Post-Internet Art: Origins, Critiques, and Future Visions

Marisa Olson coined the term 'Post-Internet' in the early 2000s to describe how her entire practice was shaped by daily online experience, not just web-based works. The term quickly became a label for a generation of artists influenced by web culture, often lacking political or critical engagement. A key example is The Jogging, a collaborative project launched in 2009 by Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen on Tumblr, where artists shared photos of improbable object compositions as art, sometimes remaining digital collages, other times becoming physical sculptures. This shift of digital language offline, as Hito Steyerl argued, reflects the growing power of the internet as it expands beyond screens. Post-Internet art entered white cube galleries with an unprecedented attitude but faced criticism as lightweight, documentation-driven art. Despite its rapid rise and fall, it legitimized the internet's presence in contemporary art. Looking ahead, Zach Blas's Contra-Internet (2014-18) proposes a queer future for the network, resisting normalization by systemic forces. Current discourse spans privacy, surveillance, social networks, data control, digital labor, memes, AI, machine learning, and blockchain, indicating a fertile moment of multiple, unpredictable possibilities.