I, Internet

What does it mean to make art in the machine? Online media shape our perception like no earlier technology has. Our fraying attention spans and the hybridisation of online and offline identities are now undeniable. Despite fierce opposition, AI tools have blurred the boundaries between human and machine creation. As our consciousness evolves in networks and on platforms, our subjectivity is changing in profound yet unexpected ways.

The mediatic bearers of such changes – video and the internet in its many forms –  have been the favourite tool of artists engaging with the emergence of such ‘online subjectivity’. Yet if temporal discontinuity is a feature of our post-internet state of mind, this certainly holds true for the history of internet-inspired art itself.

Classics of media and video art made a feature of the particularities of their emerging technologies. Recent works by often anonymous, post-millennial artists appear to think on, as much as about, the internet. These works, and their emergent AI successors, share many apparent aesthetic features: like fast-paced editing, low resolutions, and the use of found footage. Do they also, less obviously, impose an emotional, social, or political sensibility on their creators?

Through a screening and symposium, I, Internet traces the ways in which technologies have shaped our mutating selfhood and how artists have attempted to break out of the machine – successfully or otherwise – by making art inside it.

Symposium programme

The symposium will bring reflections by Helen Rollins, Tony D. Sampson, and John-Robin Bold, alongside screenings of media works by Chris Boyd, Eva and Franco Mattes, George Barber, Milo Creese, Thomson & Craighead, NobodyTM, Neue Deutsche Kunst, and others.

I, Internet is organised with John-Robin Bold.