Notes on Artie Vierkant: The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010

Artie Vierkant is an artist active on the Internet and in physical space. His work can be seen at artievierkant.com and in the UbuWeb Film / Video

Archive, ubu.com/film/vierkant.html

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"Post-Internet Art" is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by Gene McHugh Post-Internet is distinct from New Media Art and Conceptualism

Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction.

Art is a social object.

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Characteristics of art nowadays: 1) Nothing is in a fixed state: i.e., everything is anything else.Post-medium condition (Rosalind Krauss, Lev Manovich). - Art object's lack of fixity in representational strategy (multiple variations of the same object: Oliver Laric, Seth Price).

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In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author. .. stratagem of ... taking an object to be represented ... as another type of object entirely, without reference to the “original.” For objects after the Internet there can be no “original copy.”

• ...if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance ... of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies.

Information aesthetics: Its fault is in its attempt to encapsulate large amounts of data—practical information, experience—into an aesthetic and understandable shorthand. In other words, information aesthetics provides in one object both a representation and the components which make up its source in an attempt to illustrate or arrive at knowledge.

2) Second aspect: the nature of reception and social presence of art. Attention has always been a currency: now it has become diverged/split between those who wishes to seek it.

"They" idiom: alienation from production, a continuous deferral to action (“They should release this on another platform”). It does not allow, though, for a new fundamentally changed abilities of culture and language: - free available to all image-making tools; - instruments for image dissemination; - free access to majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning.

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While art may no longer have to contend with an idea of “mass media” as a fixed, monolithic system, instead it must now deal with both itself and culture at large as a constellation of diverging communities, each fixated on propagating and preserving itself.

Ironically, the most radical and “progressive” movements of the Post-Internet period would be those who either pass by either largely unnoticed due to a decision to opt out of any easily-accessible distribution networks, or else would be composed of a community of people producing cultural objects not intended as artistic propositions and not applying themselves with the label of artist.

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Boris Groys, On the New (2002): The successful... mass cultural image production of our age concerns itself with attacks by aliens... but once in while one would like to be able to contemplate and enjoy something normal, something ordinary... In life, only the extraordinary is presented to us as a possible object of our admiration.

Any sorting of images or aspects of culture, applied with a declaration or narrative gesture, becomes not dissimilar to our experience of everyday life... What matters is that in the presentation they have created a proposition towards an alternate conception of cultural objects.

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If, in Post-Internet culture, artistic production must deal with arrangements and representations of images and objects taken from any cultural context, how do we conceive of sorting the artists themselves?

Language in most average internet use is limited to search keywords, tags - a simple but nevertheless grossly limiting architecture.

P.10 ... denigration of objects and our relationship to space: if an object before us in a gallery is only one of an infinite multitude of possible forms that object could take, its value to the viewer becomes little more than a curiosity.

The strategy: create projects which move seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation. Central focus is the image (an object in itself).