The term ‘post-internet' has emerged as a popular descriptor of recent visual art and its surrounding discourse. While no cogent definition of the term has been collectively agreed upon, post-internet stances share an assumption that technological conditions in general, and lifelong internet immersion in particular, offer an increasingly useful frame through which to understand contemporary artistic practice.
To what forms of practice can this thinking be applied? Do they cohere into a recognizable field or movement? What aesthetic and conceptual frameworks emerge from such positions? Is post-internet art simply a voguish, mass-palatable rejoinder to the internet art of yesteryear?
Presented by Rhizome in association with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and organized by Karen Archey, the panel discussion Post-Net Aesthetics convenes leading artists and intellectuals in academia, contemporary art and new media to give shape to this slippery neologism.
Comprising artist Harm van den Dorpel, Rozsa Farkas, Director and co-curator/editor, Arcadia Missa, Ben Vickers, Curator of Digital, Serpentine Gallery, and moderated by curator and art critic Karen Archey, Post-Net Aesthetics considers issues such as increasingly popular post-human and corporate aesthetics, the museum's role in post-internet art's potential canonization, and the relationship of post-internet art to its web-based forebears. Post-Net Aesthetics follows a series of Net Aesthetics panels, presented by Rhizome in 2006 and 2008, that sought to examine the state of contemporary art engaged with the internet.
Above image courtesy of grouphab.it.