Between Intimacy and Surveillance: The Artworks that Best Explain Internet Culture
May 26, 2025
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
Popularised between the late ’90s and the 2000s, Net Art was the artist-led movement whose works were completely internet-based: not only a product of the internet, but existing within it. Website artworks like those by Olia Lialina and JODI.org completely reinvented the way of inhabiting websites, turning functional platforms into abstract landscapes to traverse, where narratives unfold in increasingly intricate, surprising, and emotional ways. These experiments took place when the internet was different, just before it became a part of everyday life and changed how people connect and relate to each other.
Net Art, post-internet art, website art: the art world has found many ways to categorise works that explore the online world and the rise of internet culture in society. But is it helpful to rely on these categorisations today? And is it truly possible to find contemporary works that are not infused, at least to some extent, by the new feelings born from internet culture, now at the centre of our daily lives?
For many artists, questioning where the internet comes from, along with its hidden effects, serves to challenge this vast structure (the one that theorist Benjamin Bratton calls “The Stack”) that we choose to log in every day. From artists who wrote the history of internet art, to contemporary ones who narrate the experience of “being online” today, here are six artists who have best captured the essence of internet culture.
Amalia Ulman
Through her Instagram performance, Excellences & Perfections (2014), Amalia Ulman became one of the pioneers of Instagram Art. The performance opened up new possibilities for artists to engage directly with social media as a site of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and not only to be used as a distorted mirror of their daily lives. In the performance, Ulman deliberately crafted and manipulated her social media persona over several months, posting staged snapshots that depicted a carefully curated life narrative. By doing so, she exposed how internet culture shapes and distorts notions of identity and authenticity, revealing the performative nature of online self-presentation.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince’s practice of appropriating images from social media, exemplified in his New Portraits series (2014), examined how social media challenges traditional notions of authorship. By taking screenshots of Instagram posts created by other users and presenting them in a white cube, he demonstrated how social media platforms complicate users' rights over their images once uploaded online, unknowingly granting corporations permission to use and monetise their memories. Prince’s appropriation reminds spectators that whatever is uploaded online can enter a market where value is assigned in exploitative ways. For example, a topic much discussed in recent years, following the beginning of machine learning models trained with pictures from social media.
Cory Arcangel
Cory Arcangel is often recognised as the net artist who best encapsulates a recurring practice in art about the internet: hijacking. By hacking existing digital technologies to uncover new meanings and possibilities, artists emphasise how the internet is a collaborative space that should be appropriated against the few corporations that want to control it. That’s what Archangel did in his multi-channel video installation Super Mario Clouds (2002), where he hacked the classic Nintendo game to remove all elements except the drifting clouds. With the work, Arcangel turned a beloved, nostalgic piece of popular culture into a minimalist meditation on absence, dialoguing with traditional video art and hacking culture simultaneously.
Jon Rafman
One of the most renowned artists whose work focuses on networked images and the web as landscape, Jon Rafman, explores how the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds increasingly blur, leaving us without clear coordinates. You, The World, and I (2023) investigates the transformative effects of virtual mapping on human perception, imagining a lost lover whose only remaining image exists in a hidden corner of Google Street View. Similar to the 2023 film, his ongoing project 9 Eyes of Street View highlights the most surreal and unexpected images captured while wandering through the digital reproduction of our planet, reflecting on the consequences of having our entire world accessible at the click of a button, eternally visible.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy’s works often delve into surveillance culture and, most importantly, the contemporary practices of self-surveillance. In her interactive project, LAUREN (2015), the artist transformed herself into a human Alexa, a device she used to watch people in their homes and control their environment remotely. The performance, which began with installing custom smart devices like cameras, microphones and locks, allowed her to actively manage and interact with the participants’ private spaces, demonstrating how a smart home works and the complex tensions that are born from its functioning. By placing a human at the centre of this automated system, McCarthy highlighted the often invisible labour behind smart technology, raising questions about autonomy and control.
Mario Santamaría
Spanish artist Mario Santamaría’s research focuses on distancing from the idea that the internet is an abstract “cloud”, abstract and magical. His work insists on revealing the web as a vast network of optical cables and databases, not only visible but causing significant environmental impacts on our planet. Through his Internet Tours, the artist transforms himself into a tour guide through internet infrastructures in various cities worldwide, transforming the “magic” online experience into a tangible, collective experience. Similarly, in his 2016 project Travel to My Website, he physically retraced the route taken by his website’s data packets from Barcelona to Bergamo over 14 days, highlighting the geographical journeys that support our digital interactions.
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