Image Courtesy of Marisa Olson.
Web3 this, NFTs that. Our attempt at authenticating the digital as though it were a plot of land stands like a sand-castle bordering the shore, ready to melt into the ocean of an incoming AI-wave. We’ve tried and failed at overcoming the old, religious saying ‘On the internet, nobody knows you‘re a dog’ by buying blue verification badges, ridiculing some pretty large multinationals in the process. It makes sense, then, to revisit old truths, made palpable by the explorations and conversations of art-makers who’ve turned online cores into Biennale lores; chief amongst them, artist, author and curator Marisa Olson.
The internet is both a place to lose ourselves and a space to find each other. In the late Nineties and early Two-Thousands, its exponential uptake was as inspiring and hopeful as it is riddled with irony and exhaustion today. Art responded accordingly.
Net artists separated themselves from the New Media art crowd by choosing to focus exclusively on the World Wide Web, exploring how this technology can be implemented against the grain and towards a greater societal good. Geekily optimistic, they adopted a series of aesthetics and socially experimental approaches in their use of media with the same kind of TED-Talk excitement that we know from crypto ride-or-die girlies today.
Slowly but surely, dissident voices started feeling more wary about this project. Still engaging with, through and alongside the internet, they also wanted to critique it while making their art. People who held such positions started befriending one another in niche online forums, turning some of them into their art projects (McHugh’s Post Internet or the collective Nasty Nets). It wasn’t until Marisa Olson wrote a couple of viral essays a few years later that their divorce from the Net-Art family was complete, grouping up and referring to themselves as Post-Internet. (See: ‘Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture’, or ‘POSTINTERNET: Art After the Internet’, both by Marisa Olson.)
Image Courtesy of Marisa Olson.
Addressing the differences between these tribal groupings in his recent video essay titled ‘the post internet report’, Brad Troemel said it best: ‘[Post-Internet art] signalled a shift from the 90s Net-Art tendency to view the internet as a portal to the future, into viewing the internet as both the engine and archive of its own obsolescence.’
Post-Internet is when online and offline existence compete in the ring of our attention economy before realising they’re on the same team. It’s when vibe shifts happen as a result of memes and not the other way around; it’s when IRL commercial banners assimilate to chat-box stickers; when your attention span equals that of a TikTok video; when you walk around dressed as your own avatar; when algorithms decide the popularity of ideologies; when your sex life depends on Facetune; when you do things for the plot or go on vacation for the gram. Marisa Olson belongs to a generation of artists that realised the term ‘superficial’ assumes a whole new meaning, almost an immersive one. For better or for worse, growing up online means you’re wired to refer back to yourself. What, then, isn’t superficial nowadays?
Unpacking this in a mix of performance, video art and self-reflective text, she created a blog to document her audition and participation in American Idol’s fifth season. ‘Today is a GREAT day,’ her first entry reads, before continuing to consistently unmask the holistic toxicity of that entertainment programme and the competitive culture which sustains it. She then mounted a fictional re-enactment of her journey and titled it The One That Got Away (2004); you can still watch it on Vimeo.
Image Courtesy of Marisa Olson.
Post-Internet, then, is not just a Windows-Desktop-adjacent aesthetic, a greener meadow and a bluer sky. It is an acknowledgement that, in many ways, the emergence of the internet dispersed qualities typically reserved for art into our day-to-day existence, albeit deceptively. As Seth Price argued in his famous essay, ‘Dispersion’, an inherent tendency of art is to stick its nose into places one wouldn’t expect, seamlessly dispersing its influence. Olson’s work is constructed around notions of superficiality, but also seeks to unravel the physical infrastructure which sustains it (power plants, wires, warehouses). When asked to decide between concept or execution, she chooses the former.
Scrolling down my YouTube explore page, I see a video of Putin drawing the backside of a cat during a Siberian school visit ten years ago; underneath it, the new Gucci campaign about ‘A Hero’s Journey’ (Jannik Sinner). Further down it gets interesting with the CNN-live press conference titled ’Cocaine in the White House’, followed by Paper Rad’s Trash Talkin (2006). If Edvard Munch painted The Scream (1893) today, people would relate it to social media. That’s because Post-Internet is not so much an art movement as it is a reality we’re still surfing, blending the distinction between the two. If you insist on thinking about it as an art movement, at least accept that it bears no end.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Keep an eye out for Marisa Olson’s upcoming book on the topic, entitled The Meaning of Post-Internet. Other recommended reading, all of which was quoted or referenced in this text, includes the Rhizome blogs Post Internet by Gene McHugh and Nasty Nets by Marisa Olson et al. as well as Marisa Olson’s essays ‘POSTINTERNET: Art After the Internet’ (2011) and ‘Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture’ (2008). The audio-visually inclined may enjoy Brad Troemel’s video essay ‘the post internet report’ (2023).
Photobooth Credits
Styling: Joana Zibat
Wearing: COAT PRISCAVera
As featured in SLEEK 78 – BLISS. Available in print and digital here.
Marisa Olson
Marisa Olson is a New York based artist, curator and professor. Combining performance, video, drawing and installation, her work addresses the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture and the aesthetics of failure. She coined the term ‘Post-Internet-Art’ – the movement that involves works derived from the Internet and its effects on aesthetics.