The question that serves as this

essay’s title comes from a sculpture

by Aleksandra Domanović, an artist who uses

a feminist lens to consider the

conditions of the circulation and

reception of images and information

made possible by the

Internet, the topic of this text.

A Google search on the phrase

“Why can’t women time travel?”

produced 97,500,000 results in

0.39 seconds at the time of this

writing. Among the top image

results were a movie still from

Back to the Future Part II, a

stock photo of an expectant

mother caressing her stomach

that accompanied an article

about the dangers of traveling

while pregnant, an advertisement

for a travel journal priced

at $11.99, and a professionally

made installation view of

Domanović’s sculpture. This disparity

reflects the values of an

increasingly distracted society

consumed by entertainment and

advertising (as well as the interests

of advertisers). Internet image

searches produce thousands

of seemingly arbitrary results,

ranging from personal snapshots

to commercial pictures to spam.

The easy searchability and quick

dissemination of pictures in the

digital realm have ushered in an

era of image overload, as well

as a new class of commercially

available and produced images.

The developments of the

Internet and digital technologies

have conditioned a new

relationship to the image, particularly

in regard to distribution,

circulation, and production.

Photography is the lingua franca

of our distracted age–it is used

where common languages don’t

exist (and even when they do).

The numerous interlinked digital

networks that move beyond

fixed geographies and political

boundaries offer unprecedented

ways to communicate and

share information. From the

Arab Spring uprisings to Occupy

movements to the rallying

hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, social

media platforms and personal

networks have facilitated the

quick dissemination of pictures

and data, where traditional

media could not. The ability to

reach increasingly wider audiences,

however, is tempered

today by the threat to privacy

through surveillance of our data

and lives.

Commercial images of the

twentieth century were traditionally

obtained through catalogs,

image agencies, and other

commercial outlets that controlled

the quality, publication,

and integrity of those pictures.

Today’s images are increasingly

available for easy alteration and

reproduction, and in the quick

dissemination through social

media and image sharing outlets,

original credit and authorship are

frequently lost. Ubiquitous and

authorless, they are the ordinary

pictures of today. Commercially

produced images reflect cultural

models, values, and aspirations,

and more and more today they

signal an era in which originality,

image integrity, and factual truth

are not assured. Artists have

engaged with and responded to

the current conditions of image

production with wide-ranging

works and methodologies–some

with a sense of optimism, and

others with unease or downright

skepticism.

This text takes its inspiration

from the Internet itself. What

follows is a dictionary of relevant

concepts and a selection of artists

who have responded critically

to the digital dissemination of

industrially produced and commercial

images. Several of them

fall under the rubric of “post-Internet”

artists, an inadequate

and misleading term used to

describe work that engages critically

with the Internet (see Post-Internet below).

Some of the following

artists have used the aesthetics

of corporate branding, while

others have mined the language

of still life, celebrity portraiture,

advertising, or product photography. And yet others have

probed the limits of authorship

and copyright in the digital age.

Like the Internet, the following

is by no means an exhaustive

overview of image-making in the

early twenty-first century. It is a

somewhat arbitrary, and decidedly

personal, lexicon of how

we might navigate the unruly

landscape of ordinary pictures in

the age of the Internet.

Q

QUERTY–QWERTY is

the arrangement of keys

on a standard English computer

keyboard and provides the

organizational structure of this

dictionary.

W

Warburg, Aby–The

German art historian Aby

Warburg created the Mnemosyne

Atlas (unfinished at the time of

his death in 1929), a subjective

effort to chart the afterlife of

antiquity and the transformation

of antique images and motifs

into the modern era. Taking

the form of thousands of images,

Warburg’s project was made

possible by the advent of mass

reproduction of images, including

prints, photographs, and

magazine and newspaper illustrations.

In an analogue to contemporary

hypertext, Warburg laid

down visual arguments based on

connections among gestures and

symbols in artworks not typically

considered together, raising

questions of subjectivity and

meaning in art, history, and varied

sites of cultural expression.

E

Espionage/Edward

Snowden–Former government

contractor Edward

Snowden alerted the world in

2013 about National Security

Agency (NSA) surveillance

activities. His leaked classified

information has been the

linchpin in debates about the

right to privacy in the age of

the Internet and the subject of

Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning

film Citizenfour (2014).

R

(Re)Appropriation—

Appropriation is a methodology

associated most closely

with the Pictures Generation

artists in the 1970s and 1980s,

who used existing images from

movies, TV, and print to suggest

the finiteness of the visual

world, the depreciation of the

primacy of a single image, and

photography’s capacity to both

bolster and undermine the

production of stereotypes and

representations in our dominant

camera culture. In the age of

the Internet, such strategies are

utterly commonplace, and the

ease with which (re)appropriation

is made possible represents

a sea change in how we understand

originality and authorship.

Images quickly lose their

authors as they are circulated,

often without credit, and then

reposted, reblogged, pinned,

tweeted, and hashtagged in

entirely new contexts. Once

circulated, pictures that were

made for specific commercial

or individual contexts become

collective images. Viral images,

memes, and trending videos gain currency, power, and new

branding possibilities in an ever-expanding

image economy.

T

3-D Scanning–The technology

of 3-D scanning

(now available as a smartphone

app) has marshaled the precise

replication of objects,

people, and animals. In an era

when appropriating images is

routine, Oliver Laric explores

ideas about authorship and

authenticity through remixed,

bootlegged, and “cover” versions

of visual icons. To produce

Yuanmingyuan Columns (2014),

Laric made 3-D scans of seven

marble columns from the Old

Summer Palace in Beijing, once

housed at the KODE Museum in

Bergen, Norway, and since returned

to China. He 3-D printed

the sculptures and presented

them in art galleries; the scans

were made freely available to the

public, without copyright restrictions,

to be used in a variety of

contexts, from video games to

commercial backgrounds for TV

and movies.1

In the digital era,

copies quickly usurp originals,

and Laric’s work considers how

we understand the ownership of

intellectual and cultural legacies

today, specifically the politically

loaded legacies of European

colonialism.

Y

YouTube–The video sharing

website that introduced

Justin Bieber to the world is one

of the most powerful and popular

platforms for disseminating

moving images. Artists have

used the site as a platform for

circulating their work outside

the constraints of the commercial

art market and have turned

to it for stylistic inspiration as

well. Ryan Trecartin, touted

as the reigning artist of the

“YouTube age,”2

has created

videos that evoke the DIY energy,

individual creative expression,

multiple narratives, and

sampling from diverse contexts

and identities that are made

possible through the site.

U

Umbrico, Penelope—

For Penelope Umbrico the

Internet is an ever-expanding

collective archive from which she samples. Drawing on the

vast number of pictures uploaded

and shared online, Umbrico

has seized upon a generic and

universal subject–the sunset–familiar

to us from our

own phones and social media

feeds. For her monumental

and ongoing work Suns (from

Sunsets) from Flickr, begun

in 2006, Umbrico has gathered

hundreds of thousands

of images of sunsets from the

popular image-sharing site,

which she prints as 4-by-6-inch

snapshots and installs in a grid

on the wall; the presentation

changes with each installation,

its size dependent on the space

allotted to the artist. The

sheer quantity of the images

underscores the universality of

the sunset motif across geographies,

including political and

economic ones.

I

Image Object–Artie Vierkant,

artist and author of the

2010 essay “The Image Object

Post-Internet,”considers the

relationship and ownership of

objects and images in today’s

digitized culture.3 He draws

on existing images, logos, and

intellectual property to make

work in photography, video, and

sculpture. For his photographic

series Usage Pending (2014),

he appropriated the logo of the

Polaroid corporation, once a

leader in the analog photography

industry. Although the

artist sought to legally use the

company’s brand, he was denied

approval, so he covered each

photograph with a translucent

film, creating a physical manifestation

of the digital blur seen in

online images when the rights to

a person’s likeness or to a logo

have not been secured.

O

Open Source–“Open

Source” refers to a program

where the source code is

available to the public free of

charge, to use and modify from

its original design. It has become

shorthand for the model of our

current digital sharing culture

and our understanding of intellectual

production and public

space today, which prizes universal

access, transparency, and

free license. The concept was at

the heart of the New Museum’s

2010 exhibition Free, organized

by Lauren Cornell. Featuring artists

such as Rashaad Newsome,

Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, and

Amanda Ross-Ho, the exhibition

examined the many ways that

collective experiences, which

are now based on simultaneous

private experiences, are navigated

by artists in a world where

images, ideas, and data are given

free rein.

P

Post-Internet–“Post-Internet”

is a term coined

around 2006 by artist and

writer Marisa Olson to describe

art made in the “wake” of the

Internet.4

In a panel discussion

that year, Olson explained:

“What I make is less art ‘on’

the Internet than it is art ‘after’

the Internet. It’s the yield

of my compulsive surfing and

downloading. I create performances,

songs, photos, texts

or installations directly derived

from materials on the Internet or

my activity there.”5

Generally used to describe a

group of artists born in the mid-1980s working in London, Berlin,

and New York, the term has

been applied to a wide variety of

art, from screen-based work to

painting, sculpture, and performance,

that critically addresses

the Internet and an array of related

issues, from the loss of privacy

to the changes in language

in the digital realm and how we

understand images and information

today. Like all art historical

monikers, it has proved very limiting

(isn’t most art today made

after a spell on Google?), and

even its initial adherents were

collectively indecisive about its

definition. This is made even

more confusing by the use of

the prefix “post,” which in most

other contexts (e.g., postmortem

or postmodern) means “after.”

Writer and artist Karen Archey

has argued that what initially

emerged from political positions

in the legacy of institutional

critique has become co-opted by

the art world and market:

Post-internet art purports

to address the changes in

society when ever-present

advanced technology is so

banal it becomes invisible.

Thus, it is the calling of

a post-internet artist to

reveal the invisible, and to

teach us about oft-overlooked

aspects of society….

But [the] traditional modes

of artistic production,

professional comportment,

and artwork sale are conventional,

outdated, and at

odds with the internet-age

democratization of culture

that post-internet art seeks

to address. Such practices

fall back on conventions of

authority and class that we

have so desperately sought

to undermine since the advent

of Institutional Critique

in the mid-20th century.6

A

Abeles, Michele–Michele Abeles’s crisp, colorful

studio constructions and photomontages

combine common

objects–wine bottles, terracotta

pots, newspapers, and

printed fabrics–and nude

bodies. Drawing on the language

of commercial still life, Abeles’s

props are familiar, even bland,

with minimal symbolic or narrative

associations. Her titles,

constituting an inventory of

the objects in the photograph,

further emphasize the pictures’

generic quality. In response

to the endless recirculation of

ordinary images in mass culture

today, Abeles has used elements

of her own older photographs

to make new work, as

in Progressive Substitution

Drills (2012), which appropriates

imagery of a rock, printed fabric,

and a newspaper scrap from her

earlier photographs.

S

Steyerl, Hito–Filmmaker,

artist, and writer Hito

Steyerl has produced a poetic

and visceral body of work that

traces connections between

economies of images, entertainment,

and violence. In her video

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking

Didactic Educational .MOV File

(2013), she wryly takes on the

issue of surveillance today. Narrated by an automated male

voice, the video is a parody of

instructional films, outlining

strategies on how “not to be

seen.” These techniques include

shrinking down to a unit smaller

than a pixel, living in a gated

community, or being female and

over fifty years old, and they are

demonstrated by Steyerl alongside

generic faceless figures (the

kind available in 3-D modeling

programs). The video was filmed

on a desert site covered with aerial

photo-calibration targets–

symbols painted on the ground

that are used as test patterns

for cameras on planes. Steyerl

proposes here a new ontology

for images and the representation

of the body in a world where

everything is visible. On this new

understanding of representation

and visibility in the digital age,

the artist has stated:

This condition opens up

within and by means of an

avalanche of digital images,

which multiply and proliferate

while real people disappear

or are fixed, scanned

and over-represented by an

overbearing architecture of

surveillance. How do people

disappear in an age of

total over-visibility? Which

huge institutional and legal

effort has to be made to

keep things unspoken and

unspeakable even if they

are pretty obviously sitting

right in front of everyone’s

eyes? Are people hidden

by too many images? Do

they go hide amongst other

images? Do they become

images?7

D

DISimages–The online

fashion, art, and lifestyle

magazine DIS was founded in

2010 by four friends and artists.

Responding to a world in

which everything is branded,

the group uses its own platform

to create editorials, fashion,

and stock images. A division of

the magazine, DISimages, is a

fully functioning stock-image

library featuring commissioned

pictures by artists such as Katja

Novitskova, Timur Si-Qin (see

Logo), and Anicka Yi. Using the

language of corporate aesthetics,

their images broaden the

typical portrayals of lifestyle

and commercial products. Often

set against a neutral white

backdrop, the pristine photographs

are arranged by themes

such as “modest by the sea,”

which features women in body and

head-covering garb. The

artists and their collaborators

disrupt the corporate images by

hashtagging them with elusive keywords such as “after salad,”

“post-organic,” and “the new

wholesome.” DISimages

simultaneously participates in

the stock-image industry (their

photos are fully licensed and

available for sale through their

website), while also manipulating

the codes and expectations

of that industry.

F

Facial Recognition

Software–Used by law

enforcement, immigration authorities,

and employers, facial

recognition software identifies

an individual through the comparison

of selected facial features

with a digital picture from

an image database. Zach Blas’s

ongoing Facial Weaponization

Suite (begun in 2011) is composed

of a series of bright pink

plastic masks that confuse

facial recognition software.

Purportedly compiled from the

biometrics of a variety of gay

men, Blas’s objects resist surveillance

in the digital age while

challenging heteronormative

masculine cultural codes. With

this work Blas addresses the

loaded questions of representation

and queer identity through

the pointed lens of the increasing

threat to privacy that is a

hallmark of our digital age.

G

Grosse Fatigue–Camille

Henrot’s single-channel

video Grosse Fatigue (2013)

responds to the prevalent way

images of all types are consumed

today: on a screen, and often

layered with numerous open windows.

Set to a spoken-word

poem with a throbbing percussive

soundtrack, Grosse Fatigue

is composed of accumulated

shots that attempt to narrate

the creation of the universe.

The images are drawn from the

scientific and natural collections

of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, mixed with

found images from the Internet

and scenes filmed in diverse

locations, including domestic

interiors and pet stores. The

series of pop-up images and

windows that animate Grosse

Fatigue propose a new methodology

for understanding our own

history–not through the linear

models of a previous era, but

rather through the consumption

of incongruent linked images,

which raises questions about

subjectivity and meaning today. Like the prescient work of Aby

Warburg, who similarly created

subjective relationships among

disparate images to create new

narratives and question established

hierarchies, Henrot’s video

suggests how the immense and

never-ending avalanche of available

pictures and information

today produces a condition of

image fatigue.

H

Hashtag–A hashtag is a

label that can be searched

on social networks, allowing

users to find images and information

related to specific

content, events, and actions.

Personal pictures tagged, for

example, with #ArabSpring,

#BlackLivesMatter, and #LoveWins have been swiftly and

widely disseminated in ways that

supersede the networks of traditional

media. Once uploaded,

these personal images are used

in the service of news reporting

or for commercial purposes, representing

a paradigm shift in the

source of commercially disseminated

images from professionals

to amateurs.

J

JPEG–JPEG, the acronym

for the Joint Photographic

Experts Group (the committee

that created standards for

coding images), is among the

most common formats for the

compression of digital images

and has made possible the

online transmission and circulation

of photographic images.

Photographer Thomas Ruff has

engaged the aesthetic and philosophical

conditions of the vast

amount of ordinary digital images

that circulate widely, from

pornography to natural disasters

to newsworthy acts of violence.

For his jpeg series (2002-2007),

Ruff downloaded low-resolution

images from the Internet, enlarged

them to monumental size,

and presented them mounted

and framed, giving material

form to images that were meant

to be viewed only on-screen.

The enlargement of low-quality

pictures results in a grid composition

of large pixels, rendering

the image virtually illegible at

close range.

K

Kline, Josh–Josh Kline’s

wide-ranging body of work

considers the commodification

of identity and youth culture in

today’s digital society. For his

videos Forever 27 and Forever 48

(both 2013), Kline digitally grafted

the likenesses of Kurt Cobain

and Whitney Houston (respectively)

onto the faces of actors,

with the titles referring to the age

these celebrities were when they

died. Taking the format of a

documentary interview familiar

to us through reality television

and TMZ reports, the “musicians”

participate in mock interviews as

if they were still alive. The effect

is at once familiar and unsettling.

Kline proposes new models for

reimagining the body in the era

of the celebrity image and the

superlative pursuit of health, fitness,

and physical perfection.

L

Logo–Synonymous with

brands, trademarks, and

watermarks, logos are everywhere

in the commercial landscape,

used by corporations

and artists alike. Artist Timur

Si-Qin has developed his own

logo–“peace”–drawn from

the yin and yang sign, which

populates his displays and

backdrops. In installations that

mine the presentation modes of

commercial shop or trade-show

displays, using materials that

range from 3-D prints of fossils

to yoga mats, Si-Qin considers

our culture’s preoccupation with

appearance, health, and luxury

brands. For Premier Machinic

Funerary: Prologue (2014), the

artist produced 3-D printed

sculptures of hominid fossils,

presented in Plexiglas vitrines

in an arrangement reminiscent

of a funeral altar, all set against

a brightly colored fabric printed

with a generic-looking corporate

design. “I’m interested

in the way commercial images

reveal the processes by which

humans interpret and respond

to the world around them,” the

artist has stated. “These are

the fingerprints of our cultural

image-search algorithms.”8

Z

No matches found.

X

XXX–Widespread public

access to the World Wide

Web has led to a radical

increase in the production,

availability, and dissemination

of commercially produced

pornographic images.

C

Corbis–One of the largest

stock-image agencies,

Corbis owns more than one

hundred million photographs,

including nine million works from

the Bettmann Archive, which

are stored at Iron Mountain,

a high-security and temperature-controlled

converted mine

in Pennsylvania. Owned by Bill

Gates, Corbis was originally

founded as an art licensing

company that provided digital

images of iconic artworks to

consumers, businesses, schools,

and libraries.

V

Video Backdrops–Commercially available

video loops are used in a wide

variety of applications, including

promotions, advertisements,

and TV news backdrops. Such

material represents one aspect

of “distributed media,” a subject

mined by artist Seth Price

in his widely downloaded 2002

manifesto “Dispersion.”9

Price defines distributed media as

“social information circulating in

theoretically unlimited quantities

in the common market, stored

or accessed via portable devices

such as books and magazines,

records and compact discs,

videotapes and DVDs, personal

computers and data diskettes.”

Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s

famous interrogation–“Can one

make works which are not ‘of

art’?”–Price proposes that the

question has new life in the space

of distributed media, “which has

greatly expanded during the last

few decades of global corporate

sprawl. It’s space into which the

work of art must project itself

lest it be outdistanced entirely by

these corporate interests. New

strategies are needed to keep

up with commercial distribution,

decentralization, and dispersion.

You must fight something

in order to understand it.” His

Untitled Film, Right (2006), depicting a rolling

ocean swell, was created from a

six-second computer-generated

clip the artist purchased from an

online distributor of video backgrounds.

Price digitally altered

the clip and repeated it 150 times

before transferring the digital file

to 16mm film, bringing a digitally

native commercial clip into the

rarefied worlds of filmmaking and

the art gallery.

B

Blalock, Lucas–Using a

medium-format film camera,

Lucas Blalock addresses

the conventions of photographic

picture-making, specifically

the still-life genre familiar to us

through commercial and stock

images. His still lifes incorporate

ordinary objects, including found

textiles, hot dogs, cans

of food, and sheets of plywood,

and engage the aesthetics of

commercial display. The analog

pictures are finished digitally in

postproduction, through deliberately

flatfooted Photoshop

gestures executed by the artist,

such as using the clone tool

(typically used to create seamless

pictures when digital data is

missing) to create purposefully

imperfect images. Through this

rupture, Blalock suggests new

ways of looking at ordinary images

and objects in a world where

everything has already been

photographed.

N

Novitskova, Katja–Katja

Novitskova uses found and

stock images of nature to make

work in sculpture, photography,

and installation. Her series

Approximations, begun in 2012,

features large-scale cutout

images of animals presented on

aluminum stands, the kind used in

commercial and advertising displays.

These sometimes pixelated

images are cropped in odd

places, as they are reproduced

faithfully from their original

contexts, whether a magazine or

a website. Her work underscores

how our digitized culture requires

artists and viewers to adapt to a

new viewing condition for images: “As everything is simultaneously realistic and camouflaged,” she has written, “the skill needed

to navigate the space meaningfully

is to be fluent in image

editing effects.”10

M

Mroué, Rabih—Rabih

Mroué’s series The Fall of

a Hair (2012) affirms the central

role that cell-phone photographs

and moving images have played

in informing and mobilizing people

during conflict and collective

actions today. The Fall of a

Hair: Blow Ups features seven

enlarged and heavily pixelated

photographs of gunmen aiming

weapons at the viewer. These images were taken during

the first year of the Syrian civil

war from the phones of civilian

journalists and activists, whose

deaths were captured by their

cell phones, acting as an extension

of the eye to reveal the fatal

shot. The images were posted

posthumously on the Internet

and made freely available through

virtual and viral platforms. Mroué

places the viewer in the varying

positions of photographer,

victim, and co-conspirator, a

poignant reminder of the power

that phones can wield in a reality

in which mobile devices (and the

associated digital dissemination

of the images they produce) have

become an indispensable weapon

in conflicts and revolutions.

Eva Respini joined the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston as Chief Curator in 2015. Previously, Respini was Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. She specializes in contemporary photography and video, and is broadly interested in post-1960s art and visual culture.

Notes

1 See www.yuanmingyuan3d.com/english.html.

2 See, for example, Calvin Tomkins,

“Experimental People: The

Exuberant World of a Video-Art

Visionary,” New Yorker, March

24, 2014.

3 Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object

Post-Internet.”

4 See Michael Connor, “PostInternet,

What It Is and What It

Was,” in You Are Here: Art After

the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif

(Manchester: Cornerhouse;

London: SPACE, 2014), 57. See

also Gene McHugh, “Tuesday,

December 29th, 2009,” in

McHugh, Post Internet: Notes

on the Internet and Art,

12.29.09-09.05.10 (Brescia: Link

Editions; distributed by lulu.com,

2011).

5 Marisa Olson, quoted in Lauren

Cornell, “Net Results: Closing

the Gap between Art and Life

Online,” Time Out New York,

February 9-15, 2006, 69.

6 Karen Archey in the transcript

from the Forum for Contemporary

Photography, Museum of Modern

Art, New York, October 22,

2014, presentation on the topic

“Post-Internet.”

7 Hito Steyerl, quoted in the

press release for Hito Steyerl:

How Not to Be Seen: A

Fucking Didactic Educational

Installation, Andrew Kreps

Gallery, New York, July 2-

August 15, 2014.

8 Timur Si-Qin, as told to Gabriel

H. Sanchez, “500 Words,” Artforum.com, September 9,

2014.

9 Seth Price, “Dispersion.” All quotations

are from this document.

10 Katja Novitskova, artist’s statement

for Utopian Grids exhibition,

de Verdieping, Amsterdam,

September 2009.