Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu

• PUBLICATION Rhizome
• DATE Dec 19th, 2013
• URL rhizome.org
• PDF cecimoss.com

Excerpt / Post internet, post media, post media aesthetics, radicant art, dispersion, formatting, meme art, circulationism—all recent terms to describe networked art that does not use the internet as its sole platform, but instead as a crucial nexus around which to research, transmit, assemble, and present data, online and offline. I think all of the writers advancing these terms share a sense that since the rise of mainstream internet culture and social media, art is more fluid, elastic, and dispersed. As Lauren Cornell astutely points out in the recent “Post Internet” roundtable for Frieze, terms are always placeholders for more complex ideas, and when successful, can instigate further, deeper conversation. Towards that end, I’d like to introduce another word to the list—expanded. Drawing from the definition of expansion as “the action or process of spreading out or unfolding; the state of being spread out or unfolded,” I consider “expansion” not as an outward movement from a fixed entity, but rather, in light of data’s dispersed nature, a continual becoming. Expanded internet art is not viewed as hermetic, but instead as a continuously multiple element that exists within a distributed, networked system. In order to elaborate this term, and to take small steps towards thinking through the changing conditions for art production in the early 21st century, I will use Tiziana Terranova’s notion of an “informational milieu” to describe the dynamic process of exchange among artist, artwork, and network.

–“Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu” in Rhizome, December 19, 2013