The Art of Flex: Network Lessons from Post Internet Art

That's quite worth a look

The name ‘Electronic Superhighway’, although apt for the exhibition’s historical lens, still carries with it the air of internet cowboy, barrier-less freedom – a rhetoric engrained from its early tech formations in hippy-liberal Silicon Valley. With the amount of press on big data and surveillance, it should be clear that this illusion is not accurate. From the undersea networks that structure and carry the internet, to web 2.0’s digital architectures of linking, there are many echelons and restrictions within the freedoms and conveniences afforded by our ‘friendly’ every day devices. As art institutions, art practices, and collecting begin to rely upon and integrate communications technology into their methodologies, important questions as to how this infrastructure impacts success, and power are crucial.

In examining how artists involved in the beginnings of ‘post-internet’ art formed their own network of circulation, it is evident that not only is web 2.0 not a solution to opening up representation or creating a more horizontal playing field, its current network structure and the strategies used by certain artists are in fact reproducing existing hierarchies which risk further implementing capital interests into what kinds of art receive recognition….