conjunctions between the two poles, as crossovers between the virtual and the physical part of reality. Virtual space and its techniques shift from being a self-purpose to a methodology. Physical, social, spatial and conceptual ramifications of code and digitisation are getting transformed into objects of art, stressing and visualizing everyday phenomenon, which fly past us with the very high pace of contemporary culture.

Following the press release of one of the first and greatest Post-Internet-Art exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in

fragments in strange on/offline h y b r i d f o r m s . [43]

A broad survey of art that is controversially defined as ‘post-internet’, which is to s a y, c o n s c i o u s l y c r e a t e d i n a milieu that assumes the centrality of the network, and that often takes everything from the physical bits to the social ramifications of t h e i n t e r n e t a s f o d d e r. F r o m the changing nature of the image to the circulation of cultural objects, from the politics of participation to new understandings of m a t e r i a l i t y, t h e i n t e r v e n t i o n s

Beijing in 2013, which was curated by Robin Peckham and Karen Archey and even titled Art Post-Internet, they describe their assembly as:

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By tackling new constellations and objects encountered in our daily life this movement rises the very necessary awareness of the contemporary status-quo and goes even further by pushing the speculative dialogue on a future which is hardly imaginable. They are aware and concerned with questions of mediation, of adaptation and of differentiation thinking about new and appropriate medium-specific ways of originating, presenting and distributing. Being contemporary this societal symptoms like participatory and ubiquitous authorship, collective distribution, the comprehensive prosumer culture, the avoidance of physical space and the flourish of the image have to be considered as part of their work, or as con-

presented under this rubric attempt nothing short of the redefinition of art for the age o f t h e i n t e r n e t . [44]

[ 4 0 ]

[ 4 1 ]

[42]

[ 4 3 ]

Ian Wallace, What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement, Artspace, 2014 Press Release, Art Post-Internet, UCCA Beijing, 2013 Ian Wallace, What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement, Artspace, 2014 I n t e r v i e w w i t h M a r k Tr i b e , A r t i n America Magazine

sciously left out. They urge us to reconsider established ideas and a conception we are so comfortable with; concerning ideas like the nature of the art work, its originality, consistence and methodology, the exhibition space and its uniqueness and whiteness as a place of distribution, the division of the role of the corresponding protagonists, like the artist himself, the spectator and the curator, and its place in society. To understand this, it’s necessary to individually explore these elements by reviewing their attributes, investigating their present raison d’être.

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[ 4 4 ]   P r e s s R e l e a s e , A r t P o s t - I n t e r n e t ,

UCCA Beijing, 2013

The Art Object Talking about the new nature of the art object today one often hears people in contemporary art world lamenting ‘the loss of the art object’. Since post-production tools are public commodity and the ‘poor image’ has almost replaced our word based language, we live in a visually dominated world, a world of iconoclasm. While the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler in 1969 wrote: T h e w o r l d i s f u l l o f objects, more or less interesting, I do not w i s h t o a d d a n y m o r e . Nowadays, he would have to reframe this statement: ‘The world is full of images, more or less interesting, I do not wish to add any more.’ Significantly, one doesn’t need the artist anymore as the source of all visual creation. On the Internet all forms of creative production are similarly circumscribed. I t b e c o m e s mass postproduction in an age of crowd crea t i v i t y. To d a y a l m o s t e v e r y o n e i s a n a r t i s t .

[45] As well as the hierarchy between the consumer and producer, amateur and professional is blurred, this also narrows down the division between art and the everyday object. In an interview with Rhizome Guthrie Lonergan describes this evidence as follows: My whole art practice and art world grew out of intense Internet surfing, collecting and trading links on del.icio.us… Part of i t i s t h e f e e l i n g t h a t t h e r e ’s s o m u c h s t u f f out there already that it seems pointless to m a k e s o m e t h i n g n e w, f r o m s c r a t c h – w h i c h is p e r h a ps a bi t o f a cl i ch é resp o n se , b u t n o t untr u e . T h e e p h em eral n at u re o f t he I nt e r ne t insp i r e s a ki n d o f d i sresp ect f o r o b j e c t s – f o r w h o l e , p e r f e c t , ‘ c r e a t e d ’ t h i n g s . [46]

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By juxtaposing amateur material Lonergan’s work explores the blurriness between amateurism and expertise, along with defaults and specialisations. In one of his projects he isolates the intro sections of online found amateur music videos posted on the networking platform Myspace. One of these extractions is showing a girl named Teezy Baby, introducing her video by a 1:23 min monolog while posing in front of the laptop camera.

[45]

[ 4 6 ]  

H i t o S t e y e r l , To o M u c h W o r l d : I s t h e I n t e r n e t D e a d ? , e-flux Journal #49, 2013 Thomas Beard, Interview with Guthrie Lonergan, Rhizome, 2008

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Keeping this in mind, the virtual space, as a community space, functions as an information and material resource.

Collecting and remixing found digital material, as a very contemporary everyday activity, becomes a distinctive method of creation in Post-Internet art and a new form of storytelling. When German art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen describes this as a k i n d o f T V e f f e c t i n t h e a r t s p a c e [47], she exposes a possible side-effect of this. Basing their work on this digital material naturally evokes a certain aesthetic, the aesthetic of the web. The Australian artist Joe Hamilton creates a Hyper Geography on his eponymous Tumblr, celebrating this. By collaging a multiplicity of found images he creates a form of digital landscape of Internet aesthetics, which you can travel by

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scrolling through his blog. The accompanied video pieces take the viewer on a guided tour through his, in this case three dimensional, juxtaposed environment.

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This appropriation not only concerns the repurpose of found digital materials like images and texts, it integrates the use of existing online templates in order to create an artistic outcome. One great example for this is the exhibition Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship firstly shown at Higher Pictures gallery in New York in 2012. This group show, featuring artists like Jaakko Pallasvuo, Constant Dullaart, Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant and many more, was, according to the press release, m e a n t t o c h a l l e n g e t r a d i t i o n a l notions of object production and material c o n s t r a i n t [48]. Every participating artist was asked to artistically author an object by only using one of the multiple online fabrication services. As a venue of self-expression, these on-demand services correlate the virtual and the physical space. As part of the exhibition you can find videos of all of the ordered art products on youtube, were you can watch how the delivered shipping boxes are getting unpacked. On this view, the intuitive and subjective artistic approach i s a b a n d o n e d f o r t h e s a k e o f a n interaction with the materials that structure o u r e v e r y d a y l i v e s [49] – the given templates –,

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following the attempt to pause the infinite stream of overproduction.

Referencing exactly to the idea of revaluation of the pre-existing the American poet Kenneth Goldsmith developed a theory called Uncreative Writing which revolutionises the concept of authorship based on the functioning of the Internet. Although his idea mostly concerns the practice of writing, it is equally transferable to contemporaneous visual art. Goldsmith claims that c o n t e x t i s t h e n e w c o n t e n t . [50] In his view the practice of the writer, or in this sense, of the artist, moves toward the practice of a programmer of moving information. By supporting the methodologies of sampling, processing, selecting, shifting, data basing, recycling, appropriating and mimicking he upraises plagiarism to the contemporary demand of authorship. Evoking new creative, or in this sense uncreative, strategies through new conditions, the digital environment replaces originality and creativity with manipulation and management. The originary production gives way for the production of social contexts.

Boris Groys has described this as biopolitical attempt to p r o d u c e a n d d o c u m e n t l i f e i t s e l f a s p u r e a c t i v i t y b y a r t i s t i c m e a n s [51]. [ 4 7 ] S u s a n n e v o n F a l k l e n h a u s e n , To o M u c h To o F a s t ,

Frieze #17, 2014 [ 4 8 ] P r e s s R e l e a s e B r a n d I n n o v a t i o n s f o r U b i q u i t o u s A u t h o r s h i p , H i g h e r P i c t u r e s G a l l e r y, 2 0 1 2 [ 4 9 ] S p e c u l a t i o n s o n A n o n y m o u s M a t e r i a l s ,

Fridericianum, Kassel, Mousse Magazine, 2013 [ 5 0 ] K e n n e t h G o l d s m i t h , U n c r e a t i v e W r i t i n g , p . 3 , 2 0 1 1 [ 5 1 ] B o r i s G r o y s , A r t i n t h e A g e o f B i o p o l i t i c s : F r o m

Artwork to Art Documentation, 2004

Another work I would like to refer to in this context is that of the Canadian artist Jon Rafman. Rafman became widely known for his photo project The Nine Eyes of Google

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Street View. Here he utilises the template of Google Street View, and in this sense the nine-eyed lens of Google’s camera, to capture photographs of bizarre and unique scenes from all over the world by just taking screenshots on his computer. This online taken photographs, even showing relicts of Google’s interface, are collected on an eponymous blog. In the institutional context of physical space, they are shown as photographic prints and as well are published as an analog photo book.

This project not only encourages the idea of the appropriation of everyday structures, but also serves as a good example how Post-Internet art objects transforms due to their place of presentation. By understanding contemporary reality in its entirety, art always has to consider its representation and distribution in both the virtual and the physical space. The fact that media objects don’t follow the same demands as physical objects forms the very challenge for the effectiveness of the work. In this sense Post-Internet Art doesn’t end with the creation of a static art objects anymore. It has to be considered a multiplicity of things determined by their medium of appearance.

Artie Vierkant declares this as the distinctive strategy of Post-Internet Art: The strategy employed by myself and others towards this physical relationship has been to create projects which move seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation, either changing for each context, built with a n i n t e n t i o n o f u n i v e r s a l i t y, o r c r e a t e d with a deliberate irreverence for either venue of transmission. In any case, the representation through image, rigorously

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controlled and edited for ideal viewing angle and conditions, almost always becomes the central focus. It is a constellation of formal-aesthetic quotations, self-aware of its art context and built to be shared and cited. It becomes the image o b j e c t i t s e l f . [52]

Img.18 [52] Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post Internet, 2010

Being the i m a g e o b j e c t i t s e l f Vierkant is stressing another very determining symptom of contemporaneous art object. The transformation of the artwork is not ending with its on- and offline version, but continues with its dissemination as art documentation. Gene McHugh notes this when he writes, that an artwork is post-internet w h e n the photo of the art object is more widely disp e r s e d [ & ] v i e w e d t h a n t h e o b j e c t i t s e l f . [53] Since representations are elementary for the virtual space, documentation becomes an important factor. Artworks produced today are not only accessible in the context of their place of exhibition and as limited documentations in a few selected art catalogs or related publications. Instead various documentations of them are getting implemented into virtual spheres. When in pre-Internet days technologies for distribution and (re-)production were restricted

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and the art object and it’s availability naturally was (more) exclusive. Following Boris Groys, a protagonist in today’s art and media theory, the a r t w o r l d h a s s h i f t e d i t s interest away from the artwork and towards a r t d o c u m e n t a t i o n . [54] By this t h e a r t m i r r o r s the very Web formats that support or produce it, just as they transitioned from a text-based blog format (Blogspot) to an image-based one ( C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t D a i l y a n d Tu m b l r ) a r o u n d t h e e n d o f t h e p a s t d e c a d e . [55] Contemporary Art Daily, an online d a i l y j o u r n a l o f I n t e r n a t i o n a l E x h i b i t i o n s , is one of the most famous examples for this development. Beginning in 2008 it started as an art blog with the simple goal of publishing at least one international art exhibition every day. Today the art blog has a great impact on contemporary art world. For contemporary publicity and fame it has become necessary for art world protagonists to be mentioned there.

Different from Contemporary Art Daily, some of these floating representations have different purposes. One outcome of this advent is the meme of the art selfie. DIS Magazine even devoted a column of their website to this phenomenon. On their site you can see hundreds of amateur self-portraits taken in front of an artwork with the hashtag #artselfie. Some of them document the whole work, others just show parts of it focusing on the face in front. Most of these photos are not even assigned with the title of the work or the artist’s name. They function as pure self-display, defining our appearance of online identity –since art still is acknowledged as a cultural valuable product – and just as a side-affect raise the availability of the work.

In an article titled Art After Social Media artist Brad Troemel describes this infiltrating notion conveniently as t h e L o n g Ta i l o f a r t ’ s v i e w e r s h i p [56]. Signifi-

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cantly, posted as a preview from the artist or the institutions, the representation mostly is even virtually available before it is physically. The phenomenon of this army of representatives has been made use of to its extreme by a group of artists, naming Georg Schnitzer, Aleksandra Domanovic, Christoph Priglinger and Oliver Laric. By starting a blog called Vvork, they created the ‘ultimate’ exhibition space. The blog not only functions as a huge online archive consisting of hundreds of art documentation images accompanied only by title, artist and year, it also serves mediated art experiences in an associative flow.

Changing the tag, you change your associative perception.

Vvork transforms the primary art experience into a mediated one.

Img.19 [ 5 2 ] [ 5 3 ] [ 5 4 ]

[ 5 5 ]

[ 5 6 ]

Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post Internet, 2010 Gene Mc Hugh, Post Internet, 2011, p.16 Boris Groys, Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation, 2004 M i c h a e l S a n c h e z , O n A r t A n d Tr a n s m i s s i o n , Artforum, 2013 B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w Yo r k M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3

Vvork was established to become a routine resource platform for informal research, which can be taken as an example for the fact, that these documentations, but also vir-

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tual works, are subjected to the symptoms of virtual space themselves. Everything inserted into virtual space becomes open source material and loses its singularity by being limitlessly reproducible, by being again appropriable, reusable, re-valuable and re-mixable. Following Goldsmith, art itself becomes the new content for any further contextualisation, encouraging the multiple nature of the art object. Subjected to the public audience they leave the status of the untouched piece and reincarnate in innumerable versions of the same, ending, following Troemel, in the very quotidian: I n t h e s e cases art is appropriated by non-artists as e n t e r t a i n m e n t , o f f i c e h u m o u r, a b a c k d r o p f o r a m u s i c v i d e o , o r p o r n o g r a p h y. [57] [ 5 7 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w Yo r k

M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3

Hito Steyerl, extends this to the greater perspective when she writes, that [f ] a r f r o m b e i n g o p p o s i t e s a c r o s s an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are i n m a n y c a s e s j u s t v e r s i o n s o f e a c h o t h e r. [58] With this Steyerl is referencing to the Berlin based artist Oliver Laric whose i n f o r m a t i o n d r i v e n v i d e o s a n d sculptures confound distinctions between real and fake, even making that effacement t h e i r s u b j e c t . [59] For one of his earlier works Touch my Body in 2008 Laric stripped Mariah Carey’s music video for the song of the same name of all but Mariah herself, and replaced the missing part with a green screen.

This can technically be replaced by any other background.

Laric’s video rather has to be understood as a participatory ‘game’. By placing it on Youtube he himself intends the work to be appropriated and modified by the ‘ordinary’ user/spectator addressing the symptom of collective

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authorship. Significantly, it is not Laric’s original video which is suggested as the first search result when searching this piece on youtube. Instead you find Mariah Carey exposing herself in front of various zombies associated with different movies, created by a random youtube user.

As a mimicry of an interactive template Laric’s work mirrors the architecture of the internet and encourages the aversion from a steady art object in favor of an infinite loop of viral circulation. It can be understand us an updated conceptualistic way of instructing.

Img.20

This nomadic nature of the art object, making virtuality the essential content, perpetuates the art work to obtain in our o n l i n e a t t e n t i o n e c o n o m y. [60] The w h o l e , p e r f e c t e d , ‘ c r e a t e d ’ t h i n g [61] reincarnates as an everyday-like image cultivating the disposition of indifference and lives up to the open field of contemporary means of communication, where the currency of attention is the predominating force. In this context Brad Troemel is coming up with the idea of Athletic Aesthetics, explaining the controversial shift of the art object as follows: T h e l o n g - d e r i d e d n o t i o n o f t h e ‘ m a s t e rpiece’ has reached its logical antithesis with the aesthete: a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid

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pro-duction.[…]Caring too much about any one item to the exclusion of the others readily available now seems t o j e o p a r d i s e t h e v i e w e r ’s a b i l i t y t o understand the whole. […]If the value of the masterpiece was found in its t i m e l e s s n e s s a n d m a t e r i a l s p e c i f i c i t y, t h e a e s t h e t e ’s a m b i t i o n i s t o e x i s t m o s t fully in the limited time and infinite s p a c e t o w h i c h t h e y c a n l a y c l a i m . [62]

Img.21

By defining the constant broadcast as the ideal mode of presentation, where the fluid relationship between several objects means more than the individual one, Troemel builds upon the idea of Marshall McLuhan, who claims in The Medium Is the Message in 1964: Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build s e r i a l l y, b l o c k - b y - b l o c k , s t e p - b y - s t e p , because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active i n t e r p l a y. [63]

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The production of the perfected masterpiece has to make way for the hyper-production of alterable ‘art templates’ – how I would like to call them accordingly. The art object becomes a democratized activity following an endless loop of circulation. [ 5 8 ] H i t o S t e y e r l , To o M u c h W o r l d : I s t h e I n t e r n e t D e a d ? ,

e-flux Journal #49, 2013 [ 5 9 ] P a b l o L a r i o s , I c o n o c l a s h , F R I E Z E # 1 6 1 , 2 0 1 4 [ 6 0 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013 [ 6 1 ] T h o m a s B e a r d , I n t e r v i e w w i t h G u t h r i e L o n e r g a n ,

Rhizome, 2008 [ 6 2 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013 [ 6 3 ] M a r s h e l l M c L u h a n , U n d e r s t a n d i n g M e d i a :

The Extensions of Man, 1964

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The Curatorial: The White Cube and The Curator As the nature of the Post-Internet art object is changing so drastically, this naturally scrutinises the traditional concept of exhibiting. Especially because distribution has become a main factor in artistic practice and is mostly part of the work itself, the role of the exhibition space and the role of the curator doesn’t seem so unique anymore.

Because of this volatilisation, I will approach both subjects of this in one investigation.

In Inside the White Cube Brian O’Doherty exposes the development of the gallery space and its transforming role.

Especially since the 20s the gallery has been the predominating exhibition space. Although the White Cube has to be understood as an aesthetic object itself, its environment is supposed to provide a place free of context, where time and space are excluded from the experience of the artwork. As a sacred space, the gallery can’t be understood as neutral but a historical construct and gesture, which automatically declares the exhibit to be an art object.

Since the value of an artwork isn’t defined by its originality anymore, but rather by its circulation and the attention given to it, the institutional exhibition appears as only one of the possibilities. As the one and only version it misses the aspect of transformation. In his essay Art After Social Media Brad Troemel describes this circumstance: To d a y, online, there is no more home base, no building or context that contains and describes art in a way that uniformly attributes meaning f o r a l l . [64] Nowadays, the Post-Internet art object, as meant by the artist, evolves as a hybrid between the virtual and the physical space – including the White Cube but not 1 0 5 P a g e s l e f t or excluding other options –; whether as a documentation

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digital version, whether passively or actively. Its almost automated circulation changes the act of ‘exhibiting’ to become less prestigious and less bound to the curator.

Curating images applied with narrative gesture becomes not dissimilar to our iconoclastic everyday experience. This becomes significantly clear if one looks at the inflationary use of the word ‘curating’ in our daily life.

Everybody, especially online, is talking about curating pictures, information, sources, food, clothing, everything.

Although the meaning is of course absolutely different and the curatorial is more than a selection of something, it signalises the contemporary challenge. The curatorial spills over to quotidian constellations, following the contemporary pull of the attention currency. As New York based artist Seth Price reveals in his essay Dispersion, this opens up a lot of questions: Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work?

Is it incumbent upon the consumer to b e a r w i t n e s s , o r c a n o n e ’s a r t e x p e r i e n c e derive from magazines, the Internet, b o o k s , a n d c o n v e r s a t i o n ? [65] As an outcome, online galleries started flourishing, attempting to avoid the institutional context. Some of them are in the hand of artists, some in the hand of curators and some in the hand of amateurs. As it is a very uncharted format, this galleries vary a lot in their conception. Oliver Laric provides An Incomplete Timeline

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of Online Exhibitions and Biennials on his website.

This timeline starts with the The Thing, initiated by an international net-community of artists in 1991. Based on the model of Joseph Beuys’s Social Sculpture, The Thing was set up as an independent art network consisting of a list of links. It was supposed to operate around the way distribution of that day, avoiding the institutional curatorial gesture. Covering exhibitions like the online biennials of Whitney Museum and Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin Second Life, a Second Life precursor of the temporary Kunsthalle Berlin, the lists ends in 2013 with The Wrong; a digital art biennial consisting of 30 pavilions lead by 30 curators, artists and organisations featuring more than 300 artists. Although it is a very long list, neglecting the year 2014 it probably misses the peak of this flux, which has become inflationary, more and more shifting towards a quotidian construct.

Evolving from simply designed websites and containing different variations of image galleries and links lists, there are online galleries with formats in all different kinds of experimental and innovative ways of conceptualisation and visualisation. The embedding in the Second Life template seems as an appropriated gesture following contemporary symptoms. The Gallery404, an open source browser-based 3D art gallery-forum, initiated by New York based artup company Art404, serves as another distinctive example. In a three-dimensional model of a white cube Art404 are exhibiting 3D reproductions of works by artists like Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and Barbara Kruger. By scrolling the visitor navigates through the simulated spaciousness while sitting in front of the screen. With this simulation the gallery not only presents an alternate, virtual way of exhibiting, it likewise questions the one-to-one transformability of physical into equally corresponding virtual

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structures. While we still miss a lot of the understanding and awareness of our contemporary environment, these attempts don’t have to provide the absolute claim of truth.

In this sense, they shouldn’t be received as the solution of all propositions. Contrary, in my opinion this re-localisation of the physical gallery structure into a virtual gallery structure, which claims to function in the same way, does not necessarily seem as the medium-adequate transformation. Taking Gallery404 as an example, although I think that it works a successful example for a self-referencing piece of the art world’s structure, these digital reproductions of world-famous artworks in this simulated 3D environment totally fails any attempt to reconstruct the physical, primary experience. Instead, it creates an alternate version of a mediated experience and exists next to the plain images of art documentation, which already is a form of exhibition.

Img.22 [ 6 4 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w Yo r k

M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3 [ 6 5 ] S e t h P r i c e , D i s p e r s i o n , 2 0 0 2

It is this shift, which is challenging the traditional idea of the curatorial the most and what has to be considered consciously by choosing a space. According to this, Hanna Mugaas, the director of the Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway, adduces a fitting example by comparing the relationship between the on- and offline experience of the

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art object/art documentation to the relationship between cinema and video: If a photograph of a print of a photograph is posted online, this mind-melt has a pretty good chance of being read a c c u r a t e l y ; i t ’s n o t a s u b s t i t u t e o f s e e i n g the print irl so much as an equally valuable parallel experience. Remember when the movie industry thought that video would kill cinema? It didn’t, but it did create a new kind of cinematic e x p e r i e n c e . [66] Mugaas’ example encourages the necessity to think about space-specific reactions. Adducing the almost unrestricted availability of the Internet, we definitely have to acknowledge the internationalism of virtual space as a beneficial enhancement. Art has never been so comprehensibly accessible before, which also benefits physical, nation-overreaching structures like biennials and fairs. At the same it opens up a dangerous trap. Not all art objects are equally made/fitting for both of these experiences. In this context I have to think about the work of German object artist Michael Sailstofer. His Popcorn Machine, like all his other pieces, is using the spectator’s perception of sound and smell as an element of the work. Until now, this physical experience cannot be empathised through a mediated experience. A documentation of this piece would always neglect an essential part of the work and, consequently, doesn’t seem appropriate.

As the counter-example, Moon, a browser-based work

by Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson, functions totally contradictorily. As a participatory work – template – Moon

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invites people from anywhere on Earth to connect through drawing. Visiting the website you can leave your drawing mark on a 3D animation of the moon. Moon exists beyond the art world, beyond national borders, beyond traditional ideas of authorship and value and beyond the traditional, institutional exhibition space. B y c o n n e c t i n g in spaces for imagination – by determining what to share and how to share it – we can create a greater outcome. Through messages and non-verbal communication, in a language unique to each person, the collective work becomes a testament to personal freedom, c r e a t i v i t y, a n d a c t i v i t y. [67] As so Moon precisely makes use of the mechanism and enhancements of virtual space and serves as a great example for a medium-aware piece made for the mediated experience. Likewise, it indicates the blurriness between the distribution of a work and the curatorial gesture. In this case, the online presentation of the work rather has to be considered part of the piece itself than as the act of exhibiting it in a traditional sense.

Img.23 [66] Beginning and Ends, Frieze #159, 2013 [ 6 7 ] h t t p s : / / w w w. m o o n m o o n m o o n m o o n . c o m / # s p h e r e

Next to the idea of online galleries, there are – and have to be – several other proposals on how to react to this contemporary form of reality outreaching the heroic White

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Cube. These efforts also involve the physical based dimensions. Museums, like the Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway, are integrating a certain online presence in their system of display. As an increasing trend, a lot of curatorial concepts mirror virtual symptoms, like the confrontation with overproduction of images. In her essay Digital Divide Claire Bishop investigates the influence of the Internet on the mainstream art world exemplifying Documenta 11: Documenta 11 (2002) was significant in many respects, not least of which was its inauguration of a tendency to include more work than the viewer could possibly see—in this case six hundred hours of film and video.[68]

Img.24

Referring to the inability of the museum’s collection to compete with the comprehensive archive of the Internet, Boris Groys proclaims the institutional aversion from an object-based orientation. Instead of concentrating on the thingness of the image the museum turns towards the investigation of the eventfulness of events.[69] In this sense, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, initiated the exhibition series Do It. With this series Obrist was following, stated in the introduction of the attendant compendium, t h e

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ongoing question of how to create dynamic institutional exhibition formats – something t h a t r e m a i n s u r g e n t t o d a y [70] and can compete with the accessibility of the Internet. To render the exhibition format more flexible and open-ended, Obrist uses a collection of instructions by several artists as the base for this circulating exhibition. According to their sovereignty the instructions can get executed equally regardless of their site of exhibition. With this Do It is placed between actualisation and virtualisation, repetition and difference and incorporates contemporary gestures. In the same way that the Internet has changed the exhibition mode to an site-unspecific on demand service, he transforms the physical equivalent accordingly. Rafaël Rozendaal does so likewise with his circulating open source one-night-exhibition-series BYOB, Bring Your Own Beamer. As everybody who is able to bring a beamer is invited to participate, the series becomes a communal activity. BYOB has already taken place all over the world, in places like Copenhagen, Cape Town, Sydney and Shanghai.

Img.25 [ 6 8 ] C l a i r e B i s h o p , D i g i t a l D i v i d e , A r t f o r u m , 2 0 1 2 [ 6 9 ] B o r i s G r o y s , E n t e r i n g t h e F l o w , e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 5 0 , 2013 [ 7 0 ] H a n s - U l r i c h O b r i s t , D o I t – T h e C o m p e n d i u m ,

p . 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

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Keeping this examples of alternate extens i o n s i n m i n d , t h e i n s t i t u t i o n ’s p o s i t i o n a s a n a r b i t e r o f v a l u e b e c o m e s l e s s c l e a r. [71] If the exhibition space has to be understood as one of many, how can we define its specific role then? In his essay From Image to Image File – and Back: Art in the Age of Digitisation Boris Groys is asking a corresponding question: Why should we exhibit these [digital] images at all—instead of just letting them circulate freely in the contemporary information netw o r k ? [72] Searching for the answer Groys tries to reconstruct Walter Benjamin’s idea of the aura inside the digital object: According to Benjamin, the traditional artwork loses its aura when it is transported from its original place to an exhibition space or when it is copied.

But that means that the loss of aura is especially significant in the case of the v i s u a l i s a t i o n o f a n i m a g e f i l e . [73] An image file is a permanent copy and reproduction of itself, or more precisely of its embedded code. Using this as the starting point Groys adjudicates the exhibition space the role of the performer, which cures the art work’s loss of originality by transforming it into a single – original – event. Thereby the institutional space functions as the only place where we can r e f l e c t n o t o n l y o n t h e software but also on the hardware, on the m a t e r i a l s i d e o f t h e i m a g e d a t a .[74] Groys even goes further by seeing a new value in this technical transformation: [ T ] h a t m e a n s t h a t t h e c o n t e m p o r a r y, post-digital curatorial practice can do some-

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thing that the traditional exhibition could do only metaphorically: exhibit the invisible.

[75] Thus the institutional space becomes curing and the curator a curer of art.

Apart from the conclusion that the institution is a mandatory place for the recreation of aura, which I find questionable, I think we have to acknowledge the fact that the traditional context remains a place for reflection and an elementary environment for artistic practices. But despite this, following E-flux founder Anton Vidokle, we have to leave behind the idea of this sacred and glorified environment as the only space, which can create art: [W]hat most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics – through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth – rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalising the e x h i b i t i o n a s a r t ’s o n l y p o s s i b l e , u l t i m a t e d e s t i n a t i o n . [76] Accordingly this would lead to a state which Artie Vierkant describes as the following: 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

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print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations and variations on any of these as edited and decontextualised by any other a u t h o r. [77] Even if I have to agree with the possibility of this state of indistinguishability, this has to be accepted under reserve.

The question of the exhibition format turns into a question of medium-specific properties, where primary or mediated curatorial attempts have to be chosen according to their appropriate implementation, always in consideration of the artwork’s nature and effectiveness. [ 7 1 ] B e g i n n i n g a n d E n d s , F r i e z e # 1 5 9 , 2 0 1 3 [ 7 2 ] B o r i s G r o y s , F r o m I m a g e t o I m a g e F i l e – a n d B a c k :

Art in the Age of Digitization, 2004 [73] Ibid. [ 7 4 ] I b i d . [ 7 5 ] I b i d . [ 7 6 ] A n t o n V i d o k l e , A r t w i t h o u t A r t i s t s ? ,

e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 1 6 , 2 0 1 0 [ 7 7 ] A r t i e V i e r k a n t , T h e I m a g e O b j e c t P o s t I n t e r n e t , 2 0 1 0

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The Artist In an environment where the art object is changing from an o r i g i n a r y o r i g i n a l [78] towards a democratised activity and exhibiting partly becomes part of the work, the role of the artist can’t remain untouched. Since everybody can become an artist, Post-Internet artists have to adapt their role accordingly. By shifting their methodologies towards quotidian tactics like surfing, blogging, commenting and liking, they queue themselves between everybody else; but, at the same time, open up their role to a multiplicity of things. Many people, like Artie Vierkant, see the role of the artist changing towards an – uncreative – i n t e r p r e t e r, t r a n s c r i b e r, n a r r a t o r, c u r a t o r, a r c h i t e c t . [79] As a mirror of social contexts, the he specialises in seeing value in things that most people overlook and gives transient unauthorised online content a (new) valuation. Comparable to what French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud already has described as Esthétique Relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics). The artist transforms to a catalyst o f h u m a n r e l a t i o n s a n d t h e i r s o c i a l c o n text, rather than an independent and private s p a c e . [80] Assigning the viewer with creative power, he degrades his own role to viewership. His role transforms towards a double role, being a p a r t i c i p a n t - o b s e r v e r o f e m e r g i n g i n t e r n e t c u l t u r e [81], an a m a t e u r i n v e n t o r [82], an artistic-curator, a producer-narrator, partly as the author of the work and partly as the spectator of it. [ 7 8 ]

[ 7 9 ] [ 8 0 ]

Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, e-flux Journal #10, 2011 Artie Vierkant, The Image Object Post Internet, 2010 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p.113, 1998

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[ 8 1 ] M i c h a e l C o n n o r, W h a t ’ s P o s t i n t e r n e t G o t t o d o w i t h

Net Art?, Rhizome, 2013 [ 8 2 ] M a r c e l D u c h a m p

While leaving behind the traditional heroic role of the artist, almost contradictory, as another contemporary symptom, the contemporaneous artist is faced with a new form of fandom. As a new method of recognition in this non-hierarchical environment artists are increasingly obliged to apply managerial strategies for themselves. In this sense Brad Troemel extends the activity of art production towards an activity of identity production: A r t i s t s u s i n g social media have transformed the notion of a ‘work’ from a series of isolated projects to a c o n s t a n t b r o a d c a s t o f o n e ’s a r t i s t i c i d e n t i t y a s a r e c o g n i s a b l e , u n i q u e b r a n d . [83] As their self-referencing art equally thematises our new two-sided reality and is embed in it, they make themselves subject of this contemporaneous pull too. In Self Design and Aesthetic Responsibility Groys precisely investigates the ramifications of this new form of artistic online identity: N o w, i f a n a r t i s t d o e s m a n a g e t o g o beyond the art system, this artist begins to function in the same way that politicians, sports heroes, terrorists, movie stars, and other minor or major celebrities already function: through the media. In other words, the artist becomes the artwork. While the transition from the art system to the political field is possible, this transition operates primarily as a change in the positioning of the artist vis-à-vis the production of the image: the artist ceases to be an

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image producer and becomes an image h i m s e l f . [84] This public accessibility of the artistic figure naturally causes a lot of social power. Ai Weiwei incarnates a paragon in this context. By using quotidian online tactics like Twitter and Instagram he extends his power overreaching the national borders to which he is bound. Ai Weiwei’s way of working also exemplifies the shift Troemel is proclaiming with his concept of Athletic Aesthetics: This has reversed the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have an a u d i e n c e . To d a y ’ s a r t i s t o n t h e I n t e r n e t needs an audience to create art. An a e s t h e t e ’s a u d i e n c e , o n c e a s s e m b l e d , b e c o m e s p a r t o f t h e i r m e d i u m . [85]

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Triggered by the attention currency, artists have to become athletes of hyper production to be able to compete with the iconoclasm and overproduction of today’s society.

Artists who traditionally made art, are now spending their time publicly exemplifying t h e i r l i f e s t y l e a s a n a r t i s t o n F a c e b o o k . [86]

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What matters is an encompassing online publicity. A form of publicity, which has drastically been reinvented since formats like gossip magazines and reality tv have existed.

Involving everybody, it has an overwhelming magnitude of power, which is translated by Post-Internet artists into a determining part of the art activity. Online presence takes over physical presence, even supporting it, or as artist Constaant Dullaart states: Building a signature presence where t h e b r a n d i n g o f t h e a r t i s t ’s n a m e i s more important than individual work or series. The more social relevance, the more expensive the art work. Aspiring to work with galleries is to have work ‘flipped’ or/and sold on the secondary market for speculative prices, all because of their insistent social presence and talent to find the aesthetic hot spot. Not the presence at local gallery openings is important, but international social p r e s e n c e o n l i n e . [87] This evolves into distinctive evidence for the fact, that virtual involvements are influencing physical space and vice versa. A phenomenon that evokes that today a r t i s t s a r e introduced with their follower count next to t h e i r b i o g r a p h y ? [88] [ 8 3 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013 [ 8 4 ] B o r i s G r o y s , S e l f D e s i g n a n d A e s t h e t i c R e s p o n s i b i l i t y ,

e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 7 , 2 0 1 0 [ 8 5 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013

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[ 8 6 ]

[ 8 7 ]

[ 8 8 ]

B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w Yo r k M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3 Constaant Dullaart, Constant Dullaart: 100,000 Followers for Everyone,Rhizome, 2014 Ibid.

To build up this brand, every idea, every part of production gets published as part of the corporate identity. The traditional boundary between art production and art display disappears. As we are so used to the fact, that the most mundane thing gets shared with the whole world, we almost expect the same from the artist. In Postcinematic Essays after the Future art critic and historian Sven Lütticken, stresses the notion of self-reflection, in line with the self-referencing nature of the art object: It is a form of twenty-first century materialism, a materialist praxis that never deals with mere subjects in the sense of ‘themes’, but rather with the subject as maker and consumer – circulator – of images. This circulationist subject is also always circulating as image. Thus the artist herself is an instable subject-object, a n d h e r a t t e m p t Ve r s u c h i s a s e l f experiment Selbstversuch in the free f a l l o f h i s t o r y. [89] For this I would like to reference to Jonas Lund’s Studio Practice, where he transformed the gallery into an art production line. During the opening hours four hired artists constantly produced works, inspired by guidelines Lund has set out in a 300 page book. Corresponding to the system of the art world, Lund let these outcomes be

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reviewed online by an advisory board consisting of artists, art advisors, gallerists and collectors, deciding if the work is worth to be signed or destroyed. Typical for Lund, this work is constructed as self-mirroring reflection on the art world’s mechanisms. Following Lütticken, the artist, as well as every other protagonist of this structure, becomes a subject-object of investigation. Lund exposes the artist as the managing instead of the creating force in the artistic production circle, who in the end might not even touch the work her-/himself.

Artists today are challenged with the reconsideration of themselves, of their own, or constructed identity. To the gaze of the media they have to function as s u p e r- a r t i s t s [90]. They have to integrate themselves into the workings of society by fulfilling a multiple role, equally down- and upgrading themselves. While Anton Vidokle proclaims state of A r t w i t h o u t A r t i s t s , this, referring to Troemel, much more has to be seen as the state of A r t i s t s w i t h o u t A r t . This doesn’t mean that art has become obsolete, but emphasises the advanced meaning of the artist figure.

Img.27 [ 8 9 ] S v e n L ü t t i c k e n , P o s t c i n e m a t i c E s s a y s a f t e r t h e F u t u r e , To o M u c h W o r l d – T h e F i l m s o f H i t o S t e y e r l , 2014 [ 9 0 ] B o r i s G r o y s , S e l f D e s i g n a n d A e s t h e t i c R e s p o n s i b i l i t y ,

e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 7 , 2 0 1 0

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[ 9 1 ]   B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2 0 1 3

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The Spectator Just as conditions have changed for artists, they have also changed for audiences. The refresh rate of information in social media a l t e r s v i e w i n g h a b i t s . [92] Today we are focussed on skimming, scrolling, browsing, sampling and filtering, which equally infects the perception of the mundane as well as the artistic image. Traditionally the spectator was holding a sovereign position and had complete control over the duration of his or her contemplation. Following Boris Groys, there were two different models that allowed the spectator to gain control over time: T h e i m m o bilisation of the image in the museum, and the immobilisation of the audience in the m o v i e t h e a t e r. [93] Both of these models empowered the viewer to ( r e ) m a s t e r t h e s h o w, t o t a m e t h e unruly multiplicity of its meanings, to pron o u n c e a v e r d i c t , a n d t o a s s i g n v a l u e [94] Both of these models fail with time-based art, whose occurrence drastically increased with the technical innovations of digitisation. Already when the moving image got introduced to the museum, this subject position became unavailable.

The spectator lost his ability to administer the duration of his attention and got robbed of his traditional sovereignty.

While the unmoving image remains identical to itself, when the viewer is absent, the moving image continues in its transformation. Due to this, the content dictates the viewer’s time and sometimes makes an overview even impossible. [ 9 2 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013 [ 9 3 ]   B o r i s G r o y s , F r o m I m a g e t o I m a g e F i l e – a n d B a c k :

Art in the Age of Digitization, 2004

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Especially when it comes to video-based exhibitions, the duration of the average visit is mostly not long enough to watch all of the exhibited videos from beginning to end.

According to Hito Steyerl, this advent reduced all parties t o t h e r o l e o f w o r k e r s [95] and assigned spectatorship with true labor. The time based image in the museum renders overview, review, and survey impossible. From now on the viewer had to work hard to be able to follow the moving narrative, which might end in a state of doubt and helplessness. With his seven hour film Sleep or Empire State Building, Andy Warhol, for example, made it impossible for the spectator to watch the video in its full length.

The sovereign overview had to make way for a transient observation, which now – according to Groys – is transferable to digital media: The same can be said about the websites of the social networks – one can visit them or not. And if one does visit them then only this visit as such is registered – and not how much time one has spent l o o k i n g a t t h e m . C o n t e m p o r a r y a r t ’s v i s i b i l i t y i s a w e a k , v i r t u a l v i s i b i l i t y, t h e apocalyptic visibility of contracting time.

One is already satisfied that a certain image can be seen or that a certain text can be read – the facticity of seeing and r e a d i n g b e c o m e s i r r e l e v a n t . [96] Even if I have to question the conclusion of weakness, I have to agree, that in Post-Internet times, the loss of sovereignty gets even pushed further, at least partly. It not only increases the amount of moving imagery in the museum, the art object also floats in the moving spheres

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of virtuality. Here, where artistic content is shared faster than ever before, the spectator is even less able to obtain control over the duration of his or her attention. All moving images, gifs, hyperlinks, tags and suggestions distract our dedicated observation in multiple ways and increase the transient character of today’s attention. Groys describes this further: The traditional relationship between producers and spectators as established by the mass culture of the twentieth century has been inverted. Whereas before, a chosen few produced images and texts for millions of readers and spectators, millions of producers now produce texts and images for a spectator who has little to no time to read or see t h e m . [97] This inversion didn’t necessarily assign the spectator with weakness; to the contrary, it just reassesses the power. T h e time begins to be newly experienced, conceptualised and schematised through the re-negotiation of the relationship between time of contemplation and time of contemplated p r o c e s s . [98] What matters today is less the possibility of an encompassing reflection, but the unrestricted accessibility of the artwork and its contextualisation within the whole. What matters is the quantifiable amount of attention. Likes, re-blogs, comments numerically count your social value. The spectator, or more precisely his ability to pay attention, becomes a parameter and catalyst of the artwork’s value.

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Athletic aesthetics amounts to the supply-side gamification of the art a t t e n t i o n e c o n o m y. N o t e s , l i k e s , a n d reblogs serve as the quantitative basis for influence in an art world where critics’ written word has been stripped o f p o w e r. A r t m a k i n g b e c o m e s a fast-paced, high-volume endeavor analogous to the universe of automated h i g h - f r e q u e n c y s t o c k t r a d i n g . [99] Referring back to Brad Troemel’s idea of Athletic Aesthetics, as attention makes the art, the aesthlete’s audience even upraises to the foundation of artistic activity. Only when an artwork in the virtual spheres is shared, reposted, liked and tagged it is able to stand out of contemporaneous iconoclasm. Only then, its virality can serve the currency of attention. When traditionally the exhibition space could be seen as an indicator for art, today a great part of this power has been shifted towards the spectator. The more social relevance, the more expensive is the artwork.

Popularity wins over quality. What is a super artist without his group of fans?

Troemel describes this new relationship between artist and spectator as a new form of fandom: T h e u n d e rlying promise of Rate/Comment/Subscribe! culture is that viewers can engage in a more direct form of fandom. […] Audiences can now believe they are co-creators, collaborating w i t h a r t i s t s b y a p p r e c i a t i n g t h e m . [100] In my opinion, they not only do believe so. As I have examined, every kind of contemporary art, labeled with Post-Internet or not, is dependent on its representation and circulation in virtual spheres, which only can be accomplished by the

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mass audience. Post-Internet art in particular often even goes further and directly addresses collective authorship.

By creating these interactive templates, the participation of the audience becomes elementary. When authorship becomes synonymous with viewership, this equally counts for the artist as for the spectator. The spectator takes over the double role of the prosumer, being reader but also author, viewer but also creator. [ 9 4 ] H i t o S t e y e r l , I s a M u s e u m a F a c t o r y ? ,

e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 6 , 2 0 0 9 [ 9 5 ] I b i d . [ 9 6 ] B o r i s G r o y s , T h e W e a k U n i v e r s a l i s m ,

e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 1 4 , 2 0 1 0 [ 9 7 ] I b i d . [ 9 8 ] I b i d . [ 9 9 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013 [ 1 00 ] I b i d .

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As an example I would like to refer to Jonas Lund’s paintshop.biz. The Paintshop is a real time collaborative painting tool offering the spectator the possibility to sell his or her artwork and to buy great pieces of art for very competitive prices.[101] Visiting Lund’s website the viewer is invited to become part in the creation of a digital painting. In real time collaboration all visiting painters share the same canvas. Whenever one of the users decides to sign the artwork, he becomes the owner of the piece.

The painting then can be found for sale in the attendant

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gallery, where the price of each work is calculated by a special algorithm. Since he literally transforms the viewer to the artist, Lund’s project directly stages this shift of the role of the spectator. Another example, where the viewers participation is used more subtle, are Rafaël Rozendaal’s browser-based works. A lot of them make use of the users virtual interaction. The abstract composition of his website Intotime.com for example reacts in its geometry according to the viewers mouse-click. By this the worker is not originating the visual outcome, but influences it.

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As the spectator takes over an important part in the artwork, actively or passively, and transforms to a catalyst of art, his tasks get altered to be less discriminatory and more participatory.[102] Moreover, he makes art as aggressively viral as everything else and turns into – next to the super artist – the super spectator with super power. Sven Lütticken finds an interesting outline for this when he writes: U n d e r t o d a y ’s c o n d i t i o n s , t h e a u d i e n c e becomes both potential surveillance instrument and circulationist accelerator – perhaps sending text messages, tweets and photos, and in the process making the work as unpredictable as the weather a n d t u r n i n g i t i n t o a p e r f e c t s t o r m . [103]

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[ 1 01 ] h t t p : / / j o n a s l u n d . b i z / w o r k s / t h e - p a i n t s h o p - b i z / [ 1 02 ] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y, 2013 [ 1 03 ] S v e n L ü t t i c k e n , P o s t c i n e m a t i c E s s a y s a f t e r t h e F u t u r e , To o M u c h W o r l d – T h e F i l m s o f H i t o S t e y e r l , 2014

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The Contradiction o f To d a y

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The last thirty years have seen t h e t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f a r t ’s ‘expandedfield’ from a stance of stubborn, discursive ambiguity into a comfortable and compromised situation which we’re well accustomed to conceptual interventions, to art and the social, where the impulse to merge art and life has resulted in lifestyle art, a secure gallery practice that comments on contemporary media culture, or apes commercial production strategies. This is the lumber o f l i f e . [104] Reviewing these alterations the question how this development challenges traditional concepts becomes obvious and accordingly the lament on the ‘loss of the contemporary art object’ seems comprehensible, if not necessarily eligible. The identity of the artist seems to become more valuable than the originary masterpiece. Likewise the artist subordinates himself to the role of the spectator, who gains a super power and even encourages the loss of the heroic position of the White Cube. The traditional understanding, which is embracing the art world as a heroic

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institutional and prestigious system, has to make way for a collaborative activity of plagiarism and a blurriness with the mundane. It is comprehensible, that this seems to be an enormous loss. But does it has to be necessarily seen as one? I have to agree with Troemel when he writes: While the music, film, television, and print industries have each been radically overturned by digital technologies, fine art remains in a transitional period, negotiating a complex and relatively new relationship with s o c i a l m e d i a . [105] Evidently, the contemporary art system which exists next to the label of Post-Internet Art, is particularly reluctant to acknowledge this dependence. For this it is interesting to refer back to Clair Bishop. Reviewing various art formats which are typically discussed in their relation to traditional artistic practices, like assemblage-based sculpture, paintings and performances, she brings up a determining factor: [W]hen we examine these dominant forms of contemporary art more c l o s e l y, t h e i r o p e r a t i o n a l l o g i c

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and systems of spectatorship prove to be intimately connected to the technological revolution we are undergoing. I am not claiming that these artistic strategies are conscious reactions to (or implicit denunciations of) an information s o c i e t y ; r a t h e r, I a m s u g g e s t i n g that the digital is, on a deep level, the shaping condition – even the structuring paradox – that determines artistic decisions to work with certain formats and m e d i a . [106] As Bishop describes, I think, that every part of contemporary art is influenced by this constantly transforming environment we live in. It doesn’t matter, whether it is art ‘awarded’ with the label of Post-Internet, and so particularly circulating around these new topics, or if it is contemporaneous art which ‘just’ exists in this form of reality. No part of culture can free itself from this comprehensive omnipresence of virtuality and so art cannot, either. This makes an avoidance problematic. These influences can be very subtle. It might be google, which builds the basis for artistic research or a representation of the artwork floating in digital spheres. So why is there still

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this curious unresponsiveness and resistance to acknowledge? [ 1 04] S e t h P r i c e , D i s p e r s i o n , 2 0 0 2 [ 1 05] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w

Yo r k M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d

T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3 [ 1 06] C l a i r e B i s h o p , D i g i t a l D i v i d e , A r t f o r u m , 2012

When Bishop in 2002 still stated that virtual space rarely overlaps with the mainstream art world (commercial galleries, the Tu r n e r P r i z e , n a t i o n a l p a v i l i o n s a t V e n i c e ) [107], today in 2015 we are definitely a step further. Post-Internet Art is more than established in lots of commercial galleries and fairs, it is featured in the most important art magazines and blogs and became some kind of ubiquitous artistic trend. But are we closer to be fully able to acknowledge it? Despite all this, it doesn’t seem so. Florian Kramer states in his essay: Contemporary visual art, for example, is only slowly starting to accept practitioners of net art as regular contemporary artists – and then again, preferably those like Cory Arcangel whose work is white c u b e - c o m p a t i b l e . [108]

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Everything, that exists next to established structures, still isn’t valued in the same way. Isn’t that very narrow-minded? [ 10 7 ] C l a i r e B i s h o p , D i g i t a l D i v i d e , A r t f o r u m , 2 0 1 2 [ 10 8] F l o r i a n K r a m e r, W h a t i s ‘ P o s t - D i g i t a l ’ ? ,

APRJA Journal, 2013

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One just has to look back to the essay of Susanne von Falkenhausen. Here the German art historian grieves about the loss of the art object and criticizes the digital language of Post-Internet Art as an excuse of ‘artification’: To d a y, p o i n t i n g a d i g i t a l c a m e r a at something seems to become a standard procedure for turning context into art.[…]Is media transfer replacing artistic transf o r m a t i o n ? [109] Following her argumentation, the digital has developed towards a pattern of legitimation, cele-

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brating aesthetics but neglecting superior meanings. Indeed I have to agree that this development has opened up a dangerous trap. Since Post-Internet Art has become this trendy, it tends to leave behind the art world’s environment, claiming something Post-Internet art has become a phenomenon of our contemporary society. As it recycles everyday material and is based on this blurriness between amateur and professional, it has become very easy and seductive to claim something – precisely digital material – art. In this context Beuys’ statement E v e r y o n e i s a n a r t i s t [110] has found a totally new equivalence.

The Internet is filled with so-called art gifs, renderings, blogs and digital image collections.

Every digital glitch seems to be heroized like art.

I think it is important to make a distinction here and not to take these amateur attempts as a counterargument. Mostly, they don’t have to be understood as Post-Internet art, but rather as imitations of this, which don’t supersede a contemporary aesthetic fascination. Michael Connor describes this misinterpretations very convincingly: So although the word postinternet is now about to collapse under the weight of its overuse, even though its position inside of the digital ether may be easily

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mistaken for a lack of critical politics, I still think there is something true and interesting and complicated about this refusal to buy into the assumption that artwork, artist, audience, and art w o r k e r c a n a s s u m e a u t o n o m y, a n d I’m still grappling with this in my own practice as a writer and c u r a t o r. E v e n a s t h e y c r i t i c i z e the woolly discourse around postinternet art on forums and social media and in the pages of art magazines, I hope the other o l d s a r e d o i n g t h e s a m e . [111] If you really look at Post-Internet Art it overcomes this restricted fascination. Furthermore, this ‘artifcation’ becomes a contemporary gesture and their medium-adequate strength. W h i l e m a n y a r t i s t s u s e d i g i t a l t e c h n o l o g y, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filt e r a f f e c t t h r o u g h t h e d i g i t a l ? [112] [ 10 9] S u s a n n e v o n F a l k e n h a u s e n , To o M u c h To o Fast, FRIEZE No.17, 2014 [ 11 0] J o s e p h B e u y s [ 11 1] M i c h a e l C o n n o r, W h a t ’ s P o s t i n t e r n e t G o t t o

do with Net Art?, 2013 [ 11 2 ] C l a i r e B i s h o p , D i g i t a l D i v i d e , A r t f o r u m , 2 0 1 2

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In this context I find it very questionable when von Falkenhausen links the appearances of digital media to a trend of lightness; arguing that [t]here is certainly a link between the d i g i t a l i m a g e ’s l i g h t n e s s o f b e i n g a n d the popularity of huge flat screens i n e x h i b i t i o n s . [113] If you use these kind of argumentation, do we accuse the painting to be too popular? This shouldn’t be a question of materiality. Since we already have had comprehensive discussions about appropriated materials and ready-made-objects, thanks to Duchamp, it seems remarkable that the appropriation of digital everyday material strikes as inconceivable. Since we are so fond of reconsidering historical achievements, one just has to reconsider movements like Appropriation Art or Pop Art. The reuse of collected materials, including commercial objects, cannot be seen as a new gesture, thinking about artists like Andy Warhol, Richard

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Prince, Jeff Koons and Thomas Hirschhorn. Even if the comparison is not totally comprehensive, they, as many more, already have celebrated the use of the everyday object before. Methodology of Post-Internet Art cannot be understood as something entirely new, which might have explained the contemporary problem to acknowledge it. On the contrary, artist Nam June Paik has exposed a very peculiar delay between an invention of technology and the possible ingression in arts, when he has stated that he only could start to make art with television years after television was invented. The ingression into arts was only accepted, once it was like a pencil.[114] The same resistance now appears determining the Internet. (Significantly, this was posted by Hans Ulrich Obrist on his Twitter account.) [ 11 3] S u s a n n e v o n F a l k e n h a u s e n , To o M u c h To o Fast, FRIEZE No.17, 2014 [ 11 4]   H a n s - U l r i c h O b r i s t , Tw i t t e r A c c o u n t

Since this indistinguishability of artwork and everyday object, I acknowledge that accuses are not surprisingly. It increases the challenge to detect art as such. Allan Kaprow already called it the blurring of art and life. Where can you base your evaluation on, if not on established concepts?!

It is very understandable that we make the attempt to apply these kind of theories, which have

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gained acceptance over the past. But considering every new form of art as a derivative on former movements, every adaption evolves questions of contemporariness. The reliance on traditional theories, the so often used attempt of historicization seems to become problematic. I t s e e m [ s ] that in order to be defined as having value, that is as ‘art’, a work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then to be written about and reproduced as a p h o t o g r a p h i n a n a r t m a g a z i n e . [115] When it comes to deviation of these expectations, we refuse to accept. Seth Price conveniently underpins this, using the role allocation of the artist as an example: The film avant-garde, for instance, has always run on a separate track from the art world. […] The producer who elects to wear several hats is perceived as a crossover at b e s t : t h e a r t i s t - f i l m m a k e r, a s i n the case of Julian Schnabel; t h e a r t i s t a s e n t r e p r e n e u r, a s i n t h e c a s e o f Wa r h o l ’s h a n d l i n g o f I n t e r v i e w m a g a z i n e a n d t h e Ve l v e t U n d e r g r o u n d ; o r, a s w i t h m a n y of the people mentioned in this e s s a y, a r t i s t a s c r i t i c , p e r h a p s t h e

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most tenuous position of all. This i s t h e l a k e o f o u r f e e l i n g . [116] It is exactly this traditional understanding which needs to be renewed. Concepts which have functioned in the pre-digital environment are not necessarily transferable to this new two-sided form of reality. I totally agree with curator Karen Archey when she claims: This hungry reach toward historic i z a t i o n e p i t o m i z e s t h e a c a d e m y ’s most common and ham-fisted flaw: rather than understand a burgeoning art movement vis-àvis artists, art historians often chain the future to the nearestfitting moment of the past – no matter whether Post-Internet art and the egalitarianism of the Internet might be allergic to the c a n o n ’s e n d e m i c h i e r a r c h i e s . [ … ] We should instead rejoice that the category ‘Post- Internet’ challenges c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t ’s h e r m e t i c i s m via its built-in connection to the outside world, one that describes a cultural condition permeating W e s t e r n s o c i e t y a s a w h o l e . [117]

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A fitting example for this is Walter Benjamin’s concept on art, which came up before. Since his essay The Work in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1936, almost the whole art world bases the differentiation between art and the ordinary – or more precisely between the original and its technical reproduction – on his theory on aura, an aura which is based on the artworks’ place of origin and is demolished by its re-localization. If you look at the contemporary symptoms of today’s reality, where relocation is the predominating factor, doesn’t this reversion become unreasonable? Boris Groy’s attempt to rediscover aura in the digital file seems, to me, as an absurd clamping on an established concept.

He ends up with the conclusion, that [ t ] h e r e i s n o s u c h t h i n g a s a c o p y. I n t h e w o r l d

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of digitalized images, we are dealing only with originals – only with original presentations of the absent, invisi b l e d i g i t a l o r i g i n a l . [118] Even if he successfully relocates the aura within the source code, instead of increasing the significance of the art object, this reversion seems to ignore any contemporaneous and medium-adequate strength of the work. With this I don’t want to devaluate Benjamin’s theory, but I want to stress the importance to reconsider what can be transferred and what cannot. T h e r e c o u r s e t o B e n j a m i n ’s a r g u m e n t , s o c l o s e l y t i e d to the historical avant-gardes, sounds almost nostalgic when applied to these y o u n g e r a r t i s t s . [119] We are surrounded by an army of reproduced representatives. Consequently, it is not the question anymore to reveal them as fakes, but rather to be aware of their impact and power, or as Bishop says: Q u e s t i o n s of originality and authorship are no longer the point; instead, the emphasis is on a meaningful recontextuali z a t i o n o f e x i s t i n g a r t i f a c t s . [120] [ 11 5] S e t h P r i c e , D i s p e r s i o n , 2 0 0 2 [ 11 6] I b i d . [ 11 7 ] B e g i n n i n g a n d E n d s , F r i e z e # 1 5 9 , 2 0 1 0 [ 11 8] B o r i s G r o y s , F r o m I m a g e t o I m a g e F i l e –

and Back: Art in the Age of Digitization, 2004

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[ 119] Cl aire Bishop, D igital D ivide, Artforum, 2 0 1 2 [120] Ibid.

If you want to stick to a traditional terminology, the digital revolution really involves a reconsideration based on the contemporary symptoms of reality and culture. In this context I can only emphasise Hito Steyerl’s renewed idea on the aura of the poor image: By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the original, but on the transience of t h e c o p y. I t i s n o l o n g e r a n c h o r e d within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious d a t a p o o l s . [121] This reconsideration seems as a time- and medium-appropriate understanding. Whereas it certainly has not to be understood as the one and only.

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[ 1 21] H i t o S t e y e r l , I n D e f e n s e o f t h e P o o r I m a g e ,

e-flux Journal #10, 2011

Framed, an invention by Japanese artist and designer Yugo Nakamura, functions as another very distinctive example for such an absurd transformations of a physical structure. Framed is a stand-alone screen invented to display all manners of web content – especially digital art – in the physical space. Like a traditional oil painting Framed enables you to hang digital artworks on your wall. For me this kind of adaption feels very characteristic and insufficient, almost banal. It totally ignores all medium-specific benefits and ramification introduced by Post-Internet art. Why should we display works like Moon or The Paintshop in such a way? D o e s w o r k p r e m i s e d on a dialogic, prosumer model, seeking real-world impact, need to assume representation or an object form in o r d e r t o b e r e c o g n i z e d a s a r t ? [122] Isn’t it more a drawback from what they really are than an accrual benefit?

Self-evidently, this invention can also be understood as an attempt to integrate the digital object into the established capitalistic orientated system, which is a major challenge for art based in the virtual space. Following Brad Troemel, we need to look from a different perspective at the idea of capitalistic value:

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[w]hile digital images make for a l o u s y f o r m o f p r i v a t e p r o p e r t y, the attention an artist can accrue around herself through branding can be leveraged into a more traditional notion of success as seen through gallery exhibitions, magazine features, books, and s p e a k i n g e n g a g e m e n t s . [123]

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Formatted as digital material, alterable for everybody, the (virtual) art object itself serves the idea of public commodity, but not of a sellable good anymore. With this it automatically absolves itself from the traditional value system and cannot be treated in the same way. As a consequence certain art doesn’t follow certain values anymore. Exemplified by Bishop, [ t ] h e e n d l e s s v a r i a b i l i t y and modulation of the digital image is belied by the imposition of a ‘limited’ edition and an aesthetics of the precious one-off (sepia-tinted prints, dis-

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play cabinets, file boxes of ephemera, e t c ) . [124] Although in some way websites can be sold and Post-Internet art objects mostly manifest as physical objects as well, their pluralism confronts us with the necessity to reinvent an appropriate system. W h a t i s n e e d e d – n o w more than ever – is affirmative speculation that sabotages the exploitation o f p o t e n t i a l f o r q u i c k p r o f i t . [125] [ 12 2 ] C l a i r e B i s h o p , D i g i t a l D i v i d e , A r t f o r u m , 2 0 1 2 [ 123] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w

Yo r k M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d

T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3 [ 12 4 ] C l a i r e B i s h o p , D i g i t a l D i v i d e , A r t f o r u m , 2 0 1 2 [ 125] S v e n L ü t t i c k e n , P o s t c i n e m a t i c E s s a y s a f t e r

the Future, 2014

It is probably a very human reaction to refuse what is not understood and prefer what has been evaluated before. But should this discourage us from making progresses? Since we are not really aware of our contemporaneous status-quo, which we cannot be blamed for, we at least have to make the effort to confront ourselves with it. Seth Price is marking a relevant fact when he writes, that [n]ational bourgeois culture, of which art is one element, is based around commercial media, which, together w i t h t e c h n o l o g y, d e s i g n , a n d f a s h i o n , g e n e r a t e s o m e o f t h e i m p o r t a n t d i f f e r-

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e n c e s o f o u r d a y. [126] It is not the contemporary task to find end results, acknowledgement is what we have to gain. For this I have to stress Gene McHugh’s point of view when he writes: ‘ A c k n o w l e d g e ’ i s k e y h e r e . I t ’s not that all contemporary artists must right now start making hypertext poetry and cat memes, but rather that, somewhere in the basic conceptual framework of the work, an understanding of what the Internet is doing to the work – how it distributes the work, how it devalues the work, revalues it – must be acknowledged in the way t h a t o n e w o u l d a c k n o w l e d g e , s a y, t h e m a r k e t . [127] I find it very distinctive for this overall problem that we haven’t even acknowledged New Media for what it is. In contemporary discussions ‘new’ media still mostly only encompasses ‘old’ media like television, radio and cinema. When Groy’s in 2004 talks about artworks moving towards art documentations, he almost fully leaves out the digital file, basing his argumentation on documented artistic activities and happenings. In his book After Art David Joselith restructures the

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whole art world in relation to digitization, without any reference to Post-Internet Art. Additionally, there are whole courses of studies in art academies that are labeled New Media, but only circle around cinematic examinations and analysis.

[126] Seth Price, Dispersion, 2002 [ 1 2 7 ]  G e n e M c H u g h , P o s t I n t e r n e t , p . 6 , 2 0 1 1

As a very crucial accomplishment, we have to leave behind nostalgia to be able to grasp the nature of today.  It should no longer be the familiar, the traditionally established what functions as the indicator of the real. Displaying art is not limited anymore to protagonists like the curator, the exhibition spaces, or the materiality of a painting. It can equally be a post or a simple like.

The indicator can reincarnate in various versions. I f P o s t - I n t e r n e t a r t i s p r o d u c e d with a consciousness of the networks that enable its production, dissemination and reception, then critics, curators and art historians should wake up t o t h e p r e s e n c e o f t h e n e t w o r k . [128] Statements like, A r t d o c u m e n t a t i o n i s b y definition not art; it merely refers to a r t [129], seem highly unconsidered in this new environment. W i t h o u t a b u r e a u c r a t i c e s tablishment imbuing art with value,

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art is free to be valued in any possible w a y. [130] Even if from today´s point of view this seems as something utopian and unsolvable, we should acknowledge it as idealistic tendencies of the web to break with age-old social hierarchies.

As Seth Price states, [ n ] e w s t r a t e g i e s a r e needed to keep up with commercial distribution, decentralization, and d i s p e r s i o n . Yo u m u s t f i g h t s o m e t h i n g i n o r d e r t o u n d e r s t a n d i t . [131] I think we have to follow the necessity to take over responsibility, even if we don’t know where it will lead us.

Concluding, I can only reference Claire Bishops conclusion, which really gets to the heart of the apparent challenge: If the digital means anything for visual art, it is the need to take stock of this orientation and to q u e s t i o n a r t ’s m o s t t r e a s u r e d assumptions. At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.[132]

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So in the end this reconsideration of the world could mean its elimination. Might be. For sure we are somehow in a state ‘after art’, after the art we are so used to. [ 12 8 ] B e g i n n i n g a n d E n d s , F r i e z e # 1 5 9 , 2 0 1 0 [ 12 9] B o r i s G r o y s , A r t i n t h e A g e o f B i o p o l i t i c s :

From Artwork to Art Documentation, 2004 [ 13 0] B r a d Tr o e m e l , A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w

Yo r k M a g a z i n e o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d

T h e o r y, 2 0 1 3 [131] Seth Price, Dispersion, 2002 [132] Claire Bishop, Digital Divide, Artforum, 2012

Updates are available.

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Index Page 117

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Page 118

B

Bosma, Josephine; Post-Digital

i s P o s t - S c r e e n – To w a r d s a N e w

V i s u a l A r t , 2 0 1 3 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. josephinebosma.com/web/ node/98)

Bishop, Claire; Digital Divide, Artforum, 2012; (http://artforum. com/talkback/id=70724)

Beard, Thomas; Interview with Guthrie Lonergan, Rhizome,

2008; (http://rhizome.org/ editorial/2008/mar/26/ interview-with-guthrie lonergan/)

Barthes, Roland; The Death of the Author, 1967

(All web links accessed on May 5th, 2015)

Source List

G Goldsmith, Kenneth; Uncreative Writing, p.3, 2011

Groys, Boris; Art in the Age

of Biopolitics: From Artwork to

Art Documentation, 2004;

F FRIEZE; Beginning and Ends,

Frieze #159, 2013; (http:// w w w. f r i e z e . c o m / i s s u e / a r t i c l e / beginnings-ends/)

D Dullaart, Constant; 100,000

Followers for Everyone, DIS

Magazine, 2014; (http:// dismagazine.com/dystopia/ 67039/constant-dullaart 1 0 0 0 0 0 - f o l l o w e r s - f o r- e v e r y o n e / )

C C o n n o r, M i c h a e l ; W h a t ’ s

Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?, Rhizome, 2013

Bourriaud, Nicolas; Relational Aesthetics, p.113, 1998; (http:// rhizome.org/editorial/2013/ nov/1/postinternet/)

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Groys, Boris; Self Design and Aesthetic Responsibility, e-flux Journal #7, 2010

Higher Pictures; Press Release Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, 2012; (http://higherpictures.

H

LeWitt, Sol; Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum, 1967;

L Larios, Pablo; Iconoclash,

FRIEZE no. 161, 2014; http:// ( w w w. f r i e z e . c o m / i s s u e / a r t i c l e / iconoclash/)

K K r a m e r, F l o r i a n ; W h a t i s ‘ P o s t Digital’?, APRJA Journal, 2013; ( h t t p : / / w w w. a p r j a . n e t / ? p = 1 3 1 8 )

J Joselit, David; After Art, 2012

Joselit, David; Painting Beside Itself, 2009

Groys, Boris; From Image to

Image File – and Back: Art in

the Age of Digitization, 2004;

( h t t p : / / w w w. a l t x . c o m / r e m i x / Groys.pdf)

Groys, Boris; On the New, 2014

Hurst, Nathan, How the Internet

is changing the fine art Market place, Wired Magazine, 2012; ( h t t p : / / w w w. w i r e d . c o . u k / n e w s / archive/2012-09/07/web-fine- art-retail-changing)

Groys, Boris; Entering the Flow,

e-flux Journal #50, 2013; (http:// w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / j o u r n a l / entering-the-flow-museum between-archive-and-gesamt kunstwerk/)

com/press/brand-innovations f o r- u b i q u i t o u s - a u t h o r s h i p / )

( h t t p : / / w w w. r a n a d a s g u p t a . c o m / notes.asp?note_id=34)

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McHugh, Gene; Post Internet, p.17, 2011

McLuhan, Marshell; Under standing Media: The Extensions

of Man, 1964

Mousse Magazine; Specu lations on Anonymous Materials, Fridericianum,

Kassel, 2013; http://mousse magazine.it/speculations

M Mashable; U.S. Adults Spend

11 Hours, PeDay With Digital Media, 2014; (http://mashable. com/2014/03/05/american digital-media-hours/) O ’ D o h e r t y, B r i a n ; I n s i d e t h e White Cube, 1996

Q

Quaranta, Domenico; Beyond New Media, 2013

P Price, Seth; Dispersion, 2002, ( h t t p : / / w w w. d i s t r i b u t e d h i s t o r y. com/Dispersion2008.pdf)

O O b r i s t , H a n s - U l r i c h ; D o I t –

The Compendium, p.15, 2013

M u r r a y, S u s a n ; D i g i t a l I m a g e s ,

Photo-Sharing, and our Shifting

Notions of Everyday Aesthetics,

Journal of Visual Culture, 2008; (https://postmediacalgaryherald 2.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/ murray-photography-everyday- aesthetics.pdf)

Lütticken, Sven; Postcinematic E s s a y s a f t e r t h e F u t u r e , To o Much World – The Films of Hito Steyerl, the2014

onanonymousmaterials fridericianum/)

(http://radicalart.info/concept/ LeWitt/paragraphs.html)

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Sterling, Bruce; An Essay on

t h e N e w A e s t h e t i c , W I R E D

M a g a z i n e , 2 0 1 2 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on the-new-aesthetic/)

Sheikh, Simon; Positively White C u b e R e v i s i t e d , e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 3 ,

2 0 0 9 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / journal/positively-white-cube revisited/)

Sanchez, Michael; On Art And Tr a n s m i s s i o n , A r t f o r u m , 2 0 1 3 ; (http://shootandscram.blogspot. nl/2013/07/michael-sanchez-on art-and-transmission.html)

S S a l z , J e r r y ; R i c h a rd P r i n c e ’s

Instagram Paintings Are Genius Tr o l l i n g ; V u l t u r e , 2 0 1 4 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. v u l t u r e . c o m / 2 0 1 4 / 0 9 / richard-prince-instagram pervert-troll-genius.html)

T To f f l e r, A l v i n ; T h e T h i r d W a v e , 1980

Steyerl, Hito; In Defense of the

Poor Image, e-flux Journal #10,

2 0 1 1 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / j o u r n a l / i n - d e f e n s e - o f - t h e - p o o r image/)

Steyerl,Hito ; Is a Museum a F a c t o r y ? , e - f l u x J o u r n a l # 6 ,

2 0 0 9 ; h t t p : / / w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / journal/is-a-museum-a-factory/)

S t e y e r l , H i t o ; To o M u c h W o r l d :

I s t h e I n t e r n e t D e a d ? , e - f l u x

Journal #49, 2013; http:// ( w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / j o u r n a l / t o o much-world-is-the-internet dead/)

Steyerl, Hito; In Defense of the

Poor Image, e-flux Journal #10,

2 0 1 1 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / j o u r n a l / i n - d e f e n s e - o f - t h e - p o o r- image/)

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V Vierkant, Artie; The Image

Object Post Internet, 2010; (http://jstchillin.org/artie/ vierkant.html)

U U C C A B e j i n g ; P r e s s R e l e a s e

Art Post-Internet, Karen Archey

a n d R o b i n P e c k h a m ( 2 0 1 3 ; h t t p : / / u c c a . o r g . c n / e n / exhibition/art-post-internet/)

Tr o e m e l , B r a d ; A t h l e t i c A e s t h e t i c s , T h e N e w I n q u i r y,

2 0 1 3 ; ( h t t p : / / t h e n e w i n q u i r y. com/essays/athletic-aesthetics/)

Tr o e m e l , B r a d ; A r t A f t e r S o c i a l M e d i a , N e w Yo r k M a g a z i n e o f

C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t A n d T h e o r y,

2013; (http://ny-magazine.org/ PDF/06.07.EN_Art_After_Social_ Media.pdf)

Y Yo u K n o w Yo u r M e m e ; P r i n t i n g

Out the Internet, 2013; (http://

k n o w y o u r m e m e . c o m / m e m e s / events/printing-out-the-internet)

W Wallace, Ian; What is Post Internet Art? Understanding the

Revolutionary New Art Movement,

A r t s p a c e , 2 0 1 4 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. artspace.com/magazine/ i n t e r v i e w s _ f e a t u r e s / p o s t _ internet_art)

von Falklenhausen, Susanne; To o M u c h To o F a s t , F r i e z e # 1 7 ,

2014; (http://frieze-magazin.de/ archiv/features/too-much-too- fast/)

Vidokle, Anton; Art without Artists, e-flux Journal #16,

2 0 1 0 ; ( h t t p : / / w w w. e - f l u x . c o m / journal/art-without-artists/)

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Img.6 Hilton Hotel Render, Detail, Hilton

Img.7 InSilico Virtual Community, Detail, Second Life

Img.8 Datacenter, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Google

Img.9 E P O C Te l e p a t h y D e v i c e , I n s t a l l a t i o n Vi e w, Emotiv

Img.2 Printing Out the Internet, I n s t a l l a t i o n Vi e w, Kenneth Goldsmith

Img.3 Laptopstand, Installation View Omax

Img.4 Occulus Rift, D e a t a i l Vi e w, Occulus VR

Img.5 iCloud, Detail, Apple

Img.1 Google Loon, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Google

(according their order)

Image Credits

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Img.17 Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Higher Pictures Gallery

Img.12 Deception Advertisement, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, NBC

Img.14 One and Three Chairs, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Joseph Kosuth

Img.19 #ArtSelfie Publication, Detail, DIS Magazine

Img.18 The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Jon Rafman

Img.16 Hyper Geography, Detail, Joe Hamilton

Img.11 Emoticon Clothing, Detail, China

Img.13 Displaced (Smartphone), I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Spiros Hadjidjanos

Img.15 Summer (2013) Detail, Olia Lialina

Img.10 Selfie Hat, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Acer

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Img.25 B Y O B Ve n i z e , I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Rafaël Rozendaal

Img.26 Leg Gun, Detail, Ai Weiwei

Img.27 Studio Practice, Detail, Jonas Lund

Img.28 The Paintshop, Detail, Jonas Lund

Img.29 intotime.com, Detail, Rafaël Rozendaal

Img.20 To u c h M y B o d y ( A p p r o p r i a t e d ) , Video Still, Oliver Laric

Img.21 RIGGED, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Kate Cooper

Img.22 Gallery404, Detail, Art404

Img.23 Moon, Detail, Ai Weiwei & Olafur Eliasson

Img.24 Do It, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist

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Img.33 Framed, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Yugo Nakamura

Img.32 Saba (The future was at her fingertips), I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Aleksandra Domanovic

Img.31 Ed Atkins at MoMa Ps1, I n s t a l l a t i o n V i e w, Ed Atkins

Img.30 Any Ever, Video Still, R y a n Tr e c a r t i n

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Colophon Updates Available: On the Challenges of Contemporary Art as a Meta-Physical Hyprid of Physicality and Virtuality Bachelor Thesis, ArtEZ Institute of the Arts Arnhem, June 2015 Te x t & D e s i g n Hendrike Nagel with special thanks to Te x t S u p e r v i s i o n Annie Goodner Design Supervision Remco van Bladel Thomas Castro Lector Kirsten Glover M e i k e Vo g e l Bas van Bentum Lena DrieĂ&#x;en Regine Nagel Lisenka Nissen

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ArtEZ

Hendrike Nagel ArtEZ 2015