The firsthand experience of viewing is often mediated by the digital apparatus (your phone or camera), and the intention is to post it to mark that you were there, but also for it to be seen and experienced by your followers.
Therefore, while you are there in person experiencing the original works of art, you may be looking at them largely through the lens of your camera or the screen of your phone. Think about the ramifications of the theories posited by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Video above: Art in the Age if the Instagram featuring Jia Jia Fei.
Art in the Age of Internet (26m 46s. The first segment deals with Art in the Age of the Internet):
Amalia Ulman. Excellencies & Perfections #2 (2018)
Some artists create works of art that intentionally reference the internet and social media, and often the system of surveillance that they embody. These types of social critique are often intended to make us aware of our complicity in these very systems, and are often meant to leave us uncomfortable about our role in this system.
What one posts online can embody ideas about the way that we see ourselves, or the way that we want to be seen, and about the way in which we create these constructed mediations.
These idealized and mediated expressions of self are created to be consumed online, and are often fictionalized accounts of the “reality” that the spectator is meant to understand as “real”– but they are often actually more irreal than they are real.
They also serve as raw source material for artists who use these types of mediated images to engage in a larger cultural critique.
Amalia Ulman (shown above) is an artist who created a body of work where she pretended to be an Instagram influencer, and her online performance helps underscore and contextualize the way in which the epoch of social media sharing and over-sharing has become a normalized way to consume online content. It also points out the extent to which Instagram feeds should be understood as fictionalized accounts of "reality."
What one posts online can embody ideas about the way that we see ourselves, or the way that we want to be seen, and about the way in which we create these constructed mediations.
These idealized and mediated expressions of self are created to be consumed online, and are often fictionalized accounts of the “reality” that the spectator is meant to understand as “real”– but they are often actually more irreal than they are real.
They also serve as raw source material for artists who use these types of mediated images to engage in a larger cultural critique.
Amalia Ulman (shown above) is an artist who created a body of work where she pretended to be an Instagram influencer, and her online performance helps underscore and contextualize the way in which the epoch of social media sharing and over-sharing has become a normalized way to consume online content. It also points out the extent to which Instagram feeds should be understood as fictionalized accounts of "reality."
See Also:
The Art History of the Selfie (8m):
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Surface Tension. 1992 (Installation)
Some artists, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, deal with the exploration of the systems of surveillance, and our complicity in those systems when we surf the internet.
Surface Tension "is an interactive installation where an image of a giant human eye follows the observer with Orwellian precision.This work was inspired by a reading of Georges Bataille's text The Solar Anus during the first Gulf War: first wide-spread deployment of camera-guided 'intelligent bombs'. Present-day computerised surveillance techniques employed by the Department of Homeland Security in the United States through the Patriot Act, provide a new and distressing backdrop for this piece."
See Surface Tension videos HERE.
WEEK 6: Art in the Age of Internet (reading assignments for this week)
• Jeff Scheible: Longing to Connect: Cinema’s Year of OS Romance
• Katrina Sluis, Julian Stallabrass and Christiane Paul. The Canon After the Internet
• Lauren Cornell. Self-Portraiture in the First-Person Age
• Gloria Sutton. CTRL ALT DELETE: The Problematics of Post-Internet Art
• Jeffrey De Blois. Hybrid Bodies
