The question that serves as this
essay’s title comes from a sculpture
by Aleksandra Domanović, an artist who uses
a feminist lens to consider the
conditions of the circulation and
reception of images and information
made possible by the
Internet, the topic of this text.
A Google search on the phrase
“Why can’t women time travel?”
produced 97,500,000 results in
0.39 seconds at the time of this
writing. Among the top image
results were a movie still from
Back to the Future Part II, a
stock photo of an expectant
mother caressing her stomach
that accompanied an article
about the dangers of traveling
while pregnant, an advertisement
for a travel journal priced
at $11.99, and a professionally
made installation view of
Domanović’s sculpture. This disparity
reflects the values of an
increasingly distracted society
consumed by entertainment and
advertising (as well as the interests
of advertisers). Internet image
searches produce thousands
of seemingly arbitrary results,
ranging from personal snapshots
to commercial pictures to spam.
The easy searchability and quick
dissemination of pictures in the
digital realm have ushered in an
era of image overload, as well
as a new class of commercially
available and produced images.
The developments of the
Internet and digital technologies
have conditioned a new
relationship to the image, particularly
in regard to distribution,
circulation, and production.
Photography is the lingua franca
of our distracted age–it is used
where common languages don’t
exist (and even when they do).
The numerous interlinked digital
networks that move beyond
fixed geographies and political
boundaries offer unprecedented
ways to communicate and
share information. From the
Arab Spring uprisings to Occupy
movements to the rallying
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, social
media platforms and personal
networks have facilitated the
quick dissemination of pictures
and data, where traditional
media could not. The ability to
reach increasingly wider audiences,
however, is tempered
today by the threat to privacy
through surveillance of our data
and lives.
Commercial images of the
twentieth century were traditionally
obtained through catalogs,
image agencies, and other
commercial outlets that controlled
the quality, publication,
and integrity of those pictures.
Today’s images are increasingly
available for easy alteration and
reproduction, and in the quick
dissemination through social
media and image sharing outlets,
original credit and authorship are
frequently lost. Ubiquitous and
authorless, they are the ordinary
pictures of today. Commercially
produced images reflect cultural
models, values, and aspirations,
and more and more today they
signal an era in which originality,
image integrity, and factual truth
are not assured. Artists have
engaged with and responded to
the current conditions of image
production with wide-ranging
works and methodologies–some
with a sense of optimism, and
others with unease or downright
skepticism.
This text takes its inspiration
from the Internet itself. What
follows is a dictionary of relevant
concepts and a selection of artists
who have responded critically
to the digital dissemination of
industrially produced and commercial
images. Several of them
fall under the rubric of “post-Internet”
artists, an inadequate
and misleading term used to
describe work that engages critically
with the Internet (see Post-Internet below).
Some of the following
artists have used the aesthetics
of corporate branding, while
others have mined the language
of still life, celebrity portraiture,
advertising, or product photography. And yet others have
probed the limits of authorship
and copyright in the digital age.
Like the Internet, the following
is by no means an exhaustive
overview of image-making in the
early twenty-first century. It is a
somewhat arbitrary, and decidedly
personal, lexicon of how
we might navigate the unruly
landscape of ordinary pictures in
the age of the Internet.
Q
QUERTY–QWERTY is
the arrangement of keys
on a standard English computer
keyboard and provides the
organizational structure of this
dictionary.
W
Warburg, Aby–The
German art historian Aby
Warburg created the Mnemosyne
Atlas (unfinished at the time of
his death in 1929), a subjective
effort to chart the afterlife of
antiquity and the transformation
of antique images and motifs
into the modern era. Taking
the form of thousands of images,
Warburg’s project was made
possible by the advent of mass
reproduction of images, including
prints, photographs, and
magazine and newspaper illustrations.
In an analogue to contemporary
hypertext, Warburg laid
down visual arguments based on
connections among gestures and
symbols in artworks not typically
considered together, raising
questions of subjectivity and
meaning in art, history, and varied
sites of cultural expression.
E
Espionage/Edward
Snowden–Former government
contractor Edward
Snowden alerted the world in
2013 about National Security
Agency (NSA) surveillance
activities. His leaked classified
information has been the
linchpin in debates about the
right to privacy in the age of
the Internet and the subject of
Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning
film Citizenfour (2014).
R
(Re)Appropriation—
Appropriation is a methodology
associated most closely
with the Pictures Generation
artists in the 1970s and 1980s,
who used existing images from
movies, TV, and print to suggest
the finiteness of the visual
world, the depreciation of the
primacy of a single image, and
photography’s capacity to both
bolster and undermine the
production of stereotypes and
representations in our dominant
camera culture. In the age of
the Internet, such strategies are
utterly commonplace, and the
ease with which (re)appropriation
is made possible represents
a sea change in how we understand
originality and authorship.
Images quickly lose their
authors as they are circulated,
often without credit, and then
reposted, reblogged, pinned,
tweeted, and hashtagged in
entirely new contexts. Once
circulated, pictures that were
made for specific commercial
or individual contexts become
collective images. Viral images,
memes, and trending videos gain currency, power, and new
branding possibilities in an ever-expanding
image economy.
T
3-D Scanning–The technology
of 3-D scanning
(now available as a smartphone
app) has marshaled the precise
replication of objects,
people, and animals. In an era
when appropriating images is
routine, Oliver Laric explores
ideas about authorship and
authenticity through remixed,
bootlegged, and “cover” versions
of visual icons. To produce
Yuanmingyuan Columns (2014),
Laric made 3-D scans of seven
marble columns from the Old
Summer Palace in Beijing, once
housed at the KODE Museum in
Bergen, Norway, and since returned
to China. He 3-D printed
the sculptures and presented
them in art galleries; the scans
were made freely available to the
public, without copyright restrictions,
to be used in a variety of
contexts, from video games to
commercial backgrounds for TV
and movies.1
In the digital era,
copies quickly usurp originals,
and Laric’s work considers how
we understand the ownership of
intellectual and cultural legacies
today, specifically the politically
loaded legacies of European
colonialism.
Y
YouTube–The video sharing
website that introduced
Justin Bieber to the world is one
of the most powerful and popular
platforms for disseminating
moving images. Artists have
used the site as a platform for
circulating their work outside
the constraints of the commercial
art market and have turned
to it for stylistic inspiration as
well. Ryan Trecartin, touted
as the reigning artist of the
“YouTube age,”2
has created
videos that evoke the DIY energy,
individual creative expression,
multiple narratives, and
sampling from diverse contexts
and identities that are made
possible through the site.
U
Umbrico, Penelope—
For Penelope Umbrico the
Internet is an ever-expanding
collective archive from which she samples. Drawing on the
vast number of pictures uploaded
and shared online, Umbrico
has seized upon a generic and
universal subject–the sunset–familiar
to us from our
own phones and social media
feeds. For her monumental
and ongoing work Suns (from
Sunsets) from Flickr, begun
in 2006, Umbrico has gathered
hundreds of thousands
of images of sunsets from the
popular image-sharing site,
which she prints as 4-by-6-inch
snapshots and installs in a grid
on the wall; the presentation
changes with each installation,
its size dependent on the space
allotted to the artist. The
sheer quantity of the images
underscores the universality of
the sunset motif across geographies,
including political and
economic ones.
I
Image Object–Artie Vierkant,
artist and author of the
2010 essay “The Image Object
Post-Internet,”considers the
relationship and ownership of
objects and images in today’s
digitized culture.3 He draws
on existing images, logos, and
intellectual property to make
work in photography, video, and
sculpture. For his photographic
series Usage Pending (2014),
he appropriated the logo of the
Polaroid corporation, once a
leader in the analog photography
industry. Although the
artist sought to legally use the
company’s brand, he was denied
approval, so he covered each
photograph with a translucent
film, creating a physical manifestation
of the digital blur seen in
online images when the rights to
a person’s likeness or to a logo
have not been secured.
O
Open Source–“Open
Source” refers to a program
where the source code is
available to the public free of
charge, to use and modify from
its original design. It has become
shorthand for the model of our
current digital sharing culture
and our understanding of intellectual
production and public
space today, which prizes universal
access, transparency, and
free license. The concept was at
the heart of the New Museum’s
2010 exhibition Free, organized
by Lauren Cornell. Featuring artists
such as Rashaad Newsome,
Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, and
Amanda Ross-Ho, the exhibition
examined the many ways that
collective experiences, which
are now based on simultaneous
private experiences, are navigated
by artists in a world where
images, ideas, and data are given
free rein.
P
Post-Internet–“Post-Internet”
is a term coined
around 2006 by artist and
writer Marisa Olson to describe
art made in the “wake” of the
Internet.4
In a panel discussion
that year, Olson explained:
“What I make is less art ‘on’
the Internet than it is art ‘after’
the Internet. It’s the yield
of my compulsive surfing and
downloading. I create performances,
songs, photos, texts
or installations directly derived
from materials on the Internet or
my activity there.”5
Generally used to describe a
group of artists born in the mid-1980s working in London, Berlin,
and New York, the term has
been applied to a wide variety of
art, from screen-based work to
painting, sculpture, and performance,
that critically addresses
the Internet and an array of related
issues, from the loss of privacy
to the changes in language
in the digital realm and how we
understand images and information
today. Like all art historical
monikers, it has proved very limiting
(isn’t most art today made
after a spell on Google?), and
even its initial adherents were
collectively indecisive about its
definition. This is made even
more confusing by the use of
the prefix “post,” which in most
other contexts (e.g., postmortem
or postmodern) means “after.”
Writer and artist Karen Archey
has argued that what initially
emerged from political positions
in the legacy of institutional
critique has become co-opted by
the art world and market:
Post-internet art purports
to address the changes in
society when ever-present
advanced technology is so
banal it becomes invisible.
Thus, it is the calling of
a post-internet artist to
reveal the invisible, and to
teach us about oft-overlooked
aspects of society….
But [the] traditional modes
of artistic production,
professional comportment,
and artwork sale are conventional,
outdated, and at
odds with the internet-age
democratization of culture
that post-internet art seeks
to address. Such practices
fall back on conventions of
authority and class that we
have so desperately sought
to undermine since the advent
of Institutional Critique
in the mid-20th century.6
A
Abeles, Michele–Michele Abeles’s crisp, colorful
studio constructions and photomontages
combine common
objects–wine bottles, terracotta
pots, newspapers, and
printed fabrics–and nude
bodies. Drawing on the language
of commercial still life, Abeles’s
props are familiar, even bland,
with minimal symbolic or narrative
associations. Her titles,
constituting an inventory of
the objects in the photograph,
further emphasize the pictures’
generic quality. In response
to the endless recirculation of
ordinary images in mass culture
today, Abeles has used elements
of her own older photographs
to make new work, as
in Progressive Substitution
Drills (2012), which appropriates
imagery of a rock, printed fabric,
and a newspaper scrap from her
earlier photographs.
S
Steyerl, Hito–Filmmaker,
artist, and writer Hito
Steyerl has produced a poetic
and visceral body of work that
traces connections between
economies of images, entertainment,
and violence. In her video
How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking
Didactic Educational .MOV File
(2013), she wryly takes on the
issue of surveillance today. Narrated by an automated male
voice, the video is a parody of
instructional films, outlining
strategies on how “not to be
seen.” These techniques include
shrinking down to a unit smaller
than a pixel, living in a gated
community, or being female and
over fifty years old, and they are
demonstrated by Steyerl alongside
generic faceless figures (the
kind available in 3-D modeling
programs). The video was filmed
on a desert site covered with aerial
photo-calibration targets–
symbols painted on the ground
that are used as test patterns
for cameras on planes. Steyerl
proposes here a new ontology
for images and the representation
of the body in a world where
everything is visible. On this new
understanding of representation
and visibility in the digital age,
the artist has stated:
This condition opens up
within and by means of an
avalanche of digital images,
which multiply and proliferate
while real people disappear
or are fixed, scanned
and over-represented by an
overbearing architecture of
surveillance. How do people
disappear in an age of
total over-visibility? Which
huge institutional and legal
effort has to be made to
keep things unspoken and
unspeakable even if they
are pretty obviously sitting
right in front of everyone’s
eyes? Are people hidden
by too many images? Do
they go hide amongst other
images? Do they become
images?7
D
DISimages–The online
fashion, art, and lifestyle
magazine DIS was founded in
2010 by four friends and artists.
Responding to a world in
which everything is branded,
the group uses its own platform
to create editorials, fashion,
and stock images. A division of
the magazine, DISimages, is a
fully functioning stock-image
library featuring commissioned
pictures by artists such as Katja
Novitskova, Timur Si-Qin (see
Logo), and Anicka Yi. Using the
language of corporate aesthetics,
their images broaden the
typical portrayals of lifestyle
and commercial products. Often
set against a neutral white
backdrop, the pristine photographs
are arranged by themes
such as “modest by the sea,”
which features women in body and
head-covering garb. The
artists and their collaborators
disrupt the corporate images by
hashtagging them with elusive keywords such as “after salad,”
“post-organic,” and “the new
wholesome.” DISimages
simultaneously participates in
the stock-image industry (their
photos are fully licensed and
available for sale through their
website), while also manipulating
the codes and expectations
of that industry.
F
Facial Recognition
Software–Used by law
enforcement, immigration authorities,
and employers, facial
recognition software identifies
an individual through the comparison
of selected facial features
with a digital picture from
an image database. Zach Blas’s
ongoing Facial Weaponization
Suite (begun in 2011) is composed
of a series of bright pink
plastic masks that confuse
facial recognition software.
Purportedly compiled from the
biometrics of a variety of gay
men, Blas’s objects resist surveillance
in the digital age while
challenging heteronormative
masculine cultural codes. With
this work Blas addresses the
loaded questions of representation
and queer identity through
the pointed lens of the increasing
threat to privacy that is a
hallmark of our digital age.
G
Grosse Fatigue–Camille
Henrot’s single-channel
video Grosse Fatigue (2013)
responds to the prevalent way
images of all types are consumed
today: on a screen, and often
layered with numerous open windows.
Set to a spoken-word
poem with a throbbing percussive
soundtrack, Grosse Fatigue
is composed of accumulated
shots that attempt to narrate
the creation of the universe.
The images are drawn from the
scientific and natural collections
of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, mixed with
found images from the Internet
and scenes filmed in diverse
locations, including domestic
interiors and pet stores. The
series of pop-up images and
windows that animate Grosse
Fatigue propose a new methodology
for understanding our own
history–not through the linear
models of a previous era, but
rather through the consumption
of incongruent linked images,
which raises questions about
subjectivity and meaning today. Like the prescient work of Aby
Warburg, who similarly created
subjective relationships among
disparate images to create new
narratives and question established
hierarchies, Henrot’s video
suggests how the immense and
never-ending avalanche of available
pictures and information
today produces a condition of
image fatigue.
H
Hashtag–A hashtag is a
label that can be searched
on social networks, allowing
users to find images and information
related to specific
content, events, and actions.
Personal pictures tagged, for
example, with #ArabSpring,
#BlackLivesMatter, and #LoveWins have been swiftly and
widely disseminated in ways that
supersede the networks of traditional
media. Once uploaded,
these personal images are used
in the service of news reporting
or for commercial purposes, representing
a paradigm shift in the
source of commercially disseminated
images from professionals
to amateurs.
J
JPEG–JPEG, the acronym
for the Joint Photographic
Experts Group (the committee
that created standards for
coding images), is among the
most common formats for the
compression of digital images
and has made possible the
online transmission and circulation
of photographic images.
Photographer Thomas Ruff has
engaged the aesthetic and philosophical
conditions of the vast
amount of ordinary digital images
that circulate widely, from
pornography to natural disasters
to newsworthy acts of violence.
For his jpeg series (2002-2007),
Ruff downloaded low-resolution
images from the Internet, enlarged
them to monumental size,
and presented them mounted
and framed, giving material
form to images that were meant
to be viewed only on-screen.
The enlargement of low-quality
pictures results in a grid composition
of large pixels, rendering
the image virtually illegible at
close range.
K
Kline, Josh–Josh Kline’s
wide-ranging body of work
considers the commodification
of identity and youth culture in
today’s digital society. For his
videos Forever 27 and Forever 48
(both 2013), Kline digitally grafted
the likenesses of Kurt Cobain
and Whitney Houston (respectively)
onto the faces of actors,
with the titles referring to the age
these celebrities were when they
died. Taking the format of a
documentary interview familiar
to us through reality television
and TMZ reports, the “musicians”
participate in mock interviews as
if they were still alive. The effect
is at once familiar and unsettling.
Kline proposes new models for
reimagining the body in the era
of the celebrity image and the
superlative pursuit of health, fitness,
and physical perfection.
L
Logo–Synonymous with
brands, trademarks, and
watermarks, logos are everywhere
in the commercial landscape,
used by corporations
and artists alike. Artist Timur
Si-Qin has developed his own
logo–“peace”–drawn from
the yin and yang sign, which
populates his displays and
backdrops. In installations that
mine the presentation modes of
commercial shop or trade-show
displays, using materials that
range from 3-D prints of fossils
to yoga mats, Si-Qin considers
our culture’s preoccupation with
appearance, health, and luxury
brands. For Premier Machinic
Funerary: Prologue (2014), the
artist produced 3-D printed
sculptures of hominid fossils,
presented in Plexiglas vitrines
in an arrangement reminiscent
of a funeral altar, all set against
a brightly colored fabric printed
with a generic-looking corporate
design. “I’m interested
in the way commercial images
reveal the processes by which
humans interpret and respond
to the world around them,” the
artist has stated. “These are
the fingerprints of our cultural
image-search algorithms.”8
Z
No matches found.
X
XXX–Widespread public
access to the World Wide
Web has led to a radical
increase in the production,
availability, and dissemination
of commercially produced
pornographic images.
C
Corbis–One of the largest
stock-image agencies,
Corbis owns more than one
hundred million photographs,
including nine million works from
the Bettmann Archive, which
are stored at Iron Mountain,
a high-security and temperature-controlled
converted mine
in Pennsylvania. Owned by Bill
Gates, Corbis was originally
founded as an art licensing
company that provided digital
images of iconic artworks to
consumers, businesses, schools,
and libraries.
V
Video Backdrops–Commercially available
video loops are used in a wide
variety of applications, including
promotions, advertisements,
and TV news backdrops. Such
material represents one aspect
of “distributed media,” a subject
mined by artist Seth Price
in his widely downloaded 2002
manifesto “Dispersion.”9
Price defines distributed media as
“social information circulating in
theoretically unlimited quantities
in the common market, stored
or accessed via portable devices
such as books and magazines,
records and compact discs,
videotapes and DVDs, personal
computers and data diskettes.”
Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s
famous interrogation–“Can one
make works which are not ‘of
art’?”–Price proposes that the
question has new life in the space
of distributed media, “which has
greatly expanded during the last
few decades of global corporate
sprawl. It’s space into which the
work of art must project itself
lest it be outdistanced entirely by
these corporate interests. New
strategies are needed to keep
up with commercial distribution,
decentralization, and dispersion.
You must fight something
in order to understand it.” His
Untitled Film, Right (2006), depicting a rolling
ocean swell, was created from a
six-second computer-generated
clip the artist purchased from an
online distributor of video backgrounds.
Price digitally altered
the clip and repeated it 150 times
before transferring the digital file
to 16mm film, bringing a digitally
native commercial clip into the
rarefied worlds of filmmaking and
the art gallery.
B
Blalock, Lucas–Using a
medium-format film camera,
Lucas Blalock addresses
the conventions of photographic
picture-making, specifically
the still-life genre familiar to us
through commercial and stock
images. His still lifes incorporate
ordinary objects, including found
textiles, hot dogs, cans
of food, and sheets of plywood,
and engage the aesthetics of
commercial display. The analog
pictures are finished digitally in
postproduction, through deliberately
flatfooted Photoshop
gestures executed by the artist,
such as using the clone tool
(typically used to create seamless
pictures when digital data is
missing) to create purposefully
imperfect images. Through this
rupture, Blalock suggests new
ways of looking at ordinary images
and objects in a world where
everything has already been
photographed.
N
Novitskova, Katja–Katja
Novitskova uses found and
stock images of nature to make
work in sculpture, photography,
and installation. Her series
Approximations, begun in 2012,
features large-scale cutout
images of animals presented on
aluminum stands, the kind used in
commercial and advertising displays.
These sometimes pixelated
images are cropped in odd
places, as they are reproduced
faithfully from their original
contexts, whether a magazine or
a website. Her work underscores
how our digitized culture requires
artists and viewers to adapt to a
new viewing condition for images: “As everything is simultaneously realistic and camouflaged,” she has written, “the skill needed
to navigate the space meaningfully
is to be fluent in image
editing effects.”10
M
Mroué, Rabih—Rabih
Mroué’s series The Fall of
a Hair (2012) affirms the central
role that cell-phone photographs
and moving images have played
in informing and mobilizing people
during conflict and collective
actions today. The Fall of a
Hair: Blow Ups features seven
enlarged and heavily pixelated
photographs of gunmen aiming
weapons at the viewer. These images were taken during
the first year of the Syrian civil
war from the phones of civilian
journalists and activists, whose
deaths were captured by their
cell phones, acting as an extension
of the eye to reveal the fatal
shot. The images were posted
posthumously on the Internet
and made freely available through
virtual and viral platforms. Mroué
places the viewer in the varying
positions of photographer,
victim, and co-conspirator, a
poignant reminder of the power
that phones can wield in a reality
in which mobile devices (and the
associated digital dissemination
of the images they produce) have
become an indispensable weapon
in conflicts and revolutions.
Eva Respini joined the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston as Chief Curator in 2015. Previously, Respini was Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. She specializes in contemporary photography and video, and is broadly interested in post-1960s art and visual culture.
Notes
1 See www.yuanmingyuan3d.com/english.html.
2 See, for example, Calvin Tomkins,
“Experimental People: The
Exuberant World of a Video-Art
Visionary,” New Yorker, March
24, 2014.
3 Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object
Post-Internet.”
4 See Michael Connor, “PostInternet,
What It Is and What It
Was,” in You Are Here: Art After
the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif
(Manchester: Cornerhouse;
London: SPACE, 2014), 57. See
also Gene McHugh, “Tuesday,
December 29th, 2009,” in
McHugh, Post Internet: Notes
on the Internet and Art,
12.29.09-09.05.10 (Brescia: Link
Editions; distributed by lulu.com,
2011).
5 Marisa Olson, quoted in Lauren
Cornell, “Net Results: Closing
the Gap between Art and Life
Online,” Time Out New York,
February 9-15, 2006, 69.
6 Karen Archey in the transcript
from the Forum for Contemporary
Photography, Museum of Modern
Art, New York, October 22,
2014, presentation on the topic
“Post-Internet.”
7 Hito Steyerl, quoted in the
press release for Hito Steyerl:
How Not to Be Seen: A
Fucking Didactic Educational
Installation, Andrew Kreps
Gallery, New York, July 2-
August 15, 2014.
8 Timur Si-Qin, as told to Gabriel
H. Sanchez, “500 Words,” Artforum.com, September 9,
2014.
9 Seth Price, “Dispersion.” All quotations
are from this document.
10 Katja Novitskova, artist’s statement
for Utopian Grids exhibition,
de Verdieping, Amsterdam,
September 2009.
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