THE PHENOMENON OF POST-INTERNET ART: ARTISTIC STRATEGIES AND PLACE IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Abstract

The study is devoted to the phenomenon of post-Internet art, its main representatives and key works, and a description of their characteristics. In contrast to the practices of net art, post-Internet art is a “return to the material”: artists create objects inspired by the network and often bearing the “mark” of network aesthetics. However, these objects have physical characteristics; they evoke a tactile sensation in the viewer, serving as a spontaneous affirmation of materiality in our increasingly virtualised world. Post-Internet art is a little-studied area of contemporary art; the emergence of this trend is associated with the development of net-art practices (network art), which have offered new forms of interaction with viewers who got the opportunity to join the artistic process as full participants. The term “post-Internet” should be understood not as a situation “after” the Internet (as if the Internet “ended”) but as a situation after some significant event that changed the usual course of things. “Post-Internet” is a situation after the Internet has ceased to be perceived in a romantic way, as a space of anonymity and permissiveness, “undeveloped land” and is now understood as part of an online-offline “bundle” - with appropriate communication channels, creation of commercial platforms, digital currencies and etc., that is, as part of vernacular practices (everyday experience). From the point of view of its orientation, post-Internet art deals with understanding the consequences of the influence of Internet practices on contemporary art and culture. Net art artists created such works that were intended for the Internet, that is, used the possibilities of the Internet as a means of expression (they studied the structure of the Internet, the features of the code, the specifics of certain browsers, programs, etc.), whereas post-Internet artists seem to “bring” digital objects from the digital environment into the material world and use both online and offline formats for reflection on the effects of almost ubiquitous networking. In the 2010s, the Internet was no longer perceived as a “new” medium; it became more difficult to talk about post-Internet art as a specific movement in art since more and more aspects of our daily life are structurally determined by the World Wide Web, including art as a whole. Of course, the Internet continues to interest artists as a kind of socio-cultural state; however, discourses related to the Internet start to be increasingly woven into a wider range of issues - digital capitalism, ecology, social issues, etc. Therefore, the “marking” of art created under the influence of the Internet or referring to it in one way or another as “post-Internet art” is becoming less and less common, which allows us to speak about the specific temporal boundaries of post-Internet art as an art movement.