Using a language common to internet users, Alexei Shulgin proposes performative explorations of interactive elements which comprised the early web.
The artists creates a multi-page labyrinth composed of interface form elements, scripted to form a labyrinthian multi-page experience; a double take on interactivity, removing the original function expected by the element and giving it new meaning.
By systemically using the default browser elements and styles, the artists allows the works aesthetic to progress with the time and advancements in technology. Together with the artists call to contributions following his set of instructions, this artwork closely resembles a happening or performance piece.
Such an artwork requires the audience to be well acquainted with internet language as it was developing in the late nineties: the Vernacular Internet.
‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ – the mantra of the Instagram era
Sharing itself becomes personhood, with activities taking on meaning not for their basic content but for the way they are turned into content, disseminated through the digital network, and responded to.
[cf An Elixir of Reminding: “Nostalgia is the negation of death, it proves we are still living even without an identifiable future. Instagram is a machine for producing instant nostalgia, a ward against death.”]
Recent years have seen a pivotal shift in the producer-consumer model with the advent of the Internet, and especially Social Media networks. This new publishing medium, which has grown to become ubiquitous, empower users to create, share and consume content within peer networks; an disruptive model which is bringing visible changes to publishing and broadcasting. Artists working with new and traditional media are piggybacking this information sharing paradigm and creating expressive and contemporary artworks.
Social Media Art and its artist is growing in the public taste, as more people become fluent in the languages of the Internet; But what exactly constitutes Social Media Art? Using a bit of logic we can draft a preliminary definition: Art created to be shared in Social Media. This definition encompasses the most important aspect of this new medium, which is also the most difficult to grasp: sharing.
Sharing is at the heart of Social Media and any artwork that lies therein. It is integral to this participatory model of creation and consumption, where content is made with the intent of "going viral". Social Media, as argued by Jose Van Dijk and David Nieborg, is composed by individuals “seeking to harness mass creativity, collectivism and peer production.” The medium Lends itself to appropriation and builds on the modernist tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s "Aesthetic Osmosis". Social Media Art, and specifically the shareable nature of its content, transfers the responsibility in interpreting a subject from artist to viewer, and goes beyond transferring also the production and ownership of the artwork.
In the act of sharing, the media is first consumed, added upon and then re-published to the consumers immediate network. In this viewer-interactive performance, additions by the creator-consumer users can be subtle or drastic, ranging from simple recontextualisation (which may be an act as small as commenting) to complete reconstruction or appropriation of the product, in turn impairing it with increasing surreal value, as understood by Susan Sontag’s observations on photography. Perhaps due to the ease of finding content online, the practice of reapropriation is commonplace and has become a trademark of the social media artist communities, often using each other's material, as seen in online arts platforms such as To.be or New Hive. Thus Social Media artists don't create for themselves, but rather as a contribution to the artist lore of Internet communities, making any artwork free and available to be built upon; an unfathomable model in traditional media, which is marked by copyright disputes.
As a result of this anarchic ownership model, the role of the artist has shifted from a monotheistic view of single entity responsible for creation, both concept and production, to a curatorial model of filtering, associating, archiving and altering pre-existing content integrally to their creative process. As explained by independent art critic Domenico Quaranta: “[the] internet generation is implementing … the practice of exploring, collecting, archiving, manipulating, reusing huge amounts of visual material produced by popular culture and advertising.” Artists working in Social Media will often incorporate elements of contemporary Internet culture in self-referencing artworks; what Russian internet artist pioneer Olia Lialina calls the "Vernacular Internet”, building on the contemporary art tradition, explained by the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art curator Felipe Chaimovich as a “mirror reflecting its meaning back onto the viewer”.
Another aspect of Social Media Art's natural shareability becomes clear its exhibition. Just as it is created from appropriating the medium, it must be consumed inside this context. Much as the traditional museum attempts to provide context for its artwork, Social Media Art lives inside this creator-consumer model. Thus, attempts to remove it from its context results in the display of of an archive rather than the original, much as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was a product of a time and place, meant to vanish, leaving only residual documentation. In this light, Social Media Art can be compared to a performance or beusyian social scultpure, that exists ephemerally in the interactions between artists and viewers, as with Douglas Davis’ The Worlds First Collaborative Sentence, from 1994. Today, this project which consisted in an internet-based collaborative text editor, is owned and maintained by the Whitney Museum of American art, and is displayed both as a historical archive, as well as an interactive and on-going performance.
Finally, this performative element of Social Media Art is accentuated by its carefully choreographed timing. Artists no longer create an artwork, but use the language of social media by creating a constant stream of little pieces published with small intervals, composing their greater oeuvre, as Explained by Brad Troemel: “artists are using social media to strategically manage perceptions of their work—transforming it from a series of isolated projects to a streaming feed that transforms the artist identity into a recognisable brand.” Social Media Art isn't to be thought of a series of artworks, but as a collective or series that contributes to a single artwork. This model dispels the notion the Masterpiece in a way somewhat prophesied by Gombrich's "there's no such thing as Art, only Artists."
“Richard Prince, new Portraits” is a series which exemplifies Social Media art. The artist appropriates photographs from the popular social media platform Instagram, intervenes by adding a comment and shares them in to his own followers. The offline exhibition that followed Gagosian Gallery in New york resulted in polarised opinions (Artnet called it “Thin offerings for anyone who is in possession of a brain”, whereas critic Jerry Saltz called it “truly brilliant"). What is remarkable is that even offline viewers took up the Social Media ethos, by using the artworks for #artselfies: as backgrounds for their own self portraits shared in the very same social media network in which they were conceived; even serving as a media opportunity for an artist whose work was appropriated by Richard Prince. A veritable example of the Vernacular Internet and its reapropriative aesthetics.
To synthesise, let's revisit our definition: Social Media Art is ephemeral, performative art created constantly, with the intention of being shared and reapropriated, not to be seen as individual artworks, but as a whole. Social Media offers its own language, which is only starting to be accepted by the traditional art establishment, but which is already showing great potential as a disruptive medium.
Digital sculptor Jan Robert Leegt’s process involves crafting spaces using a conceptual Hypermaterial. In this piece, the artist creates a series of cloisonné non-spaces in the browser.
The artist does not use a generative process do layout the spaces, nor does he make an attempt at narrative such as Olia Lialina; instead, the artists creates a strict formalist composition, playing with the internet’s interface language.
Each frame works as a window to a different page, whose dimensions exceeds its borders, discernible only through the shifting scrollbars. Thus, the artists creates a sculpture in the impossible space of the internet.
The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.
The concept would be all gravy if not for one thing: the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.
If this bot was shipping to the U.S., asks Forbes contributor and University of Washington law professor contributor Ryan Calo, who would be legally responsible for purchasing the goodies? The coders? Or the bot itself?
ROBOTS ARE STARTING TO BREAK THE LAW AND NOBODY KNOWS WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT - Fusion
Joe Hamilton - Essentially Absolutely Continuous Plane - 2015
Joe Hamilton
Essentially Absolutely Continuous Plane
2015
Essentially Absolutely Continuous Plane is an Internet-collage, created and exhibited within visual social media platform NewHive.
Work comprises of a digital collage using found photography to create an abstracted colour-field composition, following the lines of his earlier work DIV/CONTOUR. Essentially Absolutely Continuous Plane is a mono tonal and solemn, adhering strictly to a red-hued Mars exploration subject matter.
The artist's work is marked by skilful use of the medium. The artwork uses the visually-led NewHive blogging platform as a tool for creation and exhibition, functioning within the service's reapropriative language.
The latest exhibition at the online museum explores Hyperspatialism: a concept to describe sculptural and geophysical volumes through abstraction, inspired by Jan Robert Leegt's Hypermaterialist sculptures and Marc Augé's non-spatial modernity; building on the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana and Dadamaiano.
The exhibition wonders between volume and void; between the sculptural forms of Jan Robert Leegt (NL), Nicolas Sasson (FR) and Clement Valla (US) and the psycogeography of JODI (NL), Olia Lialina (RU) and Jeroen Van Loon (NL).
Frame border is a Hypermaterialistic sculpture. The artist Jan Robert Leegt received a classical training in architecture and art and employs what he calls Hypermaterial: a conceptual semantic material based on hypertext, which uses the web’s user interface vernacular to describe volume and space.
The artist crafts the website through using hypertext rather than marble or wood. The minimal sculptural form has a sense of physicality, being placed within the confines of the browser window and dividing two spaces. The viewer is able to navigate the spaces, interacting with the border to observe it form the left of right.
This internet based artwork presents earth as a volumeless surface. The artist has taken 3d technology used in mapping through services such as Google Earth and removed its mass using an algorithm that projects its textures against its surface, in search for what the artist calls the Universal Texture; a hypermaterialistic matter that unifies volume and cartography.
The artist archivist looks for empirical processes in which anomalies occur; these anomalies are not errors, but the logical conclusion of these processes. The Universal Texture isn't a mistake–though its aesthetics are reminescent of Glitch–it is an empirical method of calculating volume, much like mathematical perspective.
Architect by training, Brookling based artist Clement Valla works as a digitial archivist who tries to systematically examine the world.
His oeuvre is marked by the search for inconsistencies in systems, through digital algorithms or their human counterpart: mapping errors or a digital telephone game using Amazon’s mechanical turk. A 'programmed brain'.
Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegt (1973) trained in architecture and art before turning his attention to the web. His practice revolves around the exploration of space in the web. His early work is marked by what what he calls Hypermaterial, a conceptual prime matter based on hypertext and user interfaces from which he builds descriptive sculptural forms. Gradually, his work became increasing concerned with cloistering spaces and points of view, always working within the vernacular web.
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