Neil Thrun, describing Michael Manning's current show in the Kansas City Star:
Manning’s work fits neatly into the post-Internet art movement, a phrase that has been championed by curators Karen Archey and Robin Peckham in a recent exhibition in Beijing.
In a nutshell, post-Internet art is heavily influenced by the chaotic nature of the Internet but differentiates itself from earlier works of “Net Art” by blending digital and real objects, taking things from the Internet into physical space and physical things into digital formats.
So that's what that term means. If we go through Rachel Greene's 2004 Internet Art book I bet we can find a few examples of "taking things from the Internet into physical space and physical things into digital formats."
Whoa wait, here's something: Heath Bunting -
During the day of Friday 5th August 1994
the telephone booth area behind the destination board
at kings X British Rail station will be borrowed
and used for a temporary cybercafe.It would be good to concentrate activity around 18:00 GMT,
but play as you will.[list of actual telephone numbers for the phone booth phones at the railway station]
Please do any combination of the following:
(1) call no./nos. and let the phone ring a short while and then hang up
(2) call these nos. in some kind of pattern
(the nos. are listed as a floor plan of the booth)
(3) call and have a chat with an expectant or unexpectant person
(4) go to Kings X station watch public reaction/answer the phones and chat
(5) do something different
Sounds an awful lot like "taking things from the Internet into physical space."
What Archey/Peckham are talking about is, essentially, commodifying the internet for gallery consumption. There's no theory there. They're wedded to this awful term, but unfortunately that's what mainstream journalists are using to describe anything digital in a gallery now. (My own attempt, in the mid-'00s was "digital non-sites," a joke on Robert Smithson's non-sites where the "site" was a URL. Not great but better than "post internet.")
