The Internet has transformed the landscape of artistic expression. There is a body of artwork that

directly incorporates the Internet into its processes and structures and is distinct from any other category

of technologically-enabled art. Vague taxonomies like “Digital” or “New Media” have, in their own rights,

expanded the purview of artistic expression. They have also been successfully incorporated into

academic and mainstream realms of artistic appreciation. But the birth of Internet art engendered a need

to widen our definitions of art as an overarching theoretical concept. Specifically, I hope to demonstrate

our need to critically examine this work from an updated art-historical perspective by crafting the

beginnings of a classificatory and evaluative framework to guide our inquiry into this new category of art.

Internet art seems to reveal the presence of a new artistic medium. But there is some opposition

and confusion about how to consider the possibility that the Internet, despite being diversely functional,

could be amenable to artistic practices (rather than as an expanded means of presentation). Some, like

Julian Stallabrass in his 2003 publication Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce,

contend that the Internet is not a medium in the way that paint or photography are, “but rather a

transmission system for data that potentially simulates all reproductive media.”1 This contention suggests

that the artistic capacity of the Internet is completely subsumed by its capacity to present information via

other media. This is certainly one of the Internet’s functions: displaying art online. But in the short time

since Stallabrass’s book was published, artists have innovated beyond the point of mere re-transmission.

The depth of manipulation via programming has developed so much in the past decade that the Internet

should be considered amenable to art practices. As will be asserted through examination of some

exemplars of Internet art, the Internet itself has the capacity to be artistically generative and not merely a

means of presentation - in other words, to be an art medium.

Internet art presents particular characteristics by virtue of this specialized interaction. Internet art

is usually collaborative and interactive in nature, having a main orchestrator and numerous participants

whose contributions are constitutive of the work. Because it is embedded within the Internet, it often

refers reflexively to the Internet itself. These are commonalities, but are not sufficient in and of themselves

to constitute a unique criterion for the analysis of Internet art. In addition to using the Internet as an art

medium, there are two essential conditions for Internet art. First, the existence of the work of Internet art

must be utterly confined to the network. Internet artworks are born upon being uploaded to the Internet,

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1 Stallabrass, Julian. Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce. London: Tate Pub., 2003, 2.

cannot be accurately or appropriately presented in any context other than on the Internet, and suffer a

fundamental and compromising loss of meaning when removed from this context. Second, Internet art

avails itself of the representational capacities of the Internet, so it does not necessarily have a coherent

visual form. Instead, its coherence is structural; it is found in the utilization and manipulation of the

Internet armature.

Toward a new art form

It can be objected that Internet art does not qualify as a discrete or truly new category of art.

Indeed, much of the content found online is reiterative - it is linguistic, pictorial, auditory, and so on simply

regurgitated in digital format. These concerns stem in part from suspicions about whether one can locate

a distinct medium in Internet art. In his treatise on Computer art (which is a related, but separate category

of art), Dominic McIver Lopes calls computers “all-purpose representational devices. They deal with

information in many different formats - text, numbers, images, sounds - by converting them all into a

common, digital code.”2 So, certainly the varied content found in Internet art is presented in a new format,

but this alone does not constitute a new sort of medium.

To begin to address this suspicion, it will be useful to clarify what sorts of art categories constitute

art forms and which are merely based on insignificant descriptors. To this end, Lopes suggests that only

“appreciative art kinds” can legitimately be called art forms. By his formulation, “A kind is an appreciative

art kind just in case we normally appreciate a work in the kind by comparison with arbitrarily any other

works in that kind.”3 So paintings are within the appreciative art kind because as a genre, they are

understood primarily in relationship to other paintings and not with, say, photographs. By contrast,

paintings containing representations of trees constitute another art kind, but not one that is appreciative

- thus, paintings about trees do not constitute an art form. Likewise, digital format is not sufficient for

consideration as an art form. It is merely a certain means of transcribing and presenting data that is not

bound to one medium - we do not appreciate digital photography in relation to digitally created music, for

example. So digitization is not sufficient for qualification as an appreciative art kind. But neither is

digitization sufficient for the creation of Internet art. The Internet enables a process of transcription and

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2 Lopes, Dominic McIver. A Philosophy of Computer Art. London: Routledge, 2010, 2.

3 Ibid., 17.

provision of content that is unlike anything found in other appreciative art kinds. It generates new forms

that can be visual, multi-sensory, and structurally distinct from works in any other media.

The work of artist Brad Troemel constitutes what I consider to be archetypal examples of Internet

art. His project Blind Mist (see Fig.1 & 2) adroitly references the totality, disambiguation, and ephemerality

of the Internet’s presentation of images. It successfully conveys intellectual content and structural

manipulation of the Internet to serve artistic purposes. From Troemel’s artist statement: “Blind Mist

provides a chance to see a constantly revolving display of images organized at random. All images

function as links to their place of origin and will eventually expire from public rotation.”4 Blind Mist

functions by collecting and archiving images from user-contributed URLs and re-presenting those images

with a randomizing algorithm, creating unique sequences each time it is accessed. Viewers influence

content through URL submission, but they do not control the ordering and juxtapositions that occur. It is

conceptually dense by virtue of its emphasis on organizing structures over form.

While it is predominantly pictorial, Blind Mist manipulates Internet utilities to create a work of art

that is interactive, sensorially engaging, and distinct from works in other art media. Specifically, Blind Mist

is organized as an image stream that is reliant upon network connectivity for content and presentation.

Were it to be divorced from the Internet context, its constitutive images would become disembodied non

sequiturs. Their perpetual, animated juxtapositions produce a metaphoric meaning - namely a reference

to the Internet itself. Correspondingly, Internet users are exposed to an array of information whose

arrangement is partially autonomous (as with self-determined pathways, Google searches, etc.) and

partially externally controlled (as with algorithmically determined content like ads, keystroke tracking).

Both the Internet universe and Troemel’s artistic microcosm are perpetually mutating entities dependent

upon an organizing structure and user-contributed content it can regurgitate at will. Blind Mist seems to

use the Internet as a medium by producing a form that could not have been created by any other means.

It depends upon the functions and demands of the Internet itself not just as a means of presentation - it

evinces a causal relationship between the Internet medium and its form. The Internet is eligible for

consideration as an art medium while it undeniably differs in complexity and origin from traditional

examples of media, particular the plastic ones like paint and marble.

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4 Troemel, Brad, http://blindmist.com/.

The Internet as art medium

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Figure 1: Brad Troemel, Blind Mist. http://blindmist.com/. Accessed 1:08pm, 5 November 2012.

Figure 2: Brad Troemel, Blind Mist. http://blindmist.com/. Accessed 1:10pm, 5 November 2012.

Modern art is often understood as an artistic reification of self-critique. This entails a philosophical

examination of the very process of artistic creation and criticism. The goal of this activity involves the

identification of the elemental, individuating characteristics of each form of art to arrive at a formalist

notion of “medium purity.” A theoretical parallel can be drawn between the modernist investigation of the

medium and the omnipresence of the medium in Internet art. In both cases, content is of diminished

importance while the medium itself is foregrounded. There are two overlapping respects in which Internet

art is engaged with the notion of medium: for one, the Internet itself is a medium comprised in part of

other media; secondly, the Internet structure itself often foregrounded (and is always at least present) in

works of Internet art. In other words the medium, to some extent, is part of the content of Internet art. In

light of this, it seems that Internet art is engaged in a philosophical exploration of medium comparable to

that of Modernism.

In “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg offers an explanation of the modernist compulsion to

distill the fundamental and unique qualities of each medium, which narrows its scope but assures

confidence in its fundamental character. “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, is the use of

characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order

to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”5 Broadly speaking, artists working in specific media

strove to demonstrate that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to

be obtained from any other kind of activity. As a result of these efforts,

It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.6

Modernist painting’s tendency towards abstraction is thus explained as a movement towards “pure

opticality” and consequently an evasion of sculptural, illusionistic, or narrative content that would taint the

purity of the medium. This reflexive development has been explained by Greenberg as a manifestation of

modernist art’s phobia of being assimilated into the broad, subordinate category of “entertainment.”

Medium purity may thus be seen as a reification of ontological purity. The ramifications of defining this

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5 Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, edited by John O'Brian, 85-94. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993, 85.

6 Ibid., 85.

purity would cement the value and discrete character of art (as well as the self-righteous delineation from

“lesser” forms of expression).

As has been mentioned, Internet art does not have a fixed form since the Internet is, as phrased

by Paul Levinson, “the medium of media.”7 Because of its protean nature, it is difficult to think of the

Internet as an artistic medium in the clear, taxonomic way we do painting and other plastic media. But this

incredible capacity for representation does not preclude the possibility that the Internet itself cannot itself

be considered a medium; it is not solely representational. Certainly it takes considerably more complex

substances as its base resources, but just because it is not as fundamentally manipulable as, say, paint

does not mean that artistic manipulation cannot occur. Furthermore, the recombinant quality of Internet

art simply shows more explicitly what occurs in all the arts: namely, that there are no works of art that are

of one medium and one medium alone. This pluralistic position is best articulated in “There Are No Visual

Media” by W.J.T. Mitchell, in which he counters the enduring Modernist notion of medium purity:

The notion of ‘‘medium specificity,’’ then, is never derived from a singular,elemental essence. It is more like the specificity associated with recipes incooking: many ingredients, combined in a specific order in specific proportions,mixed in particular ways, and cooked at specific temperatures for aspecific amount of time. One can, in short, affirm that there are no ‘‘visual media,’’that all media are mixed media, without losing the concept of mediumspecificity.8

Mitchell contends that our experience of any art medium is not wholly captured by the entailments and

priorities of that one medium. It is impossible to isolate sensory experience when interacting with art. We

might look to the performative aspect of a Pollock painting, the haptic quality of sculpture, the palpability

of impasto. The most compelling argument that Mitchell offers against the possibility of a self-explicatory,

untainted medium is our dependence on language. If a painter consciously endeavors to create a “purely

optical” experience by using abstraction to deny non-visual allusion, he evades one foreign area of

discourse only to be caught in another. A history painting and an abstract assemblage both rely on extra-

visual engagement to be comprehended: the former of the material of historical narratives and the latter

of “the discourse of theory, of idealist and critical philosophy.”9 Even Modernist paintings, perhaps the

most self-consciously concerned with visuality, cannot escape the verbal, dialogical, and haptic. No

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7 Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. New York: Routledge, 1999, 42.

8 Mitchell, William J. Thomas. "There are no visual media." Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257-266, 399.

9 Ibid., 396.

medium can really be reduced to a single facet. From this assertion we can argue that the Internet is a

medium just as much as paint, but is one that consists in more complex base elements than does paint.

But while Greenberg’s qualifications might be too stringent and formalist in terms medium purity, his

assertion of the importance of self-criticism remains relevant. Internet art, like many other art forms, has a

stake in, and is elucidated through self-definition via self-reflexivity. There is a dialogical and theoretical

link between it and older art forms.

If we accept Mitchell’s assertion, then we can set aside concerns that the Internet’s variegated

base resources disqualify it from medium status. Internet art works need not have a deterministic

relationship with the formal components of their medium and are instead amorphous. Any inference we

project about the visual form of Internet art is confounded by the medium because the form of Internet art

might take as its components any information, from physical reality or technologically conceived, that is

renderable in digital format and able to be uploaded to the web. This upsets the model of a linear path

from medium to form observed in most other art practices. It also seems likely that Internet art could

disrupt notions of discrete formal differences between visual and non-visual arts. In the totalizing field that

is the Internet’s presentation mode, anything presented therein is incorporated into its format. The prolific

Internet artist Rafaël Rozendaal capitalizes on the synthetic capabilities of the Internet structure to create

interactive works that incorporate sound, color, and oscillating forms. One example is violentpower.com

(see Fig.3), an art website that immerses the viewer/participant in overwhelming noise and vibrant colors

that mimic a cubic space. But once the work is activated by the viewer through a click on the trackpad, a

rough beat emerges from the clamor and the shapes continuously reassemble themselves in a random

pattern, fluctuating from color to color throughout. violentpower.com fuses auditory and visual information

into a single entity. How would we think of this work? Levinson suggests that on the Internet “old media

become the content of new media, but in so doing retain the older media that served as their content,

which in turn retain their even older media as content, going back and back.” But this implication of

retention is problematic. Levinson seems to respond to the Internet’s archival capacity, but his comment

seems to preclude the possibility that the Internet is more than a museal database. violentpower.com

warrants consideration as something beyond an allusive function of sound and image.

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Borrowing from the vocabulary of neuroscience, Jack Ox likens the transformative cross-media

process observed in works like violentpower.com to synesthesia, “an anomaly in the brain whereby

information received by one sense is experienced in another. . . Synesthesia can be used as a metaphor

for transposing elements indigenous to one medium into another.”10 This repurposing of synesthesia to

elucidate Internet art addresses the unification of a multitude of once-discrete media. “Complex strata of

information interact with one another to make something utterly different from the individual components,”

and this does indeed seem to be the case with violentpower.com, whose components do not allow for

easy categorization. Neither purely visual nor purely auditory, it occupies a liminal space. Synesthesia (in

this context) seems to refer to the simultaneity and inseparability of different sensory experiences

presented at once. Thus, we can conclude that both theoretically and empirically, Internet art can effect a

transgressive erosion of the traditional boundaries and categorizations of older art forms.

But despite the Internet’s unparalleled representational capacity, the elements that are re-

contextualized through Internet are often arbitrary. We observe this in Blind Mist. It is the formulation of its

visual content that is of real importance, and not the visual content itself. We must focus on the

manipulations rendered by Internet art to find its unique characteristics. The medium is truly observable in

Blind Mist because it is a stream of images, and not a static series. Were it in the latter category, I would

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10 Ox, Jack. “Synesthetic Fusion in the Digital Age.” Leonardo 32 (1999): 391-392.

Figure 3: Rafaël Rozendaal, http://www.violentpower.com/. Accessed 11:50am, 18 November 2012.

be hard-pressed to prove its difference from digital-pictorial art. But since the image stream is dependent

upon the Internet and its users for content and functions as a perpetually changing sequence of images,

this formulations exemplifies multiple conditions of Internet art I stated above. The theoretically unlimited

contributions from viewer/users, storage and collation, and randomized re-presentation of those images -

all of these characteristics are enabled by the Internet and could not be enabled by any other medium.

Blind Mist, violentpower.com and all works of Internet art proper evince their dependence upon

and connectivity to the network. This condition of dependence is not a one-time necessity - if that were

the case, there would be no difference between Internet art and artworks that cull and/or manipulate

content from the Internet. To push this point further, consider the work of Jon Rafman. His project 9-eyes

(see Fig.4) essentially appropriates satellite images captured and stored by Google Maps. The images he

selects and presents on his website are mystifying and noteworthy for their representation of the capacity

for technology to capture temporal and spatial information that would otherwise be inaccessible. In vital

ways, 9-eyes is dependent upon the Internet for its existence: it relies upon an Internet application for

content and presentation. Yet at base level, Rafman’s project does not qualify as a work of Internet art

because it is merely digital, pictorial, and photographic. Were it divorced from the Internet context, its

visual form and its conceptual message would persist and cohere (and in fact, these images have been

printed and presented in a traditional gallery space). These considerations disqualify it from consideration

as Internet art despite its momentary dependence upon the Internet’s resources.

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Figure 4: John Rafman, http://9-eyes.com/. Accessed 7 April 2013.

Similar conclusions can be reached about all works that circulate solely online, but are not

dependent upon continuous network connectivity as a constitutive of their meanings. For example, artist

Travess Smalley has created numerous art works using digital rendering software that are accessible only

through his website. One example is his series Vibrant Renders (see Fig.5).

These luminous, amorphous forms are the products of a highly abstracted and technologically-enabled

method. But following their creation, they do not interact with the Internet in a relevant way (i.e. merely as

a mode of dissemination). They are static. Suppose Vibrant Renders were to be removed from the

Internet context, printed, and presented as works of art created using some kind of software. It is

plausible that these works could still exist without the Internet context, and thus are too independent from

it to be fully realized works of Internet art. The translation of the work from its Internet manifestation to a

physical format does not (in this case) fundamentally compromise the integrity of the work. It could still

easily be understood within the realm of other pictorial arts. Likewise, many artists working with Internet-

based practices create works of video art presented online. One such artist is Petra Cortright, whose

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Figure 5: Travess Smalley, Form 3 from series Vibrant Renders. http://www.vibrantrender.com/. Accessed 7 April 2013.

videos include clever digital manipulations (see Fig.6). They revel in digital abstraction and communicate

clear conceptual themes. But, even if these videos are found only on their websites or on YouTube’s

video database, their ability to be successfully re-contextualized independent of Internet connectivity

motivates a denial of their status as Internet art regardless of artist intent.

Such works fail to meet a basic, but elusive technical condition that is partially constitutive of the medium

specificity of the Internet.11 I am aware that my somewhat stringent insistence in the satisfaction of the

criteria listed above disqualify a vast amount of artistic material found online. But for Internet art to be

regarded as an art form, and for the Internet to be regarded as an art medium, there must be a system of

identification that can cut through the seemingly endless amount of material circulating online to arrive at

fundamental qualifications of its character.

So far, I have identified the need to expand the notion of “medium” beyond the constraints set by

the physical-plastic arts and outlined an essential property of Internet art: its reliance on constant

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11 A similar evaluation can be applied to the .gif format. These are set of images animated by software such as Adobe Photoshop. While these are often found online and are rarely found elsewhere, they are capable of being viewed absent network connection. Thus, while they certainly gain currency through their circulation online, they are not works of Internet art proper even though they depend on a digital armature for their creation and display.

Figure 6: Petra Cortright, Sickwoof 2011. http://www.petracortright.com/sickwoof.html.Accessed 7 April 2013.

connectivity to the Internet. This is necessitated by the Internet medium and delineates works of Internet

art from work inspired by and/or exploitative of the Internet (e.g. for expanded means of presentation).

I alluded briefly to the additional characteristic of interactivity in my discussion of Blind Mist and

violentpower.com, which is often a product and conduit for demonstrating dependence upon the Internet.

The capacity for interactivity is often a hallmark of Internet art and is an important capacity enabled by the

Internet art medium.

Even if it is a reproduction of a physical image, the Internet complicates our understanding of an

image on a screen. A painting may exist in both physical and digitally reproduced formats and depict

exactly the same visual information, but they are by no means the same thing.12 The perception of their

equivalence likely hinges on the exactness and flexibility of digital technology in presenting images.

Conceivably, the Internet structure can accommodate exact replications of existing images. But a

photograph re-presented online is no longer a photograph, but something more.

Re-transmission as recoding

The adaptation of photographic technologies to artistic purposes was a gradual, sometimes bitter

process. Arguments leveled against the medium usually focused on the influence of machinery. It was

argued that photography either effaced or was completely separate from the artist’s hand. Resultant

images were products of a little-understood technology and nothing more. Their only artistic use was for

compositional studies for drawn or painted works. We have since come to understand that the artist is still

present in the photographic arts and a number of manipulations and decisions are made despite the

intermediary influence of the camera. The initial foreignness (and sometimes crudeness) of new

technologies makes their translation into the arts difficult until theory and institutions are able to make

sense of their character. The technology-prejudice against photography echoes in questions of the

Internet’s legitimacy as art medium. As was mentioned above, the technology behind Internet art is

sometimes perceived as merely a powerful means of presenting different kinds of information. But

Internet art clearly consists in artistic manipulations of the Internet medium, and even the re-transmission

of older media online is not merely representational, but effects a transformation of their meanings.

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12 Magritte’s surrealist Perfidy of Images more eloquently sums up the cautionary appeal to delineate between subjects and their representations than words can, even when an Internet representation is in fact a representation of a representation.

In Image, Music, Text Roland Barthes presents a system through which we can understand the

many valences of the photographic message.13 Barthes emphasizes the denotative power of the

photograph: its ability to transcribe detail is not merely descriptive, but analogically perfect. His notion of

the “photographic paradox”14 stems from this denotative capacity. He posits that photography’s message

is so thoroughly expended in its “analogical plenitude”15 that any extra-denotational significance we might

infer from a photograph is pure projection external to the medium. The photographic paradox describes

the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art,‘ or the treatment, or the ‘writing,‘ or the rhetoric, of the photograph); structurally, the paradox is clearly not the collusion of a denoted message and a connoted message. . . It is that here the connoted (or coded) message develops on the basis of a message without a code.16

This model is significant for our purposes because the presentation of media on the Internet has an

analogical capacity that can actually exceed that of photography. The digital reduction of data and its

subsequent onscreen exhibition can achieve incredible consistency and fidelity (given adequate screen

resolution) to visual media.17 As was cited above, Dominic McIver Lopes’s asserts that technology

enables a level of re-presentation of older media to an extent and variety never before seen. However,

this process of re-transmission is not a passive one. For instance, W.J.T. Mitchell goes so far as to claim

that digital technology might improve our perception of the original because “the digital reproduction of

sounds and visual images. . . Need not involve any erosion of vividness or lifelikeness, but can actually

improve on its material. . . The work [can be] restored to its pristine originality in a reproduction.”18 But the

efficiency and accuracy of surface qualities attainable by digitization is secondary to consideration of the

re-transcription inherent to this process. While digitization and computation produce content that parallel

photography’s “analogical plentitude” (and in fact exceeds it), the process entails a fundamental alteration

in format. It is a representation of a representation, communicating that which the photograph has already

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13 Barthes’s analysis pertains to press photography, but I believe it to be amenable to other photographic uses. I think Barthes’s framework is actually quite pertinent here, since we are dealing with the Internet presentation - a process of transferring information from one format to another which is not, in and of itself, an artistic process.

14 Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 19.

15 Ibid., 18.

16 Ibid., 19.

17 Furthermore, this process can display any type of media capable of digital reduction with equal accuracy.

18 Mitchell, W.J.T. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” Modernism/Modernity 10 (2003):481-500. Accessed September 11, 2012, 487.

transcribed (its denoted message), connotations that have been projected onto it post-production, and

finally a meta-structural message about the photographic medium itself, exposed through its online re-

contextualization. This change is discernible in terms of material, from manipulated photosensitive

substance to bytes, and contextually, from its original location to the Internet. It is not only encoded, but

transformed and reformatted - emphatically, a message with a code (or several overlapping codes).

What is the content of this code? As has been stated, Internet art can take as its formal

components any medium that can be presented on the screen. This communicates Internet art’s

mutability and, if it incorporates a work that once had a definitive medium, this re-presentation constitutes

a rewriting and augmentation of its original meaning. Internet art seems to displace considerations of

“form” with those of “format.” This distinction is useful because attempts to categorize the visual forms

that Internet art presents (as a consequence of, but secondary to, its continuous connectivity to the

network) can result in an anachronistic conflation of terms (for example: believing a photograph re-

presented online to retain its photographic qualities without alteration or addition to its meaning).

Furthermore, since Internet art is delimited more by the Internet structure than by anything else, it is the

interaction with this structure that we must attempt to categorize instead of the forms that result

(sometimes arbitrarily) from it. Format is a more appropriate term because it privileges the way in which

forms are arranged rather than the forms themselves. Describing Internet art in terms of format avoids

miring the conversation in futile attempts to meaninglessly categorize every individual component

presented and refocuses our attention on its most significant qualities - the overarching relationship

between its structure and the Internet’s. Format denotes the process or action taken in creating (or

amalgamating, as the case may be) a work of art and responds to the re-encoding process of images

uploaded to the net. With synesthetic works like violentpower.com, format (versus form) seems apt as a

means of understanding how disparate media and sensory engagements are arranged and syncretized.

Format is also a term that refers to the various ways in which computer data are encoded19, so we might

appropriately adapt this term to our purposes as a response to the increasing interconnectivity between

the realms of art and technology to update the lexicon used to qualify this relationship. Thus we might

categorize James Proctor’s work Stars (see Fig.7) in terms of a pictorial-auditory format that also

engages the interactive potential of the Internet’s user interface. Stars consist of an animated image of a

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19 “File format,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_format.

constellation in the night sky. As the cursor moves nearer to the stars in the constellation, tones of varying

pitches are produced in kinetic and synesthetic unity. Conceptually, it seems to illustrate our emotional,

but epistemically deficient reaction to natural phenomena.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a seminal essay

from the early 20th century the that remains relevant because it bridges the gap between technological

innovation and the consumption of art. Benjamin’s essay circumscribes notions of originality, authority,

and the effects of mechanical reproduction upon the reception of original instantiations of art works.

Benjamin argues that mechanical (as opposed to manual) reproductions of extant works of art diminishes

their “aura,” a term used to describe the abstract notion of their physical and historical presence. Aura is

that which cannot be replicated in a physical work of art and, alongside authority, it is what is diminished

by mechanical reproduction through the substitution of “a plurality of copies for a unique existence”.20

When Benjamin’s analytic lens is applied to Internet art, it is found to be incommensurable to older Fine

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20 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217-251. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969, 221.

Figure 7: James Proctor, Stars. http://jamesmakes.com/stars.html.Accessed 7 April 2013.

Art practices primarily because of the differences in “existence” between the two art forms. For physical

art forms, existence is fairly intuitive, but for Internet art, the concept of a physical and spatial existence is

somewhat elusive.

A foundational element of Benjamin’s essay is the original from which mechanical reproductions

are generated. Originality is easily understood when considering a physical work of art - a painting, say.

Because physical matter cannot occupy two locations simultaneously, it is simple to comprehend its

uniqueness (and consequently its authenticity). No matter how many copies of a painting are made and

no matter what detrimental effects result, those copies are not able to destroy this spatial uniqueness. But

the idea of space in terms of digital technology is an abstract means of describing an intangible mode of

storage via encoding and numeric reduction. Strictly speaking, a file does not occupy physical space in

the same way that a painting does and cannot be interacted with in an equivalent way. Physical and

digital space entail different considerations. Contemporary scholar Mark Wolf addresses the uncertainty

born of these incompatibilities. He contends that if the aura of a physical work of art is diminished through

mechanical reproduction, then “that which withers in the age of digital reproduction is the physicality of

the work of art.”21 Internet art must still be instantiated in some way in the physical world, but the work

itself does not satisfy this need. Instead, it relies upon the technological armature used to access and

display the Internet.22 So Internet art has a physical instantiation, but it is temporally linked to individual

access and spatially diffuse. Conceivably, works of Internet art can have no visible presence at all, or as

many visible presences as there are network-enabled screens in the world. If pressed, it can certainly be

said that an original file could be found which, when uploaded, would produce the work in question. But it

is only upon being uploaded that it can be viewed online, and the restriction of Internet art to an online

existence means that the physical existence of that original file is necessary, but not sufficient for properly

experiencing the work. I suggest that Internet art depends upon a symbiotic relationship with its viewing

platform and cannot be defined solely by the artistic expression involved, but alongside the structure

through which it is disseminated. This constitutes one of the properties of Internet art’s medium specificity:

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21 Wolf, Mark J. P. Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age. Lanham, MD: University of America, 2000, 65.

22 There is no particular hardware-based display that is of significance to Internet art. Rather, it is distributed among all digitally compatible displays.

dependence upon the Internet and a compatible viewing armature to (temporarily) physically ground the

work for the purpose of viewing.

The privileging of originality can only be clumsily projected onto Internet art. Beyond recognition

of the original figure behind the creation of a work of Internet art, originality is not a significant concern to

ontological qualifications. However, occasionally Internet artists are asked to sell sole rights to buyers.23

This allows the buyer to have sole rights to circulate or otherwise display the work. I contend that this

gesture results from both a frivolous proprietary urge and a deficient understanding of the nature of

Internet art. For restricting access to the work effectively destroys its capacity for online circulability.

Furthermore, property rights are notoriously difficult to manage online precisely because of this

circulability. Originality is significant only insofar as it is necessary to identify the original author, and for no

other reason. The very structure of Internet art, and to some extent the Internet structure itself,

undermines the traditional importance of “the original.”

A work begins its existence as Internet art only when it becomes available online. Thus, since the

work of Internet art starts existing at the precise moment at which it becomes accessible and re-

presentable, it never has a locatable unitary existence. Since the “reproductions” (better retransmissions)

and the original file produce the same information, works of Internet art can exist (indeed are meant to

exist) in multiple locations simultaneously. This dramatically alters our original perception of aura as

concerns Internet art if not obviating it altogether. Internet art has created a context in which technology is

finally able to create reproductions that are indistinguishable from their authoritative copy.

The process of viewing Internet art is such that each individual point and time of access are of

equal validity. If we grant that slight variations in resolution or saturation from screen to screen are

insignificant, the only differences in viewings are external to the work of Internet art. Because Internet art

exists online, it produces indistinguishable and equally representative instantiations of itself. So, like

physical works of art, visual/aesthetic qualities remain constant - excepting the degradation of physical

works over time. But, unlike physical works of art, Internet artworks are able to produce these qualitatively

identical experiences despite not being grounded in a single physical form.

Benjamin’s parallel concepts of cult value and exhibition value also come to bear on the

discussion of Internet art’s multipliable existence. Cult value is the significance of objects within their

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23 http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2011/03/07/taking-it-offline-part-two/. Accessed 7 April 2013.

original contexts - which were often related to religious and/or ritual purposes - that we now call art. 24

Meanwhile, exhibition value, which has risen in prominence and consideration for artists, relates to the

circulation allowed by physical mobility and contextual liberty. For Benjamin, the development of art has

resulted in a prioritization of exhibition value and subsequent diminution of cult value:

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.25

For Benjamin, the displacement of cult value with considerations of exhibition value could lead to a point

at which, ironically, the artistic function of art is secondary. With the physical arts disseminated through

mechanical reproduction, this seems plausible - liberated from contextual considerations, nothing stops

artworks from appearing in as high quantities or as diverse contexts as are willed by the masses.

Because value on the Internet is cemented by widespread distribution (demonstrated by the importance

of the size of one’s “digital footprint,” viral videos, memes), it would at first seem that exhibition value is

foregrounded in Internet art. By virtue of the platform on which one must receive Internet art works, it

must have the ability to exist in multiple instantiations, whether this means that it is embedded on multiple

webpages, is circulating on multiple image feeds, or is simultaneously presented on multiple computer

screens in different locations. Furthermore, the idea that Internet art has the ability to participate in the

traditional privileging of a unitary existence over a multiplicity of copies is misguided. But for all of the

inherent properties of Internet art that amplify its exhibition potential, considerations of cult value are not

irrelevant. In fact, the original context in which Internet art is found is of vital importance. Separated from

its original context, Internet art effectively ceases to be Internet art. So while it can be endlessly

reproduced without dilution, its cult value is also directly constitutive of its meaning. It may be that in the

case of Internet art a syncretic conception of cult value and exhibition value results from its mobility

within, and inextricability from, the nexus of global communication.

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24 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 223.

25 Ibid., 225.

Viewer-Participant-User-Contributor

Internet art further alters traditional expectations of the art viewing experience through its capacity

for perpetual availability. It is obvious that this is not a capacity it shares with older artworks confined to

physical spaces, but there are repercussions of its “permanent availability” that are not automatically

comprehensible. Given a laptop and network access, almost any environment can be made into a space

for interaction with art. I want to draw a distinction, however, between looking at digital reproductions and

viewing Internet art: Because each instantiation of Internet art is internally equivalent to any other, I feel it

provides an experience that is more genuine than seeing reproductions of physical artworks. There is no

loss of information, no significant difference between re-transmissions. Conversely, outside of its

particular spatial, physical presence, physical artworks can only be seen as degraded copies. The

contrast can be more dramatically perceived through consideration of performance art, which generally

operates through the creation of a spatially and temporally specific art environment. Its memory endures

as a distorted record that cannot recreate the unitary experience of the interaction:

That work which seeks what Allan Kaprow called “the blurring of art and life,” work which Boris Groys has called biopolitical, attempting to “produce and document life itself as pure activity by artistic means,” faces the problem that it must depend on a record of its intervention into the world, and this documentation is what is recouped as art, short-circuiting the original intent. Groys sees a disparity thus opened between the work and its future existence as documentation.26

Internet art similarly engages viewers/participants, but does not suffer the ephemerality of the

“biopolitical.” Granting the condition of network access, Internet art can supply viewers with an art

experience at any moment, ad infinitum, within a vast geographic region. The documentation of

biopolitical art is never commensurate to the subject it documents - how could a static record adequately

communicate the immersive phenomenon of a performance? Interactions with Internet art are not subject

to a degraded archive because their presentation and documentation are indivisible events.

“Documentation is a fundamental part of a digital artwork. A program’s source code and the data it uses

are de facto documentation, along with directions for its installation.”27 Because it depends on the

Internet, which in turn depends on the consistent re-presentation of masses of source codes, Internet art

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26 Price, Seth. "Dispersion, 2002—." Distributed History. http://www.distributedhistory. com/. Accessed August 2, 2011, 3.

27 Marchese, Francis T. “Conserving Digital Art for Deep Time.” Leonardo 44 (2011): 302–308. Accessed November 21, 2012, 306.

has an automatic archival quality and thus its presence is perpetually accessible for the lifetime of the

work.

In addition to its lack of singular physical anchorage, the terms of engagement with Internet art

diverge from those of older art forms. In experiencing Internet art, both artist and institutional presences

are absent. Whereas the artist or institution is the ultimate arbiter of art-audience interactions in the

physical art realm, Internet art surrenders a significant amount of control to the viewer. This physical

removal means that she controls the temporal and spatial conditions of her viewing. But the Internet art

viewer is not simply more autonomous. Her interaction with Internet art in a sense completes the work in

a similar manner to performance art. Take for instance the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (see Fig.8). His

installations consist of piles of candy wrapped in bright cellophane which mirror the physical deterioration

of the human body (specifically that of his partner afflicted with AIDS) as viewers take from the pile.

This interaction is a fundamental component of the work - without the manipulation wrought by the

viewers, the work would not successfully communicate the ephemerality of human existence. A similar

dependence upon the viewer is observed in Internet art works. The viewer engages and completes the

work by interacting with its interface. The viewer also becomes a contributor when her participation

includes submitting information (in the form of URLs, images, text, etc.) that becomes constitutive of the

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Figure 8: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991.

work, destabilizing the activity/passivity dichotomy between viewer and viewed. Consider Miltos Manetas’

Flash website jacksonpollock.org (see Fig.9), which allows users to recreate the looping skeins of a

Pollock composition in varied colors with movements of the cursor.

Beyond the novelty of recreating the gestures of a famous artist, jacksonpollock.org facilitates a nuanced

interaction with its viewer/participant. It allows us to dictate what form it will take, and the resulting

composition becomes a record of our presence. It is this function of the work that I find most profound.

The usually negligible movements we make through a mouse or trackpad, generally with the sole intent of

navigating from one thing to another, are transformed into an implement of artistic expression. By reacting

to the presence and contribution of the viewer, jacksonpollock.org is also exemplary of Internet art’s

reflexivity. Such interactive artworks enable immediate reaction and reformulation in response to the

viewer’s participation and gaze, rendered as an observable index of her presence. Internet art shares

much with works of interactive and performative art. A similar premium is placed on the presence and

participation of the viewer, whose identity expands to include the roles of participant and even contributor.

Internet art, however, diffuses the physical loci of these interactions. Whether this increased availability is

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Figure 9: Miltos Manetas, jacksonpollock.org. Accessed 7 April 2013.

more or less profound than its physical counterparts is neither relevant nor objectively answerable, but

simply demonstrative of the dematerialization of physical constraints wrought by Internet art.

Relational aesthetics//Enabling interaction

Relational aesthetics is a concept coined by Nicolas Bourriaud to describe the collective activities

of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his contemporaries. “The artwork of the 1990s turns the beholder into a

neighbour, a direct interlocutor.”28 Bourriaud envisions the interactive work of Gonzalez-Torres, Orozco,

Rirkrit Tiravanija, and others as sites of inquiry into social interaction. Such “relational art” takes as its

theoretical object “the realm of human interactions and its social context.”29 Against the politics of the art

world, the relational aesthetes oppose the institutional notion of the “territorial acquisition”30 of art and its

associated spaces. By advancing the interactive potential of art beyond the unilateral viewer-object

relationship, this body of work prioritizes democratic and social empowerment. Viewers are made into

active participants with the intent of eroding authoritarian and hierarchical structures of the institutional art

realm.

It would be ill-advised to infer a democratizing intent from all works Internet art, but its autonomy

from mainstream art institutions does result in a decidedly anti-traditionalist trajectory. Without physical

anchorage to art institutions, Internet art has an increased potential for audience breadth and

accessibility. It is naïve to think that Internet art can ever be universally accessible or free from academic

frameworks, but certainly its potential audience is incredibly wide. However, it is not inappropriate to view

Internet art’s development as an extension of relational aesthetics. Observable in both is a foregrounding

of interactivity - a bilateral as opposed to unilateral relationship between artwork/viewer or institution/

viewer. By allowing the viewer’s interaction to become a constitutive element, Internet art is necessarily

dialogical and relational. And while it is intricately related to the Internet, it needn’t confine its conceptual

meaning to an anti-institutional thrust. For example, another work by Rafael Rozendaal The Persistence

of Sadness (see Fig.10) utilizes interactivity to communicate the universally comprehensible message

stated in its title. When the work is accessed, the user is confronted with a window filled with

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28 Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. Lukas & Sternberg, 2009, 43.

29 Ibid., 14.

30 Ibid., 15.

monochromatic boulders. Clicking on the boulders causes them to disappear only to be followed a

moment later by a rumbling sound and the descent of infinitely more boulders of varying sizes. The

Persistence of Sadness illustrates Sisyphean task of escaping the sources of sadness in life in a way that

is approachable, yet striking.

By enabling interactivity, works of Internet art make explicit and demonstrable the nature of our

tandem activities as art viewer and Internet user. By hybridizing these roles, Internet art frees the process

of interacting with art from the usual constraints of traditional art viewing. It creates relationships between

art and viewer that are mutually responsive, and perhaps even more physically proximate than older

means of art distribution. Interactivity is a main feature of the Internet structure - its interface is designed

to be manipulated by its users to suit their needs. Responding to this functional capacity, Internet art can

predicate a significant aspect of its meaning on the restructuring of the usual terms of engagement

between art and its audience.

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Figure 10: Rafael Rozendaal, www.thepersistenceofsadness.com. Accessed 7 April 2013.

Navigating hypertextuality

Experiencing Internet art necessitates that we assume a pluralistic identity. We are

simultaneously Internet users and art viewers, which means that we navigate at least two overlapping

avenues of exchange. Often we take on several distinct roles: critic, customer, social media commentator

- really, as many roles as there are windows open on one’s screen. We may, as a generation, be quite

adept at managing our multiple roles, but we are still nowhere near as multivalently engaged in physical

space as we are online. This condition of multifocal identity is an adaptation to the advent of the artist’s

ability to traverse a “new space-time of conductivity, in which supports and surfaces have given way to

journeys. Artists become semionauts31, the surveyors of a hypertext world that is no longer the classical

flat space but a network infinite in time as well as space.”32 The sheer volume of material accessible

online creates an environment that diverges so drastically from offline parameters of visuality that by mere

association with this structure, Internet art must also diverge from offline art practices. Through Internet

art we see that, undeniably, we are in “an era in which representations interpose themselves between

people and their daily lives and between human beings themselves, [so] it is not surprising that art

sometimes moves away from representation to become a part of reality itself.”33 When art is encircled by

the Internet, it confronts the hypertextual universe in which everything contained therein is juxtaposed and

connected to everything else. Boundaries between once-discrete functions blur because of this

unintentional intimacy - if art does not “become a part of reality itself,” it at least becomes more tightly

embedded in the everyday and the practical. We must realize that art itself can now be hypertextual,

which should inform our participation if such art is to be comprehended. It is defensible to conclude that

given the demands of the Internet platform, our interaction with Internet art necessarily differs from art in

physical spaces; at the very least it certainly is not presented under conditions that are as obvious outside

the screen. As a response to this elusiveness, it is my hope that the criteria outlined here can endow the

burgeoning population of Internet art viewers with a sensitivity to the nuances and distinctions between

interactions that take place online. I see considerable virtue in meeting the seemingly totalized deluge of

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31 I understand the term “semionaut” to characterize Nicolas Bourriaud’s perception that artists are no longer merely creators of forms, but are instead inciters of confluence that respond to the structures that control forms and concepts. In simple terms, I think it is fair to say that semionauts operate above the physical or formal level to address the semiotic level - the level of reference and metastructures. This seems quite compatible with the Internet structure itself, dependent as it is on digital representation, encryption, and biocybernetic interaction.

32 Bourriaud, Nicolas, The Radicant, 184.

33 Ibid., 164.

information that comes to us from out computer screens with awareness and flexibility. This openness will

hopefully result in our ability to identify Internet art from the heterogeneous materials and spaces through

which we navigate.

Although the Internet context is the factor that distinguishes Internet art from other digital and

analog art forms, it significantly problematizes our interaction with it. The Internet is a labyrinthine space.

It is a context that allows for a multiplicity of sub-contexts: financial transactions, interpersonal

communication, sexual gratification, and encyclopedic reference, to name a few. The lack of contextual

specificity for art viewing online fundamentally differs from our experience in physical reality. When we

encounter a work of art offline, we are almost always primed to receive it on its terms, usually by virtue of

the space in which it resides. The museum space wields incredible influence as a proving ground for

artistic merit: “Because museums are the de facto keepers of cultural heritage, any work acquired by a

museum is expected to become part of the canon.”34 But the museum itself cannot change the intrinsic

qualities of the artworks it houses, so its impact clearly resides in how it colors our perception. With

Fountain (see Fig.11), Duchamp exposed the effects of this context more elegantly than words ever

could.

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34 Marchese, Francis T. “ Conserving Digital Art for Deep Time”, 303.

Figure 11: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.

In a space explicitly intended for the display of artworks, objects displayed within are automatically

granted consideration as artworks regardless of original purpose (mummies, advertisements, preparatory

sketches, urinals, etc.). The same cannot be said of the Internet context, which serves as many purposes

as there are demands made of it. We can compare the positions of nontraditional analog art with Internet

art through Seth Price’s discussion of contemporary art practices. “Avant-garde [analog] work is often

illegible without institutional framing and the work of the curator or historian,” yet these are definite

avenues for affirming their art status. And while “more than anyone else, artists of the last hundred years

have wrestled with this trauma of context. . . theirs is a struggle that necessarily takes place within the art

system.”35 On the Internet, we encounter an endlessly diverse array of information; it is not a microcosm,

but a macrocosm over which we have limited control. We encounter Internet art and sites like the

amazon.com online marketplace in the same breath. There may be a burgeoning attitude of inclusivity

towards the Internet context among art viewers and institutions,36 but the vast majority of online activity

still does not fall within the “art system.” This leaves Internet art with an even more challenging “illegibility”

than avant-garde analog arts, which generally remain beneficiaries of a validating art context.

Compensations must be made for the Internet’s lack of functional specificity, and Internet art is actually

effecting one of those compensations through an expansion of the Internet’s purview: while the Internet

still occupies a liminal space between a multiplicity of contexts, Internet art begins to legitimate its role

within the “art world.” The Internet sphere now includes a unique art making and art presenting system.

Perhaps it is only a matter of time before institutional critique catches up with technology, and the

discussion of the intrinsic character of Internet art will become a tired one.

The prominence of the web context in Internet art forces our arrival at the conclusion that the

Internet medium does not merely enable the creation of Internet art but in fact engages artistic inquiry at

every level from conception to presentation to documentation. We can defensibly conclude that every

valid example of Internet art37 examined above is formulated as a response to the Internet context that

holds it in thrall. It is instructive at this point to consider the work of Communications theorist Marshall

McLuhan, who incited a major reconfiguration of our understanding of mass media in the 1960s and

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35 Price, Seth. "Dispersion, 2002—." Distributed History. http://www.distributedhistory.com/, 2.

36 Tate, for example: “Tate Online Strategy,” http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/tate-online-strategy-2010-12.

37 That is, works of Internet art that engage the Internet medium on all of the levels prescribed above and not those works that do not decisively diverge from digital art.

70s.38 His radical, incisive aphorisms regarding the nature of visuality in an era of rapid technologization

are easily transposed to the concerns of the 21st century. McLuhan famously postulated that

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.39

McLuhan elucidates this point through the conceptual priorities of Cubism. Whereas in earlier figurative

painting, “the message, it seemed, was the ‘content,’ as people used to ask what a painting was about,”40

Cubism prioritizes the manner in which content is visualized. Subject matter becomes relatively arbitrary.

Awareness is drawn to the structure of viewing imposed by the way in which paint is manipulated -

medium obscures content while previously content obscured medium.41 A similar trend can be observed

in Internet art. We can revisit Blind Mist to clarify this condition. Its message is not the arbitrary array of

images collated therein, but rather the structure or process that regurgitates them - the symbolic

reference to the Internet itself. It is clear, then, that the Internet art medium is the message because its

constitutive elements (in which various contents can be found) are subservient to the structure that allows

them to exist and be presented (the medium, the truer carrier of meaning). The Internet medium is so

dominant that (as can be seen in Blind Mist) really any data in any formation can be recast in the service

of the overarching system. violentpower.com, Stars, and The Persistence of Sadness are also significant

works of Internet art not because of their individual elements alone, but because they demonstrate that

Internet art can encompass and erode boundaries between discrete forms of sensory information. To

comprehend the ubiquitous effects of the Internet medium/context, it has been necessary to extend

beyond the realm of Art History to Media Studies. Internet art requires an interdisciplinary approach

because its structure is beyond the purview of strictly art-historical analysis - it is a site of inquiry that has

the potential to engage a vast array of theories. From an aesthetic perspective, we are beginning to

glimpse some of the fundamental characteristics of this challenging medium. The words of Marshall

McLuhan perfectly sum up my experience of analyzing the intersection of artistic expression with

contemporary technology. He offers a view of the artist that is at once futuristic and timeless: “The artist is

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38 McLuhan, Eric, and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan. New York: Basic, 1995, 1.

39 Ibid., 151.

40 Ibid., 155.

41 A similar conclusion is reached by Paul Levinson in Digital McLuhan. In Neoclassical painting, for example, the materiality of paint was denied - the physical properties of the medium were utilized in a way that obscured their application and their existence.

the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created

by technological innovation.”42

The ultimate overriding difference between Internet art and any other analog or digital art form is

that Internet art addresses the advent of the Internet in a way that no other art form can approach. This

seems like a simplistic conclusion, but this conception of Internet art gives due attention to the vastness

of material encompassed within the Internet and the intricate way in which this material is structured.

Consequently, Internet art is not defined by its form, does not have a set configuration, does not fall prey

to the constraints of temporal and spatial unity, and exists as a reaction to the globally enlaced nexus on

which it depends for existence. The Internet extends far beyond the scope of the arts. In the words of

Nicolas Bourriaud, “Across this divided-up planet, a globalized cultural stratum is developing with

stunning rapidity, nourished by the Internet and the networking of major media outlets.”43 Internet artists

are beginning a precocious investigation into the character of this structure. Although we are the

originators of the Internet, its magnitude seems to be beyond human comprehension. So, artistic inquiry

of this nature can be read as symptomatic of our experience of navigating an environment that

encompasses more information than any individual, or perhaps any one culture, could ever hope to

retain.

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42 McLuhan, Eric, and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan, 378.

43 Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant,18.

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