I used to think Post Internet Art was just people making memes with existential captions.
Turns out, it’s way more tangled than that—and maybe more honest about what it feels like to exist online than anything else I’ve encountered in contemporary visual culture. Post Internet Art emerged around 2006-2010, roughly when social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became ubiquitous, and artists started asking: what does art look like when the internet isn’t just a distribution channel but the actual environment we live in? Artists like Artie Vierkant and Marisa Olson weren’t trying to make “internet art” in the old net.art sense—they were making art after the internet had already reshaped everything. The distinction matters. It’s the difference between making art about swimming and making art while your lungs are already full of water. The work often feels exhausting because it mirrors the exhaustion of digital life: the endless scroll, the flattened affect, the way a Renaissance painting and a sponsored Instagram post can occupy the same visual space with equal weight.
Here’s the thing: the aesthetics are deliberately unstable. You’ll see glitch effects, intentionally low-res images, corporate stock photography repurposed into something vaguely unsettling. It’s not accidental.
The movement’s relationship to commodification is where things get interesting—or maybe just more depressing, depending on your mood. Artists like Jon Rafman and Amalia Ulman have built careers exploring how digital platforms commodify identity, how we perform versions of ourselves for algorithmic consumption. Ulman’s “Excellences & Perfections” (2014) was a months-long Instagram performance where she constructed and deconstructed aspirational female archetypes, and honestly, it made me feel weird about every selfie I’ve ever posted. The work asks: if your entire visual culture is mediated through platforms designed to monetize attention, can authenticity even exist? Or is everything just varying degrees of performance? Wait—maybe that’s always been true, and the internet just made it impossible to ignore.
When Digital Materiality Becomes the Actual Subject Matter of Visual Expression
I guess what strikes me most is how Post Internet artists treat digital materiality as real materiality. Cory Arcangel’s modified video games, Ryan Trecartin’s hyperactive video work—they’re not representing digital culture, they’re made from it. The file compression artifacts, the way JPEGs degrade when resaved multiple times, the specific blue of a hyperlink—these become artistic materials with their own properties and histories. It’s like how painters in the Renaissance cared about the specific qualities of lapis lazuli versus cheaper blue pigments, except now we’re talking about how many times an image has been screenshotted and the metadata trails it leaves behind.
Anyway, the movement’s relationship to sincerity is complicated.
There’s this pervasive irony in Post Internet Art, but it’s not the detached, cool irony of earlier postmodernism—it’s more like exhausted irony, the kind that comes from being too online for too long. Artists like Ed Fornieles create elaborate social media performances that blur reality and fiction until you can’t tell if you’re supposed to laugh or feel implicated. The work often contains this weird tension: simultaneously critiquing digital culture while being completely embedded in it, unable to imagine an outside. I’ve seen gallery exhibitions that consist entirely of content designed for Instagram, which then gets experienced primarily through people photographing it for Instagram, creating these recursive loops that make my brain hurt in ways I can’t quite articulate but definately feel.
The Global Networks That Shape How We See and Create Visual Meaning Today
Post Internet Art also reflects how digital visual culture has collapsed geographic and temporal boundaries in strange ways. An artist in Berlin can appropriate imagery from Japanese gaming culture, Brazilian meme accounts, and 1990s American advertising simultaneously, creating these dense, referential works that assume viewers are equally fluent in navigating disparate visual languages. Platforms like Tumblr and Instagram created what artist Hito Steyerl calls “circulationism”—where an image’s value comes not from its original context but from its velocity through networks, how many times it’s shared, remixed, recontextualized. The result is art that often feels like it’s recieving signals from everywhere at once, processing the overwhelming visual noise of digital life into something that’s occasionally beautiful, frequently disorienting, and sometimes both at the same time.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: Post Internet Art doesn’t offer solutions or escapes from digital visual culture—it offers recognition. It says, yes, this is exhausting, yes, everything is flattened and commodified and recursive, yes, we’re all performing for invisible audiences while consuming performances from others. And somehow, seeing that recognized in art makes it slightly more bearable. Slightly.
