Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today
by Eva Respini

Reviewed by Deborah Harris

I taught a university course titled Writing for the Visual Arts online in 2020, and the final project required that students write an exhibition review. Since most physical museums and exhibitions were closed due to Covid-19, I sent students a list of links to virtual exhibitions they could review for the assignment. As many students wrote in their reflections on the course, in the confines of a quarantine and global pandemic they needed art, beauty, and forms of expression more than they ever had. Many also weren’t aware of the vast availability of virtual museums and huge catalogues of online art collections. For these reasons, the comprehensive book Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today seems particularly timely, even as a historical exploration of internet art and its development. In fact, the evolution of internet art has likely been profoundly influenced by this past year, a year in which many of us have worked, played, and created primarily online.

Art in the Age of the Internet is a visually stunning book that includes a multitude of genres and modes—historical information, theoretical essays, color images, conversations on art, and more—that trace the birth of internet art and its metamorphoses back to the birth of the internet as we know it in 1989. Featuring over 200 images of works, the book is itself a rich and vast exhibition of artworks, history, and art theory. Eva Respini, editor of the book and Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, ties together the immense collaborative project with a helpful preface and introductory essay. Through these opening texts, Respini helps the reader to navigate the rest of the book, much like a docent would guide art patrons at a museum.

To take the book-as-museum analogy further, the organization of Art in the Age of the Internet is crucial for such an immense collection of works. The book’s diverse range of genres and modes are organized effectively into defined sections: the beginning “content” includes historical overviews and theoretical essays; the following larger section is comprised of color images of artworks; and the brief final section includes timelines, notes, and indexes. The color images are divided into subsections with thematic titles such as “Hybrid Bodies” and “States of Surveillance,” each followed by conversations among artists. These conversations—transcribed discussions between two artists who expound on the art and mediums featured in their respective sections—offer fresh perspectives on developments in internet art.

The argument presented throughout the Art in the Age of the Internet is sophisticated, but very clear: the internet was never a passive, static space where art was to be stored and archived, but a mode of identity formation, expression, and artistic technique. Even before the internet, various tributaries that would ultimately flow together to become internet art existed in the imagination of creative minds, including information masterminds George Maciunas and Stewart Brand. In her essay “Machines Tools, and Blueprints,” Kim Conaty describes how Maciunas assembled a “learning machine” in 1969. Consisting of “five offset-printed sheets of text glued together to form a long, scroll-like missive, this ‘machine’ took shape as a diagram or map for navigating broad bodies of knowledge.” Around the same time, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture zine that helped make “green” information available to the masses. Brand was a known activist and environmentalist who imagined ways to get information to newly formed communes outside his home in the Bay Area. Maciunas and Brand viewed cyberspace primarily as a mode of information dissemination, as a means towards government accountability and democratization, and not necessarily as a space for art creation and patronage; still, they preemptively initiated discussions of censorship and surveillance that would strongly inform the theory and aesthetics of internet art.

Editor Eva Respini’s introductory essay “No Ghost Just a Shell” offers a comprehensive history of the relationship between art and the internet in its early years. In the 1990s, the internet shifted from a domain used primarily by governments, corporations, and large research organizations, to a tool accessible to the masses. It’s understandable, then, why much of virtual reality (VR) technologies, from radar to gaming, began as military tools before entering the art world. VR offered a way for artists to mirror or disrupt reality in fascinating ways. In 1993, an essay by sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling argued that “The internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy.”

Many of the essayists in the collection discuss the liberatory potential of new technologies for making and disseminating art, and at the same time express suspicion and caution. From the start, the question of surveillance on the web troubled artists, as did concerns about the reproduction and misappropriation of their work.

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, as the title makes clear, covers a substantial period of time and thus a wide array of topics through its essays and conversations. Notable essays include Catlin Jones’ essay “IT’S A WEBSITE: The Enduring Promise of Art Online,” which discusses how “net art” moved from an attempt to capture physical museum spaces online to an actual medium of art creation; and Lauren Cornell’s “Professional Surfers” in which she explores internet surfing as an artistic practice that blurs the lines between “artist, curator, archivist, and everyday internet user” (93). The final essay, written by Omar Kholeif, theorizes what will be the future of art or the postdigital, a term he uses to describe the vast potential of our current tools.

What is most impressive, perhaps, is how the book includes a range of essays from the abstract and philosophical to more concrete, historical studies. An exploration of the internet prompts this range from the historical to the philosophical, as Kholeif captures so poignantly in the final essay: “The duality of the internet as part of an object economy as well as an intangible software economy of floating, ephemeral ‘browsing’ is what makes its cultural status so unique” (97). In “Hello World, Goodbye World, and Hello Again: Looking at Art after the Internet,” he includes descriptions and images from prophetic artworks that capture the blurring between human and machine. One piece he describes, a video by Ryan Trecartin and collaborator Lizzie Fitch called A Family Find Entertainment (2004), depicts a borderline psychotic youth named Skippy (meant to represent anyone) locked in the upstairs bathroom while a wild party goes on below. He engages in self-harm while he begins to “wax lyrical” about the world and life; meanwhile, the characters become increasingly zombie-like in their behavior. According to Kholeif, “Trecartin evokes the hypomania of becoming symbiotic with machines, relishes in it, becomes one with it.” The video captures the postdigital state—a world where humans and machines become increasingly indistinguishable.

The many artworks that follow the essay section are informative and fascinating, as are the conversations by artists interspersed throughout the images. Organized in thematic sections (rather than strictly chronologically), the color images trace the different developments in internet art and the forms they take, including physical artworks about the internet, video art, installation views, and screenshots. In one piece, Cory Arcangel hacked early video game cartridges and engineered them with a new chip that he designed himself. The result is Super Landscape #1 (2005), a video installation that includes these hacked Nintendo consoles, and projects large images of the video games’ skies and roads on the wall of a room. Imagine, for example, the fluffy clouds in the world of Super Mario projected on a large screen, with similar large images on each wall. The result is the feeling of being inside the video game. One of the last images reveals an “Instagram Update” (originally dated May 27, 2014). In the 2015 “performance,” a blonde woman with cat-eye sunglasses looks closely into a jeweled iPhone, which blocks half of her face from our view. Once again, this final color image echoes Kholeif’s notion of the postdigital, and perhaps serves as glimpse into our increasingly phone-obsessed society.

Interspersed between these artworks are conversations between artists—in the form of transcribed talks recorded through mediums such as Google docs and Skype—that cover an array of topics such as populist communication, internet censorship, political art, and the artistic process. These casual and organic conversations help contextualize some of the more abstract essays by mentioning contemporary phenomena: Trump’s presidency, social media, the younger “digital natives” who are emerging in the art scene, etc. If anything, I would have appreciated even more discussion of how the category of art has expanded to include various contemporary platforms such as Instagram and recent video games.

With the proliferation of viral memes and new mediums like TikTok, the relationship between art, the internet, and personal expression has never felt so prescient. One only needs to consider the image of Bernie Sanders and his mittens to realize the power of an image to connect people across the globe. From art as a political force in movements like Black Lives Matter to the incredible artistry found in virtual reality, Art in the Age of the Internet reveals how the internet has been integral to our conception—and even our definition—of art as form of identity and expression.