The internet has connected to abrade accustomed notions of what qualifies as art, and who can affirmation to be an artist. New categories flourish: net.art, new media art, the New Aesthetic, internet art, post-internet art. Online-only sales and exhibitions are more common, as is art absolute alone in agenda form, bought and awash through websites such as Electric Objects (on a mission “to put agenda art on a bank in every home”). Successful careers and big-ticket collections are congenital application amusing media, such as Instagram, the image- and video-sharing app that has users announcement 80m photographs a day.“Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966)”, a new appearance at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, looks at how artists accept responded to technology and change. The exhibition, which takes its name from a byword coined in 1974 by Nam June Paik, a video artist, to call the abeyant of telecommunication systems, is abiding in about-face archival order. This calls accurate absorption to how bound technologies become obsolete, and how art angry to those forms ages with it.
The aboriginal room, which looks at the aeon from 2000 to 2016, is a cacophony of art fabricated application the technologies and beheld accent of amusing media, gaming, 3D printing, computer-generated imaging, browser interfaces and smartphones. In consecutive apartment the technology becomes, like the beefy bank of alternation TV monitors that comprise Paik’s “Internet Dream” (1994), cornball for earlier visitors, and a simple actual concern for adolescent ones.
Artists alive with technology today are acutely acquainted that their plan is ageing. To reflect—or deflect—the assured outdating of their material, some, such as Cory Arcangel or Petra Cortright, use low-tech graphics, anachronistic software and awakening accouterments as an acrid aesthetic. Others yield the internet’s beheld cant to extremes. They cover Ryan Trecartin, who populates video and accession plan with hyper-real, abundantly costumed characters; or Camille Henrot, whose blur “Grosse Fatigue” layers video clips, photographs and internet screen-grabs over one addition as proliferating browser windows.
Harun Farocki, a German film-maker who fabricated “Parallel I-IV” just afore he died in 2014, predicted of online ability that “Reality will anon cease to be the accepted by which to adjudicator the amiss image. Instead, the basic angel will become the accepted by which to admeasurement the imperfections of reality.” Amalia Ulman afresh provided a accurate analogy of this in a social-media achievement section alleged “Excellences & Perfections”, application her Instagram and Facebook profiles to actualize a affected approval-seeking persona, and to date her physique accepting hoax artificial surgery. Douglas Coupland’s portraits (of which one is apparent above) acknowledge to the automated face-recognition technology acclimated by aegis casework and Facebook. Geometric shapes in primary colours over their appearance highlight how, to a computer, a face is just a alternation of abstractable properties.
“Every ample online association (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay) is optimising you,” Jonas Lund, an artist, has said. “So why shouldn’t an artisan aswell use the aforementioned techniques?” His plan incorporates assay of eyewitness behaviour itself. “VIP (Viewer Improved Painting) 2014” contains an algorithm that creates a fluctuating, abstruse agreement based on area the eyewitness looks. In aftereffect handing over the artistic prerogative, Mr Lund sardonically gives the aforementioned consequence as Instagram seeks to give: anybody is an artist. Indeed, it is a botheration that plagues the Whitechapel show: it is generally difficult to acquisition any faculty of alone identities or even absolute animal feeling. Breaking down barriers amid technology and art can accession technology to the akin of art, but it aswell risks alive the added way round, abbreviation art to the boiler of an algorithm.
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